Marketing, in museum cum art gallery terms, is best understood as the process by which museums and art galleries produce, impart and deliver ‘value’ to the institution’s Community of Ownership and Interest (COI).
Importantly, ‘marketing’ is the tool set used by institutions to maintain their layered relationships, and shared ownerships, with their COI – acknowledging that its COI itself has layered interests and ownerships.
More broadly, marketing is the key mechanism that enables the generation of a 'brand identifiers' and audience development strategies. Most importantly, marketing is an integrated strategic process that enables the building of stronger relationships with the institution’s COI and that are at the same time marketing strategies that are typically designed to generate value for the COI – and the institution itself as an integral part of that COI.
The marketing process is the means by which museums and art galleries can best:
- Identify their COI and proactively engage with it;
- Satisfy COI members’ needs and aspirations;
- Grow their COI base in multiple ways.
All too often marketing is envisaged primarily as advertising but the two activities are distinctly different endeavours albeit that they may well interface quite closely.
In order to market anything effectively it is important to identify the purpose of that which is being marketed – be it a screwdriver or an art gallery.
In the way that there are a myriad of purposes for the multifarious manifestations of screwdrivers there are a multitude of museums and art galleries serving a multitude of purposes. So, it is vitally important for a COI to either know or to identify its gallery’s ‘purpose’ – its purpose for being.
Likewise, it is important for a museum’s/gallery’s marketers to know and understand its purpose. Without knowing this none of its marketing can be truly effective in a way that is relevant to the institution’s COI.
In a 21st Century context it is important to use the full set of communication tools available and increasingly the 'photographic image' – static & moving – is superseding text in marketing the ideas museums are engaged with.
In a 21st Century context it is important to use the full set of communication tools available and increasingly the 'photographic image' – static & moving – is superseding text in marketing the ideas museums are engaged with.
1 comment:
Does that mean that marketing is the sum of the communications between the communities of interest and the managers of the facilities for which they pay i.e. the museum?
That being the case, who does/should control those communications?
One would imagine that the answer will be vary from 'management controlled' - i.e. past practice - versus community controlled as in the 'arab spring'.
Post a Comment