Full houses and healthy income are not always the same thing. Here is how one of the UK’s leading producing theatres named the gap between the two, and closed it.
Nottingham Playhouse came into their work with TRG from a position of strength: a national profile, a devoted local audience, and a pantomime that is an institution in the city. Shows were selling. Attendance was not the problem.
What the leadership team could see (and this is the part many organisations spot later than they would like) was that attendance and income had come apart. Chief Executive Stephanie Sirr was clear-eyed about how it had happened.
“We knew that although many of our shows were selling well, we could be making more of the real blockbusters and pantomime in particular. We’d become reliant on a generous concessions policy and were discounting heavily to boost last-minute sales. Our audience was wised up to this... as much as 70% of admissions were discounted in some way.” - Stephanie Sirr, Chief Executive, Nottingham Playhouse
That pattern is familiar to almost anyone selling tickets in the UK. Discounting starts as a sensible response to a slow-selling performance. It works, so it gets used again. Over a few seasons it quietly becomes the mechanism the whole sales operation runs on, and audiences, who are not daft, learn to wait for it.
70% of admissions were being discounted. Audiences had learned that waiting could mean paying less.
The membership scheme had followed the same logic, as newly appointed Head of Marketing and Communications Joanna Sigsworth found.
“Not only did it undervalue us, we were seeing a decline in acquisition and renewal. In some cases, the pantomime, for example, it was cheaper to buy a membership and take the discount than to buy the tickets outright. They were using it as a discount scheme, not a loyalty scheme.” - Joanna Sigsworth, Head of Marketing and Communications
Their work with TRG wasn't just about discounting less, it was about creating a pricing, inventory and loyalty strategy that better reflected the way that audiences were actually behaving.
Demand at any theatre is rarely fixed. It changes between productions, performances, booking periods, and even between seats in the auditorium.
But, Nottingham Playhouse's pricing and inventory structures weren't changing with demand, and that meant that the team had fewer options to respond when sales were behind target. Discounting often became the easiest lever to pull.
Working with TRG, Nottingham Playhouse set out to build a more responsive approach: one that could make more of high-demand performances, intervene more deliberately when demand was lower and protect accessible price points throughout.
Four priorities shaped our work:
The approach wasn't simply about charging more for tickets. It was about aligning price and inventory more closely with demand, and making every ticket work that little bit harder for both the audience and the organisation.
The Playhouse team began making changes as soon as the first phase of work with TRG was complete.
Heat maps showed how frequently individual seats were actually selling.
Some top-price seats sold even on quieter nights. Side seating could leave visible gaps that made healthy houses appear emptier than they were. And the data confirmed something the team already suspected: audiences really valued an aisle.
The auditorium was rescaled around that behaviour.
15% higher yield on full-price tickets.
Better alignment between price and demand meant stronger returns from the tickets already being sold.
Instead of making every seat available from the beginning, inventory could also be held and released as demand developed, giving the team more control over both the customer experience and revenue opportunity.
Concessions were restructured and member discounts reduced. Importantly, the biggest discounts moved towards priority booking. Instead of rewarding audiences for waiting, the strategy increasingly rewarded people for committing early.
Targeted access programmes (including Pay What You Can and 50:50) remained in place.
Accessibility wasn’t the trade-off. Untargeted discounting was.
The membership programme at Nottingham Playhouse moved away from being primarily a mechanism for accessing cheaper tickets.
Discounts were reduced, benefits were repackaged, acquisition campaigns were introduced and staff were trained to actively communicate the value of membership.
34% growth in new membership. Fewer discounts didn’t mean fewer members. Rebuilding the offer around loyalty helped acquisition grow.
Some existing members who valued the previous discount structure chose not to renew. But growth in new members more than compensated.
One of the most useful lessons came from what audiences didn’t object to.
The pricing changes generated relatively little resistance. Seating restrictions proved to be a much bigger adjustment.
“Some customers came back to say ‘I know why you want me to sit at the front, but I want to sit further back, maybe in Row M for more leg-room.’ We’ve amended the strategy so members can access many more stalls seats during priority booking, including Row M, and introduced a Platinum Playhouse membership, which for £500 lets customers sit anywhere in the stalls, whenever they book.” - Joanna Sigsworth, Head of Marketing and Communications
The strategy evolved in response, and it's important. Good revenue management isn’t purely a set of rules imposed on audiences. It is a continuous process of understanding demand, testing decisions and responding to what customers actually do.
The changes went beyond pricing. Contact with the database became less frequent and more purposeful. Marketing investment shifted towards productions where additional spend could generate greater returns, rather than automatically putting more resource behind shows struggling to sell.
14,000+ additional tickets sold.
Across ticket buyers and members.
“Every piece of contact has to engender an action. It’s not just telling people that a nice show is coming, it’s telling them how to book the best ticket deal." - Joanna Sigsworth, Head of Marketing and Communications
Their production of Touched provided an early indication of what the new approach could achieve.
“Touched demonstrated the yield we could achieve when we had high demand for a show, which simply wouldn’t have been possible under the old pricing strategy. Where previously those last-minute bookers would have accessed big discounts, they were now paying top rate even for seats at the back of the circle.” - Joanna Sigsworth, Head of Marketing and Communications
Photo credit: Nottingham Playhouse
Then came pantomime. Aladdin had already gone on sale before the new strategy was fully implemented. Even so, it became the highest-selling pantomime in the theatre’s history, generating approximately £72,000 more revenue than the previous pricing structure would have delivered.
The following year, Cinderella became the real test: the first pantomime managed under the new approach from the beginning of its sales cycle.
It sold more tickets. Yield increased by a further 2%. And revenue finished nearly £35,000 ahead of Aladdin.
The cumulative impact was significant:
The Playhouse wasn’t simply earning more from the same audiences. It was changing the behaviours that had created the revenue gap in the first place.
If attendance is healthy but yield isn’t keeping pace, the problem may not be demand.
If your strongest sales arrive in the final weeks of the sales cycle, audiences may have learned that waiting pays.
If membership is driving transactions but not deeper loyalty, the benefits may be rewarding the wrong behaviours.
Those aren’t necessarily signs that you need to work harder to sell.
They may be signs that your pricing, inventory and loyalty strategies haven’t kept pace with the way your audiences buy.
Take your biggest seller from last season and look at it again.
Where was demand strongest? When did yield peak? And how much revenue did you give away after you already knew the demand was there?
Photo credit: Gemma Leggett
One of the UK’s leading producing theatres since 1948, Nottingham Playhouse tours nationally and internationally while remaining firmly rooted in its home city, making world-class theatre as diverse as its community. Its programme spans drama, music, dance, comedy and the legendary annual pantomime.
Nottingham Playhouse worked with TRG Arts on a deep-dive partnership designed to help organisations develop more patron-centred approaches to marketing, pricing, loyalty and revenue.
If the patterns in this story sound familiar in your organisation, let's talk about about what your audience data could be telling you.