Philadelphia Opera: Finding a New Audience for a Traditional Artform

The brief:

Opera Philadelphia faced a keen strategic challenge: how could they appeal to new audiences without alienating their base of loyal, traditional opera fans?

The work:

MoStrategy conducted ethnographic and focus group research to understand if there was a middle ground between the opera company’s core consumer and their expansion audience. With an elegant segmentation model and in-depth qualitative rigor, we learned that both groups had an appetite for creative risk-taking that wasn’t being satisfied by the company’s current repertoire.

We positioned the brand as, “The HBO of Opera.” With this promise of artistic excellence and a modern, provocative point-of-view, the company embarked on an ambitious journey to attract new audiences, create a world-renowned opera festival, and establish the brand as a juggernaut among opera fans and opera samplers alike.

“New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe wrote last year that Opera Philadelphia “has swiftly become one of the most creative and ambitious in this country.” In Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America, Wall Street Journal opera critic, Heidi Waleson, wrote that the 017 festival was “an artistic triumph.” And F. Paul Driscoll, the editor-in-chief of Opera News, told me recently that the company’s “brand overhaul has been absolutely successful.” The Philadelphia Citizen, 2019