The Business of Festivals

Summer holidays are almost upon us and a few of you may be planning to attend one of the numerous summer festivals held across the UK. There’s a lot of business studies in there, so I was interested to come across an article that charts the changing face of festivals and some of the associated changes to the marketing mix behind them.

The biggest single change of course is how much more ‘upmarket’ festivals have become, focussing on more affluent market segments and widening their audience from 18-30 somethings to more affluent family-focussed festival goers whose more typical weekend would have included visiting a stately home or a theme park.

The BBC article Festival Focus Shifts quotes one middle class dad: “With festivals you tend to think of Glastonbury, Isle of Wight and mud. You don’t think of bringing the family along but this is very clearly family-orientated. The facilities are good and the parking is good. It shows you’re old when you think about parking when you come to a festival.”

Festival dates are more closely aligned with school holidays than in the past and ticket prices have risen steeply although some efforts have been made to widen the demographic, such as trialling reduced price tickets for teenagers and making camping an optional extra. There is now more focus on glamorous camping (they call it “glamping”) and a far wider range of products and services are on sale.

Some firms even use festivals to entertain clients. The Latitude festival will feature the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sadler’s Wells ballet and orchestras, as well as the more traditional fare of bands such as Vampire Weekend, Florence and The Machine and Belle & Sebastian.

Latitude’s founder is quoted as saying: “It has a mix of highbrow and slightly less than highbrow culture - and an element of being able to party. I saw a gap in the market because a lot of people I know spend their Sundays browsing through the Review sections of newspapers doing just that - indulging in the highbrow as well as the lowbrow.”

“Let’s not beat about the bush - I was deliberately aiming at an audience of people that weren’t automatic festival goers, that weren’t people that would be on a website looking for the Reading ticket, the Leeds ticket, the Glastonbury ticket. “