A banner of Singapore Arts Festival 2009 at Esplanade

The Singapore Arts Festival started out in 1977, and it serves as a national arts festival for the local arts activities of Singapore’s different communities and races.

The Singapore Arts Festival is organised by the National Arts Council, which has supported and helped the Singapore Arts Festival to develop into a symbol which represents the artistic and cultural life of Singapore.

Today, the Singapore Arts Festival is consistent with its largest singular event on Singapore’s arts calendar, with artists from more than 20 countries, and activities of more than 400, with attendances up to 500,000, a festival which inspires and captures the public imagination of the city.

As the Singapore Arts Festival is a festival with many activities and events, I went to a few of them.

As people always mentioned, the start and the end of a festival will be the most spectacular among everything, as it marks a great opening, and also a marvellous closing ceremony, a complete end of the festival for this time round.

Thus, for this festival, I went to the closing celebrations, which were held at the Yishun open field near the bus interchange.

Closing Celebrations at Yishun (Crackers?)

Also, I went to the few free flipside performances held at the Esplanade in collaboration with the Singapore Arts Festival.

The few flipside performances that I went to were the band performances by the local band Pinholes and also the Korean band Oh! Brothers.

Oh! Brothers from Korea

Also, it is themed Shake, Rattle, Rock & Roll!, a place for local and overseas bands to exhibit their talents, and also arouse interests from locals in the form of music.

These two bands performed at the Outdoor Theatre, from 12 June to 14 June, with various performances from 7.30 to 10.30pm.

The Korean Oh! Brothers have performed at the 2006 Mosaic Music Festival before, and now they have returned to the Esplanade in the Singapore Arts Festival with their new rock ‘n’ roll tunes from their latest album.

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b) Compare the selected festival with a similar festival that has been successful in another city in terms of its marketing strategy

From Wikipedia, the definition of marketing strategy is a strategy which can enable an organisation to use its limited resources on things that are able to increase the sales, and also achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

Also, a marketing strategy should focus most on customer satisfaction.

And also, as defined in the lecture notes, “marketing events is the process of employing the marketing mix to attain organization goals through creating value for customers and other stakeholders.

The organization must adopt a marketing orientation which stresses the building of mutually beneficial relationships and the maintenance of competitive advantage.”

Thus, I understand from the lecture notes that, I am able to compare the festival I selected with a similar festival that has been successful in another city in terms of its marketing strategy by using the 8P’s in marketing events.

The 8P’s consists of product, place, partnership, promotion, packaging & distribution, programming, people and lastly price.

The 8P’s are further divided into 2 components, experiential components and facilitating components.

Under experiential components, there are product, place, programming and people.

Under facilitating components, there are partnerships, promotions (communications), packaging and distribution and lastly, the price.

Before continuing to the 8P’s to compare the two festivals, the similar festival that has been successful in another city that I have chosen, is the Hong Kong Arts Festival.

The Hong Kong Arts Festival started in 1972, when a group of individuals decided that Hong Kong should have an arts festival.

Thus, they formed the Hong Kong Arts Festival Society Limited, a non-profit-making institution which launched the first Hong Kong Arts Festival in 1973.

Not only is the Hong Kong Arts Festival for its locals, it is also an international arts festival in which only the best of Asian and local talents are able to showcase their skills with top artists from different parts of the world.

Webpage of Hong Kong’s Arts Festival

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Product


From Wikipedia, the definition of product is as such, in marketing, a product is anything that can be offered to a market that might satisfy a want or need.

For example, in retailing, the product is the merchandise, in manufacturing, the product is the raw materials, and sold as finish goods.

From our lecture notes, the product is mostly a service, and the quality is essential. Thus, in our case, the product is the Singapore Arts Festival, and everything that the Singapore Arts Festival can offer its visitors and consumers, like the different performances and events.

As the Hong Kong Arts Festival is also an arts festival, it can be said that the two festivals have the same kind of product.

The product in marketing terms can also be said as the core product, the facilitating product.

I believe the core product in both of the festivals is the experience that the consumer gets when they go to the festival.

However, each different festival would definitely give a whole total experience, due to the different performances and events involved.

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Place

Place, the second P in our 8P’s, is the location of the festival itself, and also the setting, atmosphere and the destination features, as derived from our lecture notes.

The place is important, and considered an experiential component, as it will directly affect the experience of the consumer.

The place of the festival has to be easily accessible to the visitors, so that, they would not have much trouble getting around, thus decreasing their customers’ satisfaction level.

A photo of Marina Barrage

Esplanade

As for the Hong Kong Arts Festival, while visiting the website, I noticed that there were many different locations for each different performances and events.

As Hong Kong is much bigger than Singapore, all the more they should make their festival events and performances at different places, so as to be more accessible for their visitors.

Some of the locations used by the Hong Kong Arts Festival were Grand Theatre, HK Cultural Centre, Fringe Theatre, Fringe Club and the Concert Hall at HK City Hall.

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Programming


Programming is how the programmer plans their events and performances, so that it will benefit the event the most, and also the consumers.

In our case, for programming to be successful, the programmer must be able to line up all the performances in such a way that, not only will it arouse interests from the locals, make sure that the major performances do not clash with each other.

Lastly, the timings of the performances should be able to be made in such a way that the consumers will be able to enjoy several performances at a place in a certain timeslot, and not wait for a few hours interval between performances.

This is an important element of the marketing strategy as not only will it affect the consumer’s satisfaction level, it will also determine if the consumer will continue supporting the festival.

From a personal experience in the Singapore Arts Festival, I went to the festival on two separate days in the evening time, and I was able to watch two band performances and one Crackers?.

The two band performances were about half an hour long, and there was about half an hour interval between the two performances. This half hour interval allowed visitors to have a short break between enjoying the performances, and also have time to grab a small bite.

I think that, this will increase the customers’ satisfaction level.

Also, during the closing celebrations of the Crackers, there was only one event at that timeslot, which means that, there was not any clash of major events.

Although I did not go to the opening ceremony of the Singapore Arts Festival, from the events calendar, I can derive that, there were not any other events or performances which clashed with the festival opening, Helios II.


For the Hong Kong Arts Festival, by visiting the website, I understand that the event which stretched from 6 February till 8 March had various events at different days, and also different times of the days.

And also, due to its successfulness of the arts festival, I can say that they had successful programming of events.

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People

The people in the 8P’s are the ‘cast’, the audience, and the hosts and guests.

In this case, the Singapore Arts Festivals has their performers and volunteers as their cast. The audiences which are the consumers and visitors, and also the hosts like the organizers, and co-organizers of the festival.

The interaction between the cast and the audience has much to do with the customer satisfaction level.

Thus, how the performers and the volunteers communicate and service their audiences is very important.

For example, in the performance by Oh! Brothers band from Korea, they wanted the audiences to join them in enjoying the music, and wanted them to stand up and dance to the music.

Although the audiences were quite reluctant, but the band managed to persuade them to stand up, and enjoy the performance to the maximum.

People standing up and dancing to the music during Oh! Brothers’ performance

Another example would be at the Crackers?.

The volunteers and organizers there were dressed in a very unique way; they were wearing firemen-like clothes.

And when I wanted to take a picture of one of the volunteer who came all the way from UK, he looked at the camera, and smiled for me.

Volunteer / Crew from Crackers UK

Also, the performers that were invited to the Singapore Arts Festival were from many different countries, like Japan, Korea and UK.

As for the Hong Kong Arts Festival, even though I did not go to any of the events there, I believe that there was great interaction between the cast and the audiences, as artists and performers are always able to engage their audiences and make them enjoy their performances, to say the least, top performers and artists from all over the world.

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Partnerships

A partnership is joint marketing, where different corporations or organizations work together, partner each other to advertise and promote each other.

By having partnerships with more organizations, there will be more benefits, like more advertising, thus increasing awareness of the event.

In the case of Singapore Arts Festival, there were many partnerships formed. Singapore Arts Festival have official partners like Channel 5, its Official TV Station, okto channel as its supporting TV Station, and Coca Cola Light as its Official Sparkling Beverage.

The festival also has premier partners like the Singapore Tourism Board, Singapore Turf Club, Shaw Foundation and PSB Academy.

And also, the major sponsors are Lee Foundation, Urban Redevelopment Authority, Hong Leong Foundation, Vivo City, WingTai Asia, Raffles City, PUB, Suntec Singapore, and SMRT.

The sponsors of the festival are Marina Mandarin Singapore, Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Starhub Cable Vision and Yahoo! The supporters are Australian High Commission, Business Traveller, creative Eateries, Cultures France and the French Embassy, Embassy of Sweden, Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Embassy of the Kingdom of Spain, Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, EZ-Link, GameAxis, Goethe-Institut Singapore, Harry’s, Hasbro Singapore, The Heeren Shops, Italian Cultural Institute Singapore, JCDecaux Singapore, National Environment Agency, Rendezvous Hotel Singapore and Tan Ean Kiam Foundation.

The Venue Partners are Dome Marina Square, Housing & Development Board, LASALLE College of the Arts, National Park and SBS Transit.

The organizer of the Singapore Arts Festival is National Arts Council, Singapore.

List of Partnerships with the Singapore Arts Festival 2009

In the case of the Hong Kong Arts Festival, the festival is made possible with the support of The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust and the Leisure and Cultural Services Department.

And their supporting organizations are Hong Kong Tourism Board and Hong Kong: Asia’s World City.

However, the Hong Kong Arts Festival website has a webpage which indicates what benefits the sponsors will get if they are willing to form partnerships with the Hong Kong Arts Festival; whereas the Singapore Arts Festival’s website only has contact details if interested to form partnerships with them.

Apparently, we can see that the Hong Kong Arts Festival has many less sponsors than the Singapore Arts Festival.

With more sponsors, there will be more benefits, thus, in this partnerships component, Singapore did a better job in marketing than the Hong Kong Arts Festival.