Limited Offline Marketing = More Audience for Each Event?

With a population of slightly under 1 million, Chiba city ought not to be a major market for public events. Yet, the city has no shortage of public spectacles that are accessible to the masses. The city has professional basketball, baseball, and soccer teams, each with its own dedicated facilities. It also has large convention centers, community halls, and other event spaces that can accommodate thousands of people at once, enabling it to be the host of concerts by popular musicians, product exhibitions by various industries, and other ad hoc gatherings such as fireworks and traditional festivals.

And what drives these events to the city is no doubt the exceptional turnout. After attending fireworks and a baseball game over the past weekends, I came to realize that these events can easily draw upwards of 20,000 people each, easily topping 2% of the city's entire population. Of course, some of the attendees are likely not residents of the city, but considering that relatively few bus and train routes connect Chiba to much more densely populated Tokyo proper, one should not overestimate how many non-Chiba residents are attending these public events.

While it is difficult to compare with the situation in other cities of similar size, Chiba residents have proven with their turnout that they remain largely enthusiastic about gatherings in public, despite (and perhaps because of) long periods of their being canceled, downscaled, or postponed due to COVID-related restrictions. With COVID restrictions on public gatherings in Japan now largely limited to the voluntary wearing of masks and use of hand sanitizers and temperature checks, there is little that stops people from rubbing shoulders with others in public every chance they get. 

Why are Chiba residents so fond of gathering in public? One factor might be the lack of alternatives. Tokyo is choke full of museums, small-scale cultural events, and just different types of big-city entertainment options. Chiba, beyond its compact downtown area, is an endless stretch of residential neighborhoods, forests, agricultural lands, and highways with little beyond the usual restaurant and retail chains alongside them. For those trying to get away from their everyday lives, there is little to do near where they live.

So that is perhaps why they are so keen to pay attention to news of events that are not often broadcast in the most systematic ways. The city has a monthly newsletter that details some of the events held at government-funded or affiliated institutions, but often they are geared toward keeping old people active and those in need in the loop. Average people may need to rely on word of mouth, use their own efforts at social media searches, and even spot flyers and posters by chance in public spaces. Such a non-ideal environment for marketing events has not prevented information from being disseminated.

As information becomes disseminated, many locals, long-term residents of the city, have developed their own routines on where to look and who to ask for information. The right bulletin boards to be checked on the right days, the right pages of the newsletters to be read in exact ways, and the exact keywords to search on social media all help residents to periodically check in on what is happening in their city. And as they become regulars at certain events, memberships lead to insider ways to acquire information that can then be further spread to friends and family members.

Admittedly, such routines are decidedly low-tech, fickle, time-consuming, and not guaranteed to have a persistent chance of success. But as people shift their attention away from newspapers, TVs, and radios to the online world, the ways people can acquire information have diversified and fragmented. Marketing an event to a general audience now requires publicizing it in ever more channels, each catering to an ever more specialized and niche audience with ever more specific interests and particular ways to acquire information about events.

As online marketing becomes more fragmented, perhaps the world of marketing may eventually trend back toward the offline, as many Chiba residents still happily engage with. The deluge of information online is tiring. Instead, the limitation of choices in the offline world may signal that each of the available choices is more likely to be seen by many and draw a wider audience. In this sense, the limited choice of cultural activities in Chiba is a blessing in disguise. The fact that people have limited information about limited choices means that, perhaps, all the choices will get a massive audience.