Why People Show Up, Stay Away and Come Back to Culture – An Interview with Pablo Colella
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Pablo Colella is a Cultural Audience Psychology Consultant, founder of Disconnected Bodies, and host of the Disconnected Bodies Podcast. For more than twenty years, he has worked with museums, heritage organisations, local authorities and cultural leaders across the UK, helping them better understand audiences through behavioural research, programme evaluation and place-based cultural strategy. He is the developer of Sandbox™, a behavioural audience intelligence methodology, and the author of independent research exploring cultural strategy, participation and public value. Through his writing, Pablo challenges conventional thinking about audience engagement and explores how behavioural psychology can help shape the future of culture.
Pablo Colella, Cultural Audience Psychology Consultant
What drew you to audience psychology, and what made you see it as something the cultural sector needed?
It kept coming up in the research. Organisations could tell you who walked through the door, age, postcode, ethnicity, ticket type, but not why one person came back and another never did. Demographic data sorts people into boxes. It doesn't tell you what's going on in their heads.
I got interested in what's underneath those categories. Confidence, trust, relevance, relationships, whether a place feels like it's "for someone like me." That's where Disconnected Bodies and Sandbox™ came from.
I'm not against demographic data, it has its uses. The problem is when we ask it to answer questions it wasn't built to answer. Understanding audiences means going past describing people and getting into what's actually driving their decisions. That felt like a gap in the sector, and unfortunately, it still does.
What does being a Cultural Audience Psychology Consultant involve that people outside the profession might not expect?
People assume it's mostly surveys, statistics, marketing. That's part of it, but it's a broader job than that. A lot of what I do is trying to understand what's behind people's behaviour, then helping an organisation work out what to do about it.
Some days that's sitting with a community watching how people actually engage. Other days it's going through data trying to work out what it's really saying, or sitting in on a difficult conversation. Other days it's helping an organisation rethink its strategy or how it evaluates things.
There's more detective work in it than people expect too. A client will come to me convinced they've got an audience problem, and the evidence points somewhere else entirely, trust, confidence, accessibility, the offer itself, or an internal decision nobody's really looked at. I end up somewhere between researcher, strategist, evaluator, critical friend. The point is never just another report.
After more than 20 years of audience research, what have you learned about why people engage with culture or choose not to?
There's rarely one reason as it's usually some combination of motivation, circumstance, relationships and perception. Two people who look almost the same on paper can behave completely differently. People from very different backgrounds can end up with pretty much the same motivations or barriers.
Confidence, trust, familiarity, relevance, social relationships matter more than people think. Whether something feels like it's "for you" can matter as much as the price or what's on. I've also got more careful about assuming that if someone doesn't attend, they're not interested. That's not necessarily true. There can be a gap between caring about something and actually being able to act on it, and that gap is practical, psychological, social, all sorts.
So I think of participation as a journey rather than a single event. Awareness, first contact, coming back, feeling like you belong, maybe eventually taking a more active role. Knowing where someone is in that tells you a lot more than just whether they turned up once.
What can psychology reveal about an audience that demographics and attendance data simply cannot?
Demographics tell you who's there, attendance data tells you what happened, but psychology starts to explain why.
Knowing someone's young doesn't tell you whether they feel confident in an unfamiliar space, whether they trust the organisation, whether the programme feels relevant to them, or what would get them to come back. It also explains things that otherwise look like contradictions, people from very different backgrounds behaving the same way because they share a motivation, or a demographic group that looks the same on paper but is actually made up of quite different people underneath.
That's the distinction I make between audience data and audience intelligence. Data describes a pattern whereas audience intelligence is trying to understand it well enough to actually make a decision from it. I'm not trying to replace demographics with psychology, I just think we need to stop treating demographic categories like they explain behaviour, because on their own they don't.
Where do you think cultural organisations still misunderstand the people they are trying to reach?
One is assuming participation and interest are the same thing. If people aren't attending, the assumption is often that they're not interested. That needs testing before anyone believes it.
Consultation's another. Most organisations genuinely want to listen, but consultation often happens after the important decisions are already made. So people take part, but they don't actually get to influence much.
Organisations also tend to know a lot about the audiences they already have, and much less about the people who aren't showing up at all. Sometimes what looks like an audience problem is actually an organisational one, they understand what people need, they just don't have the structures or resources to do anything about it.
So it's less "how do we reach these people" and more "what are we actually learning about them, and are we willing to change because of it."
Your 2026 research examined cultural strategies across UK local authorities, so what separates a strategy that creates real public value from one that remains largely aspirational?
The UK Local Authority Cultural Strategy Review 2026 looked at all 382 principal authorities. One of the clearest findings was the gap between having a strategy and having the organisational capability to actually deliver it.
A good strategy needs more than good intentions. It needs a real understanding of communities and audiences, priorities that mean something, sensible governance, delivery structures, the right capability, and a way of adapting as things change. Public value comes down to whether the strategy changes what an organisation actually does. If the priorities in the document don't touch decisions, resources, partnerships or delivery, it's just a document.
To me a strategy that's working creates an actual relationship between evidence, priorities, decisions, delivery and learning. It should help people make better choices, not just describe the choices they'd like to make. The real test is what's different because this strategy exists?
When an organisation wants to engage a community it has struggled to reach, where should it begin?
I'd hold off on designing an outreach programme straight away, which is usually the first instinct. First I'd want to know what the organisation actually knows about the community, versus what's assumption. What are the real motivations, barriers, levels of trust, and the circumstances people are already engaging with culture in, if they are at all.
Then I'd look at the organisation itself. What's it doing, even without meaning to, that makes it harder to take part? Could be language, cost, accessibility, confidence, how they communicate, the venue, the programme, whether people feel represented there.
Then I'd talk to people, including people who aren't currently taking part, using more than one method rather than a single consultation. I'd want to know what the organisation can actually change, because there's not much point asking a community for their views if nothing can shift as a result. So it's less "how do we get them through the door" and more "what would meaningful participation look like to them, and what needs to change to make that possible."
On a personal level, has spending two decades studying people's motivations and behaviour changed the way you understand people in your own life?
Yes. It's made me more curious and less certain about people. One thing you learn studying behaviour is that what someone does isn't always a clean reflection of what they actually want. There's often more going on underneath than the decision on the surface.
It's made me more aware of the difference between noticing something and explaining it. I might see someone make a choice, and I try not to jump straight to deciding why. I've also got more comfortable with contradiction. People aren't always consistent, someone can say they want one thing and do something else in a different situation without being dishonest about it. Context matters.
The biggest change has probably been getting interested in the question "what am I missing?" Studying audiences has reinforced that I don't have to understand someone's behaviour right away. Sometimes it's better to just stay curious.
What is the most important shift you would like to see in how cultural leaders think about their audiences over the next decade?
I'd like to see a shift from audience information to audience intelligence. Organisations have more data than ever, but more data doesn't automatically mean more understanding. I'd like leaders to get comfortable questioning their own assumptions, looking properly at behaviour, listening to people who aren't already taking part, and being willing to notice when the evidence doesn't match what they expected.
I'd also like evaluation to sit closer to actual decision-making. We shouldn't be evaluating just because a funding body wants a report. We should be evaluating because we want to know what happened, why, and what should change because of it.
The strongest cultural organisations won't be those that think they've got their audiences figured out. They'll be the ones willing to say "we might be wrong here, let's find out", and then actually change when they find out that they were.
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