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Why do people buy art?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/onepointfour/ What is the “job to be done” here? Recently I had an opportunity to run an innovation workshop for the Arts sector in Melbourne through the Deakin Arts Participation Incubator with my colleague Ryan Hubbard. Most of my work has been in the social sector so I know what to expect in that context. The arts was something different. I was a bit apprehensive whether my ideas and the frameworks would work in this space. In the end, it turned out to be one of the most energetic and satisfying workshops for me and created value to the participants. This blog post by Ross Blemont
resonates with my experience:
The LandStyle team is savvy enough to realize that no one wakes up in the morning and adds support the arts to their to-do list. Instead, they buy art to celebrate milestone events, fill new spaces or help a friend. Even though a painting may come a place deep in the artist’s soul—completely devoid of commercial influence—it still performs a certain job-to-be-done for the buyer. No one buys anything without some reason.
We focussed on the job-to-be-done in the workshop as the main way to think about “value” for their customers. Understanding that you need to provide value to people and that _art _in the view of the artist is different from the view of the purchaser. The art sector is very different in other ways too. Due to the focus on creativity, on trying new things and failing and dealing with uncertainty there are prime candidates for the the rest of the thinking.
Suhit, I have been doing this for a long time and now you have given me language and frameworks to make sense of it.
Workshop Participant
The funding models are designed to deal with learning, failing and uncertainty. This is quite uncommon in the social sector. The artists and people who work with them are comfortable to deal with this. This creates a fertile opportunity for innovation and creating new business models in the arts space.
