Last week I wrote about the need to step beyond engaging with the public on social media platforms and to move towards putting the public at the heart of the development of the museum as a whole.
As someone who works on the marketing side of museums, I have been thinking about how my comments about the ‘BETA Museum’ could apply to the way in which we develop the way in which we promote an exhibition, an event or the institution as a whole. Could we involve the public in the way in which we develop our marketing?
I know many of you will be thinking, ‘we have done that for years’, but I am guessing that while you may have conducted research with your audiences, perhaps even asking for opinions on past marketing, you are not involving the public as partners through out the development of new marketing, branding or advertising.
To create the most effective marketing campaign for a museum, do we not need the bring together the marketing manager and a designer, but also the people who the campaign is targeting?
Including the public in this development process would help us to understand their feelings, habits, motivations, insecurities, desires and prejudices so that we can better picture of how they might respond to different marketing messages.
While audience research might help us to develop our message, asking the public to feed in to every stage of the development process could help to bring the voice of those who visit you museum in to your marketing in a far more powerful way.
Though I am advocating the involvement of the public in the development of museum marketing, I am not in any way suggesting that they have the final say, but rather that along with the marketing manager and the designer they are allowed participate in the conversation, and their views are considered.
This approach may sound horrific to you, and I accept that both the designer and marketing manager would need to be confident enough not to be threatened by a third voice at the table.
You would be excused for saying that I should put my money where my mouth is and put this in to practice, and that is exactly what I intend to do. I am going to use this approach in the coming months and report back on this blog, if anyone is interested in working with us to try this, then please drop me a line.
Have you involved the public in the development of your marketing, not in evaluation, but in creation? Please post a comment.
I think that one question here is how do you ensure that the people you involve are representative of a wide enough range of your target audience. If they’re self-selecting, they may represent your keener visitors/users – actually people who would come anyway, whatever you did. They may not be aware of how a museum is perceived by others with a lower propensity to visit. Involving focus groups or whatever in creating campains is fine, it’s not that dissimilar to carrying out and responding to evaluation while creating a gallery, or involving visitors in selecting content, which some museums do already. However, remember that the people who you are targeting may not be all that interested in how you’re marketing the museum; they may be more interested in what makes a fun day out etc. rather than how you’re marketing it. What’s in it for them? It’s not like they will ultimately experience the product in the way that they would if they were contributing to an exhibition. Sure, they may be willing to help, but how do you incentivise that?