The Value Of Signage

Little things can make all the difference. For example, effective signage is more than just hanging up a poster or two…


Depending on your point of view, the road leading to Teton Village, where the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra performs, is a marketer’s dream or nightmare. The village is constructed with only one road in and out so any advertisements appearing at that opening are guaranteed to be noticed by everyone visiting the village.

I was pleased to see that the GTMF was able to get a big banner at that entrance point (click the photo to your right to enlarge). I don’t recall if they had a banner there in past years, but this attractive banner really caught my attention. Teton Village offers a variety of tourist attractions and visitor activities and the GTMF has always struggled to find its place among these offerings; as such, having a banner strewn across the village opening is good for a number of reasons.

Regardless of the purpose for their visit, tourists know there’s a music festival going on and this is where they can take part. Perhaps more important is the fact that having their banner as the lone advertisement at the entrance point conveys an inherent amount of value in what the festival offers among the mind of the village officials.

This is doubly important for the GTMF because the signage on the outside of their venue is difficult to see from the main parking lot, as demonstrated in the picture to your right, which was taken from the front of the parking lot and the assistance of an optical zoom lens (click to enlarge). As such, it is likely you wouldn’t know the festival was around if it wasn’t your purpose for being there to begin with.

There’s one more thing the festival could benefit from but I’ll get to that in another post.

About Drew McManus

"I hear that every time you show up to work with an orchestra, people get fired." Those were the first words out of an executive's mouth after her board chair introduced us. That executive is now a dear colleague and friend but the day that consulting contract began with her orchestra, she was convinced I was a hatchet-man brought in by the board to clean house.

I understand where the trepidation comes from as a great deal of my consulting and technology provider work for arts organizations involves due diligence, separating fact from fiction, interpreting spin, as well as performance review and oversight. So yes, sometimes that work results in one or two individuals "aggressively embracing career change" but far more often than not, it reinforces and clarifies exactly what works and why.

In short, it doesn't matter if you know where all the bodies are buried if you can't keep your own clients out of the ground, and I'm fortunate enough to say that for more than 15 years, I've done exactly that for groups of all budget size from Qatar to Kathmandu.

For fun, I write a daily blog about the orchestra business, provide a platform for arts insiders to speak their mind, keep track of what people in this business get paid, help write a satirical cartoon about orchestra life, hack the arts, and love a good coffee drink.

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