The Institute of Contemporary Arts – Sales, Marketing and Strategic business review

ASSIGNMENT

The ICA has been at its current location in the Mall since 1968 and has recently celebrated its 75th anniversary. Open to the public six days a week from midday to nine each night, the Gallery allows visitors to view a diverse range of new works in film, music, and visual arts.

Due to UK government’s fiscal pressures, the ICA were informed that their annual grant would be reduced by 17% for the forthcoming fiscal. As a result we were commissioned by the Board to outline our recommendations on how the commercial Events team could increase revenues from their various sales channels with improved efficiencies.

During this two-month assignment GFG evaluated ICA’s dedicated and additional event space, current operating model, sales and marketing activity including all processes and procedures operated by the events team.

Output and Results

Following a mixture of research and analysis which included reviewing the last five years of financial performance, we undertook a mystery shopping exercise to compare ICA’s venue hire rates with their immediate competitors. As a result our detailed report outlined a number of key recommendations, these included:-

• Marketing and Brand positioning – the introduction of a proportional marketing budget which would include a re-branding exercise, focussing on commercial events with the creation of a new and dedicated ‘events’ website. The ‘Nash House at the ICA’ was one of many for consideration, which in turn would allow the ICA to re-position itself utilising the implementation of a structured sales, marketing and social media plan
• ICA’s events team – Although very experienced GFG outlined a series of recommendations to improve the team efficiencies relating to new enquiries and improved utilisation of their CRM database. This in turn delivered an improved reporting and understanding to the ICA’s Board of enquries, conversion ratios and budgeted commercial events income. Rather than the team being reactive, we suggested a series of campaign ideas using ‘referral marketing’ to generate new leads.
• Future sales channels – As it is such a contemporary venue we identified that the ICA should focus even more on the wedding market, film location work, product launches and photoshoots. With GFG’s extensive insight into each of these markets, we outlined a series of ideas on how they could penetrate these various sales channels even more effectively.