Article translated by Amritee Mahabir

For years museums have competed to attract visitors not only among themselves, but in all different ways to make use of their free time. Shopping centres, cinemas and recreation grounds are today some of the worst opponents of exhibitions and collections; it is enough to think that in third place of all the most visited attractions in Italy after the Coliseum and the Vatican Museums, is the amusement park Gardaland. Competition is therefore ruthless and even the museums have had to gather the armies of communication in order to pull audiences.

For more than twenty years therefore even the world of museums have approached marketing. Gallery market research has been more intense and complete regarding information about visitors. Various ways of getting to know the consumer market have been experimented with for decades in the marketing world: focus groups, questionnaires, surveys…But some museums are experimenting in some alternative ways to discover what is going through the minds of their visitors. For example, last year, the city of Detroit spent about 160 million dollars to restage a gallery. In order to evaluate the real impacts of this action, researchers decided to visit all the mothers in their homes to try and understand how it could attract more families to the museum.

The most common road is to use specific software that would help the museum to design an image of their visitors. Museum research has shown results in the last few years. The surveys had discovered some things to be true, and was in fact fundamental to making relative decisions regarding opening times, written targets for works which became shorter-term, and background music that was proposed to match the mix of works offered. But it’s not enough to stop at the information provided by the current visitors. What’s even more important is how to attract potential visitors, who the museum would like to target but for whatever reason are not attracted by their publicity.

That which cannot be forgotten is the need to communicate directly to the public by simple and immediate means. Some big museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York found it difficult to gain public attention in the 20s and 30s. While this share of the public showed notable interest in the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Centre, a museum affiliated with MoMa, they didn’t seem to be attracted by the Manhattan sites. MoMa therefore decided to fix this by launching the “Pop Rally” programme which presented events, tours, and collaborations with artists, concerts and performances by artists such as Patti Smith, Chicks on Speed and Paper Rad. They began especially to use internet channels to carry out these publicity schemes and there was notable success of this initiative as a result.

Such decisions to reorientate museum strategies or implement new (and often costly) communication techniques must however be adequately supported by a valid database and specific analyses of visitor behaviour. It is in fact possible to discover that their customs and the ways in which they visit are very different to what the curators expect when preparing for a show. Not all visitors love to enjoy exhibitions in the same way, some prefer to read the labels that correspond with the artwork, others prefer to find more detailed information. The means of displaying information must be adequate and today technological instruments that allows one to do so are also always on the increase which the more attentive museums are trying to implement.

Some curators however fear that museum marketing trends could deter attention from the main purpose, which is cultural. According to some, going along with public tastes could lower the qualitative level of the exhibits. Museum marketing directors on the other hand try to clarify that museums should concentrate on not what they put on display but how best to communicate the event to the public. But it is always true that blockbuster shows are a constant phenomenal growth. Despite the justified fears of the curators, that which a XXI Century museum must absolutely not forget is satisfying customer needs and this is also derived from the research.