The Cerulean Problem: What Your Season Announcement Is Actually Saying
- Tanesha Ford
- Apr 26
- 5 min read
There’s a moment in The Devil Wears Prada that I come back to every season planning cycle. The cerulean sweater monologue. It’s a masterclass in understanding influence—how decisions made in one room quietly shape everything downstream.
And that’s what makes it stick with me. Because in our sector, it’s not always a lack of awareness that creates disconnect. Sometimes it’s the decision to move forward anyway, without fully reckoning with what audiences, staff, and communities are already sending back upstream.
That’s what most season announcements feel like from the inside.
The work is often strong, and the intention is there, and when marketing is brought into the season-shaping process earlier, it creates more space for the team to help carry that vision forward in a way that feels cohesive, compelling, and clear to the public.
When marketing is not brought in early, it is left to make sense after the fact.
And that’s where the politics show up.
The kind of politics that live in who was in the room, who wasn’t, and what assumptions were made about alignment that never actually got tested.
I’ve been in enough of these cycles to say this with a full chest: if marketing is not present when the season is being shaped, the announcement becomes a performance of alignment, not evidence of it.
And audiences can feel the difference, even if they can’t name it.
When You’re Selling Shows Instead of a Season
How many of you, like me, have seen lineups that read like a series of individual bets rather than a collective statement?
Each show might be strong on its own. Each artist might bring something meaningful. But when the announcement goes out, it feels like a collection of disconnected ideas rather than a clear vision.
So marketing does what it knows how to do: sell each show individually. Builds campaigns in isolation while trying to generate momentum piece by piece.
And that works, to a point.
But it also means the organization is constantly starting from zero. Each production has to reintroduce the organization, re-explain its value, and re-earn attention. The Storytelling thread gets lost. This is exhausting for small teams and incredibly inefficient. Read our article on holistic storytelling, "Planning for Success Throughout the Year."
A season, at its best, is supposed to do some of that work for you. It’s supposed to tell a story about who you are, what you care about, and why this moment matters.
When that story isn’t clear internally, it doesn’t magically appear externally.
Narrative is a Planning Decision
I think this is where a lot of organizations get tripped up.
Narrative continuity is often treated like something marketing adds later. A theme. A tagline. A clever line that ties everything together.
But narrative is not decoration. It’s infrastructure.
It’s shaped by the questions asked at the beginning. Why these works? Why now? Why together? Who is this season in conversation with? What are we asking audiences to sit with across multiple experiences, not just one night?
If those questions aren’t part of the planning process, marketing is left to reverse-engineer meaning.
And sometimes we get close. We find threads. We build language that gestures toward cohesion.
But it’s still translation, not authorship.
Because when narrative is baked in from the start, marketing doesn’t have to stretch to connect the dots. The dots are already connected. The job becomes amplification instead of reconstruction.
The Whiplash Problem
Let’s take a beat and talk about audience experience for a second.
From the inside, it can feel normal to move from one show to the next, each with its own tone, audience, and set of priorities.
From the outside, it can feel like whiplash.
One week, it’s a bold political piece, next it’s a light family show. Then a classic revival followed by an experimental work with no clear entry point for new audiences.
Again, these are not inherently wrong choices. However, without a throughline, audiences are left doing interpretive work that they didn’t sign up for.
So... they disengage or cherry-pick or wait until something clearly speaks to them.
Which means you lose the opportunity to build deeper, sustained relationships.
Marketing teams feel this acutely. They’re constantly shifting tone, audience, and messaging. They’re rebuilding context over and over again.
And because the season itself doesn’t provide a stable narrative, every campaign has to carry more weight than it should.
“Just Make It Work” Is Not a Strategy
There’s often an unspoken expectation that marketing will figure it out. That expectation is rooted in a misunderstanding of what marketing actually does.
Marketing is not a translation service for misalignment. It’s a strategic partner in shaping how your organization shows up in the world.
When that partnership is missing at the point of decision-making, there is a scramble of smart, committed people trying to build clarity under pressure, without the context or authority to influence the source material.
It’s very Miranda Priestly in that way. Decisions are made with confidence at the top, resulting in a downstream impact that is assumed rather than examined, and ending with assistants, or in this case, marketing teams, expected to execute flawlessly without being part of the conversation that defined the work.
Why are we then surprised when the final product feels strained?
A Different Kind of Alignment
So what does alignment actually look like in this context?
It looks like marketing being in the room before the season is finalized.
Not to dilute artistic vision, but to help articulate it in a way that can live beyond internal conversations.
It looks like shared language early.
Not just titles and dates, but:
Purpose.
Stakes.
Audience invitation.
It looks like acknowledging capacity.
Understanding that a small team cannot build ten fully distinct campaigns at the same level of intensity, and expecting that to be sustainable.
It looks like making choices with the full lifecycle in mind.
Not just what feels exciting in the planning phase, but what can be supported, communicated, and experienced consistently over time.
This is about grounding ambition.
Because a season announcement should be a promise.
Are we building something that our teams can actually carry, and that our audiences can actually follow? Or are we asking marketing to turn cerulean into a story after the fact and hoping no one notices the gap?
A Quiet Check-In
Before your next season is locked, or your next announcement goes out, I’m curious what you’re seeing out in the field.
Are there organizations you’ve encountered that feel truly cohesive in how their mission shows up across a full season, not just in individual shows, but in the throughline, the storytelling, the invitation to audiences?
I'll start: 1812 Productions and Interact Theatre in Philadelphia.
I’m always paying attention to who is building that kind of clarity in a way that feels grounded and real, especially within the constraints most teams are navigating.
Share in the comments any other organizations that you can think of, and while you're doing that, I’d hold this alongside it.
Where are we relying on performance to fill in what wasn’t built together?
Comments