Targeting Audiences on All Sides

This semester I assistant directed William Shakespeare’s “King Lear” in our new black box theatre at Georgia Southern University. For those of you not familiar with a “black box theatre” its a theatre known as a “flexible space”. This means that you can arrange the seating to place the audience anywhere in the theatre. For this show we elected for a “thrust” set up – where the audience is stage left, right, and down. The audience sits on every side but the back of the set.

So, throughout the entire process, from the pre-planning phases to closing night we had to consider not just one audience’s perspective, but three. Throughout this process I was reminded of some very interesting correlations to Public relations and communication. I will break them down in subsequent posts, but for now I’ll leave you with some questions to think about targeting multiple audiences:

What are some advantages and disadvantages to targeting multiple audiences with the same strategies and tactics?

Is it possible to use one message to effectively communicate with multiple audiences?

What impacts does targeting multiple audiences have on your budget? Calendar? Mediums and channels?

Are certain audiences more easily targeted together than others?

I’ll address all of these issues in later posts with examples, anecdotes and stories of success and failure, but for now I’m curious to know what you think about these questions, and what kind of experiences you’ve had when targeting multiple audiences.