Speaking in Germany in 1963, a 46 year-old John F. Kennedy declared: Those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.*
Speaking in Greece, twenty-two centuries earlier, Aristotle wrote: Hope is a waking dream.**
For us in The Business of Pleasure, perhaps more than any other enterprise, that ‘future’ is built on foundations of hope, e.g.
Hope that the creative elements will come together,
Hope that the finance will be found to back the project,
Hope that the right artists will be available, at the right time and at the right price,
Hope that the right venue(s) will be available, at the right time and at the right price,
Hope that the sales, marketing and advertising campaigns will persuade ticket purchasers to take a punt on the new entity…to Recoupment and Beyond!
While, on the other side of the Safety Curtain, audiences will have their own constellations of wishes and needs that the experience provided will (hopefully!) either satisfy or exceed.
One influential theory of the psychology of hope (Snyder’s Hope Theory, 2005) postulates that hope is made up of two separate components which work together in tandem as the goal-pursuit process evolves:
a) PATHWAY THINKING;
Our perception of ourselves as able to produce a route to goals.
b) AGENCY;
Our perception that we can begin movement along those imagined pathways.
While this week sees the publication of new ‘Bidimensional Model’ (SEE BELOW) in which varying levels of hope (depicted pictorially by the density of shading) can be found at the intersection of Wishes on the Y-axis and Expectations on the X-axis***
Within The Business of Pleasure, audience wishes and expectations are judged against an end product, the experience(s), which will always be subjective i.e. a matter of individual taste and perceptions of quality, and usually sampled at just one point in time. And unlike a fridge or a washing machine, a purchaser can’t easily send a show or concert experience back and demand a refund.***
..But fall short of those audiences’ wishes and expectations, so that hope sinks below the horizon, and your firm’s tenure within The Business of Pleasure will almost certainly be both very brief and very, very unpleasurable.
DT 22 Nov 2024
*150 days later, on 22nd November, the attack on his Dallas motorcade ensured that J.F.K. would be certain to miss any future.
**Aristotle the Philosopher, not the Greek shipping tycoon who married the widowed Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.
***Leshem and Halperin, 19 Nov 2024.
****Unless specific contract terms have been broken
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