Audience Building: Marketing Art Museums
Office of Policy & Analysis
11
• Inserts or postcards in newspapers such as postcards placed in the New
York Times by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Passive display communication
• Billboards on streets or in subways - Create a large number of
impressions targeting a broader audience than frequent museum visitors
at a relatively high cost per likely visitor unless there are special
arrangements.
• Mobile billboards - Signs on buses, taxicabs, and subways as well as
wrapped buses and airplanes that appeal to the broader audiences targeted
by static billboards, but at a greater cost.
Electronic media communications
• Radio advertisements or sponsorships - local National Public Radio
(NPR) stations reach current audiences, while drive-time broadcasts,
weather and traffic conditions sponsorship may reach new audiences.
• Television advertisements are considered to be a very expensive way to
reach likely museum visitors.
• Web and other new-media approaches that are discussed later.
Database marketing, also referred to as customer relationship management, is a
dominant mode of promotion in for-profit marketing.
11
A firm, like a
supermarket or a bank, generates a database containing information about
specific households such as address, ages, financial position, consumption
behavior, psychographic information, and so forth. Potential customers are
targeted with specific, individualized communications. For example, the interest
rates on a credit card offer will vary for different persons (even in the same
household). Graphics may be tailored to different recipients.
We found no museums that currently maintain a single in-house, relational
database combining museum use, membership, catalog purchases, and
contributions. Retail operations generally are separated from the marketing
function in art museums. Several museums are preparing to move towards
creating relational customer database that could be used in marketing. For
example, the Museum of Modern Art uses a smart card to capture visit
information, restaurant purchases, and store purchases by members. The