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Last week the whole of Amsterdam was plastered with the image of Damien Hirst’s skull. The Rijksmuseum lets the whole Dutch world know that they have this precious object on display. The most expensive artwork in the world is in Amsterdam: “come and see it now!”. (It can be debated if it really the most expensive work of object…he bought the piece from himself). It is certainly an object worth discussing. And a lot of people are responding to it. Some positive some negative.

At the Tropenmuseum we had a discussion within our marketing staff if we should react in on the hype that is being created. In a previous post I explained that we have our own skull too. Furthermore the new vodou exhibition that opened a week ago contains so many skulls that we have lost count. Responses we considered were:

The list with funny and less funny responses can go on and on. We decided not to pursue any of these responses because it would distract of the main story we were selling last week: our new Vodou exhibition. Also I personally think it is sign of weakness to ride along with someone else’s hype. Responding on the hype Rijksmuseum is creating is a defensive move. And the best defense is offense even in museum communications. The van Gogh museum clearly has another opinion. In the week the exhibition opened at the Rijksmuseum, they responded with the ad below.

It states in Dutch: “Come and see our Skull too”, “The van Gogh Museum, congratulates the Rijksmuseum with their temporary guest for the love of God by Damien Hirst”.

What does the van Gogh Museum want with this ad? Is it Humor? Is it riding a long with the hype? or are they cynical about the hype? Probably all three a bit. The cynical part is in the words “temporary guest”. They could have used the word ‘exhibition’ or just skip the words. I am not going to Analyze it any further. But I would have spend my marketing euro’s on something I want to tell, I don’t want to tell the story of another organization.

The cultural season is starting with mini exhibition in cargo container.

In Amsterdam every year at the last weekend of August the cultural Season opens with the Uitmarkt festival. The Uitmarkt is held from August 29 - 31 at the Eastern Harbour area in Amsterdam. Three days with over 400 previews of different artists, performing on 34 stages. And of course the Tropenmuseum is also present. This year our great cultural sponsor the BankGiro Loterij made a so called castle of cargo containers where a a lot of museums could present themselves. We decided to give a preview of our next exhibition called ‘Vodou, art & mysticism from Haiti’. We were showing a real Dutch Vodou priest, a Vodou altar and pictures of the objects that will be on display. To enhance the(marketing) experience people can send a vodou postcard for free to anybody they want.

A lot of people pass by on these days so this is a big chance to present ourselves to the public. But to be frank I really hate these kind of trade fair/market stall things. Why? I always wonder if it has any effectiveness at all. Since I am working, every year or so, some boss asks me to present his company on a trade fair or some market stall. In my experience selling your organization on these kinds of events is a different way of communicating. It requires a lot of effort/money to do this the right way. And money and time is always lacking. So what questions do you have to ask before you are going to present yourself on a trade fair:

1. What goals do you have?
What is the purpose of being on a trade fair? is it awareness(brrr) or a clear goal like collecting email addresses, selling tickets etc.

2. Who is the targetgroup?

3. What are you selling?
The Tropenmuseum has 7 exhibitions a year, 60 events, 20 educational programs, etc, etc. The best thing is to focus on one or a few of them.

4. Any way to give a follow up?
Maybe you can collect email addresses and send people an email when a specific exhibitions starts.

5. How can you stand out between other booths?
Maybe some great design will help…

6. Is your staff ready and knowledgeable?
Staff is very important to make a good impression on your potential visitors. A lot of time on trade fairs I see staff talking with each other, blocking the entrance of a booth, eating, badly dressed and being very rude.

Most of the time (in my experience) the only focus is on the design of the exhibition and all other questions are just forgotten or skipped.

And here some pictures of the Tropenmuseum at the Uitmarkt.

Some extra information:
Tips on attending a trade fair

The famous artwork ‘for the love of God’, made by Damien Hirst, starts it world tour in Amsterdam at the Rijksmuseum at the 1st of November. This artwork is a skull which is cast from platinum, encrusted with 8,601 diamonds and has its original teeth. An investment group bought the skull a few years ago for an estimated $100 million dollars. The whole Dutch press is all over it. So great PR for the Rijksmuseum. The new director in chief of the Rijksmuseum Wim Pijbes is showing off his new talents. But this skull is actually accompanying the exhibition Hirst has made for the Rijksmuseum. Hirst has chosen a personal selection from the Rijksmuseum’s collection of 17th-century art. So that PR message is a bit lost.

But a little secret is that the ‘real’ thing can be found at the Tropenmuseum. But the PR value of this magnificent piece is actually not the same.

Note on the Tropenmuseum skull: This skull is from New Guinea. It is probably an ancestor because there is no hole in the skull to remove the brains. The line between life and death was not strongly drawn in most Papuan cultures.For example, the dead could still be present as spirits among the living. They had a great influence on a person’s daily existence and it was essential to ensure that the spirits remained well disposed.

In my previous post I have mentioned eight factors to consider when setting an admission price. I just want to explore the first factor that is the factor ‘art matters’. What does ‘art matters’ mean? I will present a few cases to show why ‘art matters’ in setting your entrance fee and I will show some nice homemade charts.

The first case I present is the exhibition called ‘King Tut‘. I have visited this exhibition in Chicago. I have visited Egypt two times and you could say I really love that ancient stuff, and my wife loves it even more. So when we were on a holiday trip in Chicago we stumbled upon the Tut exhibition and immediately we wanted to go. The image of the sarcophagus was all over the place. We already imagined seeing the golden case where the young king was laid to rest in. The exhibition was in the Field museum. While moving to cashiers desk we saw the ticket price (I don’t know the admission fee anymore but I can recall that it was huge, I looked up the fee for the Dallas exhibition and it is $37 dollars and $7 dollars for the audio tour). We started to discuss if it would be worth the fee. My wife said this would be a once in a life time experience…and when you are on a holiday those extra dollars doesn’t really matter anymore. So we bought the tickets and we were assigned to the 11.30am group. The excitement was building up. We were anxiously waiting in front of the exhibition door to be let in. The doors went open we went into a dark room where a story was told (the contents of the story did not make any impression). And then we were let loose. My wife and I said to each other that we would skip all the other artefacts and would head on to the big golden sarcophagus first. So we rushed by moving from room to room in a very fast pace. And then we were at the end of exhibition….. and wondered where that big golden case was, the masterpiece. Where was King Tut?

Well we actually missed it. The golden case we were looking for was a golden statuette of about 20cm’s (8inches). It was so small that we just looked over it. They even made a separate room for that small golden statuette but we had something completely different on our minds. You can imagine we really thought we were ripped of big time. Our expectation was not met at all. What is the point I try to make here? The point is that if the exhibition would have met our expectations we thought it was ok to pay the $37 dollars per person. We really love Egyptian artefacts so much, that we would pay that amount to see the big celebrity king Tut.

Another example is the (in)famous ‘Bodies, the exhibition’. This one I did not visit but not because of any ethical reasons. I just thought it was to expensive. I think it was about 20 euro’s when the exhibition was in Amsterdam. While on average visiting a museum in Amsterdam costs about 8 euro’s so there is a premium of 150%.

The last example I want to share is the exhibition ‘rembrandt caravaggio’ in the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The normal entrance fee to the van Gogh is 10 euro’s you had to pay 10 euro’s extra to visit the exhibition. Also a premium of 100% on the normal entrance fee. But you can ask, where those exhibitions a success? I know ‘rembrandt caravaggio’ was and seeing the queues in Chicago I presume King Tut is also a success. For Bodies the exhibition I don’t know if it was a success. It got lots of publicity so maybe it was too.

Was this information all new too you. Maybe not, maybe yes, but wat is probably new are the charts I made here below. You see here attendance in 2007 plotted against the entrance fee for an adult in 2008 for most of the museums in Amsterdam. What you see is that the higher the attendance the higher the admission is. That is a really strange phenomenon. In normal economics you would expect that the higher the price the lower the attendance. But what it actually shows is that the better your offering is ‘art matters’ the higher you can set your price.

Chart explanation: I have made two charts, one with only the small museums and one with all the museums. I made the chart with only the small museums because they are more comparable. There are only a few big museums in Amsterdam and as you can see in the second chart they change the perspective a bit. The green line is the correlation. I can state there is a medium correlation between attendance and admission price.

In the Netherlands and Amsterdam we have two collective museum cards. The first is the so called ‘museumkaart’ or museumcard. This card gives you free entrance, for a year, to about 400 museums in the netherlands after you paid a subscription fee of about 35 euros. This card is handed out by the museumvereniging (The Netherlands Museums Association). It is bought by people who live in the Netherlands. The other card the Iamsterdam card gives you about 1/2/3 days entrance to public transport and museums in amsterdam for 33/43/53 euros. This card is handed out by the tourist board of Amsterdam. This card is mainly bought by tourists.

The advantages for the user of these cards are clear. You pay a fee and you get access for a certain amount of time. There are no hidden costs and off course you minimize risk. If you think the Rijksmuseum sucks you hop out and move to the van Gogh museum. It sounds really good but on the revenue side of things i am not sure if it is all that good.

To participate in these two cards the museum has to sell their admission at a discount to the card distributors. The museums get paid (at the discounted rate) by the card distributors every time the cards pass the cashier. Selling your admission with a discount will cost revenue. But because of the risk free nature of the cards attendance will grow. So will the rise in attendance offset the the losses by selling at a discount? I think in certain cases it will but in some cases it will not. My hypothesis is that Tourist cards will give you more revenue but collaborative cards you sell to locals will cost you revenue.

Let me explain: local people who buy such a card are far better informed about what a museum has to offer then tourists. In the research I have done at the Tropenmuseum when the visitors were askes how they got the idea to visit an exhibition of the Tropenmuseum, about 40% said the heard it from friends and 35% said the read an article in a newspaper. And a lot of them are returning visitors so they know the museum by past experiences. These sources of information minimize the risk of visiting a museum and being disappointed about it. So when a local pays admission, he/she has less chance to be disillusioned. This being said a local would be more willing to pay full admission because he knows more or less what to expect.

The main sources of information of tourists are travel guides, internet, and the guide that comes with the museum pass. These are less reliable sources of information then friends, local newspapers and past experiences. The risk of getting into an unknown local museum is higher. A card like the Iamsterdamcard offsets that risk.

So if the Amsterdam museums would love to have more revenues on admissions. They should collaborative stop accepting the museumcard ‘museumkaart’ and keep accepting the touristcard ‘Iamsterdam card’.