The Challenge

The Sacramento Music Festival was originally called the “Dixieland Jazz Festival” and was one of the largest Traditional Jazz festivals in the world. The festival enjoyed immense popularity with a loyal core audience for many years but, beginning in the early 2000’s, saw a decline in Traditional Jazz popularity. The Sacramento Traditional Jazz Society (STJS), who puts on the event as their primary annual fundraiser, made the choice to change the name to the “Sacramento Music Festival” and introduced a wide range of musical genres with the hope of attracting a younger more diverse audience while still offering Traditional Dixieland Jazz to satisfy the core audience.

From a broad perspective the overarching challenges were: how to position the updated festival to attract a new, younger audience; reintroduce the festival to people who are familiar with the old format and have pre-conceived ideas of what their experience will be, and retain the loyalty of the core Dixieland Jazz audience that has supported the festival for years; all on a limited budget.

The Solution

Bouchard Communications along with STJS chose to position the festival as a family friendly event offering a wide variety of music that could be appreciated by audiences of all ages and cultures. Special events tailored to specific audiences were added to create buzz and interest. We created marketing materials that had a fresh new look with images targeted toward specific audiences while maintaining a consistent branding in the overall look and feel. More festival brand signage was placed throughout the eventThis allowed us to create advertising that would appeal to a wider variety of target markets without losing the festival’s overall branding. We placed advertising on digital billboards in high traffic commute areas for awareness and put a strong emphasis on social media.