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Today en Yesterday at the Tropenmuseum we had a big symposium about the role and importance of the Tropenmuseum as an ethnological museums in the 21st century. The discussions were academical and very interesting. The debate was mainly focused on what the exhibitions of the Tropenmuseum are all about, and what it should be about in the future. But in the core the discussion was about the mission of the Tropenmuseum. One thing was very striking to me: nobody dared to ask the question “Is the market waiting for all these exhibition?”, “does the market like the exhibitions as they are now?”.

As a marketeer I think that it was bad that these questions were not addressed (and there was no opportunity for me to ask them myself). But I am also fully aware of the balance a non-profit organization as the Tropenmuseum has to make between market and mission. But which one is right? The market or the mission? To answer that question I want to quote Peter Brinckerhoff, in his book ‘Mission-Based Marketing‘ he states that the answer to this question can be written down in three sentences:

1. The market is always right
2. The market is not always right for you
3. The mission should be your organizations ultimate guide

The consequences of these three sentences are:

1. Don’t get disappointed when nobody is visiting your museum after all the hard work. You probably don’t have a very attractive offering for the public.
2. You can not serve all markets as a museum. And if you want to serve them all you probably would have to compromise one your mission.
3. What you are as an organization is stated in you mission. And all the products and services that you offer should fit into that mission.

So the main conclusion is that the mission and the market are equally important but that your mission is your guiding principle in making product offerings for the market. I want to emphasis that the mission is not a static thing and should be discusses on a regular basis. A very famous example is the Mobile Phone company Nokia which started out as a wood-pulp mill and later on made other products like rubber boots. In the Sixties Nokia changed it’s mission and vision and focused on Telecommunications.

In the end I was happy with discussion that took place. It gave me new insight in the Intellectual discourse of the museum world and it provides valuable input in redefining our mission. It was a bad thing that nobody really mentioned the market in anyway.

PS: Nina Simon of museum 2.0 was also attending the symposium…she said to me several times “I am so involved with making things for the public, I am glad there are people who think about the theoretical site of things’. She inspired me with this remark for this post.

Since I am working as a museum marketeer I always wonder why do people visit a museum? Why do people desire to go to a building and view different kind of objects? I don’t claim to have the total and complete answer to this question but I will try to shed a light on the motives and desires of museum visitors.

In one of my other posts I discussed what factors a Museum should consider to get the most revenues out of their entrance fees/admissions. This post about pricing policy is viewed from the supply side of the museum. But where there is supply there is also a demand. So what determines the demand for museums?(in random order)

1. The cost of visiting a museum, this contains

• Entrance fee
• Opportunity cost of time: when you have high income time is expensive. The time you are visiting a museum you could have worked and earned a lot more money. With a lower income time is less expensive.
• The price of alternative leisure activities
• Other costs of visiting like transport costs, parking costs.

2. Level of education/intelligence; the average level of education is generally higher in Art Museum, this level drops with History museums, and Science museums have the broadest appeal.

3. Contents of the exhibition (art matters). I have also written a post about that. But what a museum has on display matters for the demand.

4. The design of the building. Maybe not a major factor in considering the demand.

5. The provision of services like catering, museum shop, customer friendliness, hygiene.

6. Marketing & Communication efforts.

7. Satisfying visits in the past

But this list doesn’t really cut it for me. If the Mona Lisa was displayed in a barn, with unfriendly staff, for 30 dollars and little communication would people stay away? Some will but a lot will still want to see the real thing. It is a good list to consider when trying to make an estimate of the demand for museums. Or to optimize your marketing organization. But this list is more or less an observation of the behavior of the museum visitor.

I want try too look inside the head of the museum visitor…What drives him, why is his desire big enough to get out of his chair and wonder around objects of art. In a great book I have read ‘on desire‘ by William B. Irvine, he points out there are instrumental desires and hedonic desires. An instrumental desire is a desire someone fulfills to get to a hedonic desire. For example I want to drive my car to the Louvre to see the Mona lisa. The ‘driving of my car’ is an instrumental desire to get to my hedonic desire ’seeing the Mona Lisa’. Mr. Irvine states that Instrumental desires are desired for the sake of something else. Hedonic desires are desired because I want to feel good or avoid feeling bad. So people visit a museum to feel good or avoid feeling bad.

What kind of psychological factors can trigger this feelings of good or avoiding bad. I have a theory about that. I distinguish two type of feelings: Personal museum feelings and Social museum feelings. Personal museum feelings are feelings you can experience without other people. To experience ‘Social museum feelings’ other people have to be involved. The museum visitor has a hedonic desire to experience at least a part of these feelings.

There are various different personal museum feelings:

• Entertainment feelings, being entertained feels good, you feel joy and fun.
• Educational feelings, understanding how things work, solving a puzzle, raises your self esteem.
• Aesthetical feelings, the awe of seeing a great object of art, is uplifting, it stretches the imagination, it crosses a mental boundary. A colleague of mine said that Great arts gives him consolation. The beauty of the artwork makes live worth living despite all the troubles there are in the world.

There are also various social museum feelings:

• Sharing feelings, Sharing the personal museum feelings with each other. A shared feeling deepens the experience of the feeling. Seeing the same beautiful work of art, and sharing that feeling enhances the aesthetical feelings.
• Superior feelings, visiting a museum to impress people or feeling superior towards other people. Someone who has these kind of feelings may think “hmmmm, what a great painting of Willem de Kooning in his late period, I like it but my stupid friends probably won’t appreciate it”.
• Inferior feelings, you go because your friends visited that exhibition and if you don’t go you can not join in the conversation.
• Lethargic feelings, others decide for you to go, like in a school trip.
• Landmark feelings, you must have seen ‘the venus de Milo‘ en the ‘Mona Lisa’ when you visit the Louvre in Paris or “this exhibition is a once in a life time event”.

What is the marketing use off all those feelings described above? Actually I use the three “personal museum feelings” in my communication strategy. Must we sell the exhibition like an aesthetical one or a more entertaining one. The social museum feelings are more difficult. This is because not all of them are positive feelings. But promoting the an exhibition as a ‘once in a lifetime event’ helps raising attendance or promoting a visit to the museum as shared experience probably also lifts up the image of the museum.

After writing my blog article on star appeal that was finished at 23.39 I went to bed for some good night sleep. Right before my eyes shut down totally I was thinking about my article and saw that I mixed up some things. My conclusion was that not all celebrities are equal in the museum world. There are two possible ways to measure celebrity appeal. The first way is the image of the star: is he well known? Does he have a positive or interesting angle to offer to the exhibition? Is his brand name so well known that this immediately means the exhibition has to be good or interesting? The other way is artistic value. Artistic value means that the artifacts or collection associated with this person are esthetically or historically appealing.

While considering this I came up with a star appeal matrix loosely inspired by the bcg matrix. This star appeal matrix has two axes. The first axis is the strength of the image of the person. The second axis is the artistic value of the artifacts which are linked to that person. As you can see below some of the dots are already filled in. The chart has four quadrants.

- Mice, this is the lower left quadrant. In this quadrant you will find the nobodies or artistic wannabe’s. The have a lack of any artistic or pr value
- Question marks, this is upper left quadrant. In this quadrant you will find artists with high artistic value. They are very good at what they do but are not a household brand. They can probably grow into stars but with bad luck return to mice.
- PR kings, this is the lower right quadrant. In this quadrant you will find artists with a lot of PR/marketing value. The artists are well known brand but lack artistic value for the museum.
- Stars, this is the quadrant in the upper right corner. If you can make an exhibition with objects who are related too, uses by or made by these persons you have a blockbuster exhibition.

No relevant science is used in determining the spot of the persons in this chart. I just made up the numbers to give an example. But I think it is possible to make a chart like this. It could for example be useful in choosing for a certain exhibition. Do you want for example to make an overview of the work of Madonna (the singer) in your museum? It will give you a lot of PR but the risk is your museum will be taken less seriously. Or do you want to show the bright young and upcoming artist who nobody knows. This matrix could probably also be used for themes instead of persons.

Links about the question marks in the chart:
Khosrow Hassanzadeh
Rogerio Reis

This post is about setting the optimum price for your Museum. And by optimum I mean what factors a Museum should consider to get the most revenues out of their entrance fees/admissions.

1. Contents/Quality of the exhibitions. Actually what you have on display really matters. The better the content the higher you can set your entrance fee.

2. Price elasticity. What would happen if you increase your entrance fee? Your attendance would probably drop, but the extra revenues of setting a higher price will offset your drop in attendance.

3. The duration of a visit to the museum. The longer you can keep your visitors (voluntarily) in your museum the higher you can set your price.

4. Pricing of competition and substitutes.

5. Communication efforts. The more you advertise, the more free publicity you get, the more people would like to visit your museum.

6. Other costs of visiting your museum. For example if your museum is in the middle of nowhere it will cost people time and extra gaz to go to your place.

7. Scarcity. This exhibition is a once in a life time event!!!

8. Economic developments. For example in times of recession people have less to spend. In times of high inflation you can easily raise your entrance fee in line with that inflation.

I will elaborate on all of the points mentioned above in posts to come. In the meanwhile you can read one my main sources for this post. An excellent paper on ‘the economics of museums’ Bruno S. Frey and Stephan Meier.