Marketing-by-telepathy

The endless British winter this week brought a paucity of punters at gigs across London and the south of England. On a cliched foggy night I drove with a couple of comics to a once-a-month gig at a pretty little pub in an isolated village.  The landlord greeted us with a bizarre accusation: -

"Not many in tonight. Don't know why I bother with comedy. I got twice as many to watch opera last week and paid the singer half what you lot cost me."

Who were we to dispute this? The thirty (happily happy) punters who turned up to watch us apparently amounted to less than a third of the audience for the first foray into arias.  The comic in me shrugged his shoulders, did the gig, collected the fee and drove on home.

My inner consultant wanted to grab him by the lapels and shake some sense into the fool. Can't you see that you're blaming the acts for a lapse in your marketing?  How does that help us entertain the people who have managed to turn up and god knows how they did given that your sole promotional effort was a chalkboard listing our names inside the pub itself? Are you having the same whinge at your equally underwhelmed bar staff tonight?  Well done on the opera thing.   Maybe you've tapped an exciting new market of well-heeled culture-vultures or maybe you got lucky.  Either way I bet you spruiked the night a lot harder than the solitary chalkboard we got.

Marketing-by-telepathy. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?