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In recent years museums have changed from being predominantly custodial institutions to becoming increasingly focussed on audience attraction. New emphasis is placed on museum‐audience interactions and relationships. This change in the purpose and priorities of museums has impacted upon the nature of museum management. The recognition of new roles for museum directors and the need to appeal to differentiated audiences has created new challenges for previously traditional, custodial directors. This paper presents a conceptual framework for managing museums, taking account of the museum service context and the delivery of the museum service product. It then examines two museums, one in Ireland and one in Australia, both of which have a similar cultural history. The paper considers the different management styles for museum directors and how these different styles illustrate the changes in professional perspective from the traditional (a focus on custodial preservation) to the more current (a focus on educating and entertaining the public).

The purpose of this paper is to explore the current role of competition as one of the neglected aspects of museum marketing management. It also aims to discover whether museum professionals consider museums to be market immune and to find out what they think about the role of competition in creating and managing their existing and new services.

The theoretical part of the paper is based on a review of the literature from the multidisciplinary field of arts and museum marketing management. The exploratory qualitative research included 17 museum professionals and was carried out in 17 museums in one EU emerging market country.

Museum professionals are not aware of the competition, or they tend to ignore its existence. They consider the preservation of objects (exhibits) to be equally or even more important than providing services. However, additional services become important. Although some museum professionals try to engage visitors in the active creation of museum experience, most are still conservative in such terms.

The primary research limitations are related to intentional, convenience sample and the perspective of one employee (marketing manager or museums’ director).

Research findings provide valuable insights for both marketing academics and professionals engaged in the museum marketing management field. The contribution of the paper is also contextual as it helps to bridge the gap existing in museum marketing management research in the context of the emerging markets.

El objetivo de este trabajo es explorar el papel actual de la competencia, como uno de los aspectos que ha recibido escasa atención en la gestión del marketing de museos. Además, busca descubrir si los profesionales de museos consideran los museos inmunes al mercado, y conocer cómo reflexionan sobre el papel de la competencia en la creación y la gestión de los servicios existentes y los nuevos.

La parte teórica del trabajo se basa en la revisión de la literatura del campo multidisciplinario de la gestión de las artes y del marketing de museos. La investigación cualitativa exploratoria ha incluido 17 profesionales de museos y se ha realizado en 17 museos, en un país emergente de la Unión Europea.

Los profesionales de museos no son conscientes de la competencia, o tienden a ignorar su existencia. Consideran la conservación de objetos (exposiciones) igual o incluso más importante que la prestación de servicios. Sin embargo, los servicios adicionales están ganando en importancia. Si bien algunos profesionales de museos tratan de involucrar a los visitantes en la creación activa de la experiencia del museo, la mayoría de ellos todavía son conservadores con respecto a esta idea.

Las limitaciones principales de la investigación serefieren a la muestra intencional de conveniencia y el punto de vista de solo un empleado (gerente de marketing o director de museo).

Los resultados de este estudio proporcionan información valiosa tanto para los académicos de marketing como para los profesionales que trabajan en el campo de la gestión de marketing de museos. Además, la contribución de este trabajo es contextual puesto que ayuda a llenar el vacio existente en la investigación de la gestión de marketing de museos en el contexto de los mercados emergentes.

The paper aims to introduce social marketing (SM) as a tool to overcome the low cultural participation, a problem of the arts and culture sector that has worsened in the post-pandemic scenario.

The study uses a multidisciplinary literature review (SM, museum marketing, museology and cultural policy) to address the problem of museums and other cultural heritage institutions, at both the macro-level (prevailing cultural policies and antecedents, barriers and consequences to cultural participation) and micro-level (challenges faced by museums in the 21st century and marketing as a management instrument).

The downstream, midstream and upstream approaches can be used to design and implement SM interventions intended to address the problem of low cultural participation in museums. The three approaches should be considered holistically, with their synergetic and recursive effects.

Due to its introductory and conceptual nature, the study provides a comprehensive intervention framework to be used as a platform for future theoretical and empirical research. Further investigations may expand on the specificities of each approach (down, mid and upstream) and extend the framework to other nonprofit cultural institutions beyond museums, such as libraries and archives, cultural heritage sites and theater, music and dance companies.

The paper proposes a comprehensive SM intervention framework that integrates three interdependent approaches (downstream, midstream and upstream).

The paper provides a starting point for the holistic application of SM in the arts and culture sector. It also encourages researchers, cultural policymakers and cultural heritage professionals to investigate, design and implement SM programs that better understand, expand and diversify the audience and strengthen the legitimacy and relevance of cultural actors and activities to transform them into inclusive, accessible and sustainable institutions.

Managerialization – i.e. the institutional and organizational transformation of cultural institutions acknowledging the need for a managerial action to address their value propositions – is radically reshaping the way museums interact with relevant stakeholders and arrange their service offering. The paper aims at making sense out of the manifold implications of managerialization on museum activities.

Secondary data were collected from a sample of 4,073 Italian museums and art institutions. A logit regression model was designed to investigate the implications of museums’ managerialization on pricing strategies, service offering, organizational and marketing policies, inter-organizational relationships and digitalization.

Managerialization triggered an evolution in museums’ service offering and organizational practices. Institutions that underwent a managerial development were more likely to innovate their policies and strategies. However, managerialization may undermine the way museums focus on disadvantaged people, nurturing inequalities in the access to their service offering.

The managerialization of museums should be handled as a double-edged sword. Although it contributes in enriching the museums’ service offering and in differentiating their activities, it may generate drawbacks on the art institutions’ ability to address the demands of underprivileged groups. Tailored correctives are needed to avoid the side effects of managerialization.

This is one of the first attempts to investigate the implications of managerialization on museums’ practices and inter-organizational relationships. The research findings provide some insights into the challenges that are related to the managerialization of museums and art institutions.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse museums and theme parks as a tourist package and how the proximity of airports to the city and public transport influence the development of this tourist package to stimulate tourism demand in cities.

Qualitative and quantitative indicators have been applied in our methodology to measure the most visited European theme parks and museums from 2012 to 2022. Moreover, the localisation of airports has allowed us to address the importance of theme parks and museums in cities and their regional economies.

The results suggest that the location of the city, entertainment complementary activity, airport proximity, intermodal passenger transport, air and train accessibility, tourism demand and supply, and a high concentration of population in cities have a high influence on the development of a tourist package that includes museums and theme parks to stimulate the tourism demand in European urban cities. London and Paris are two of the most visited cities in the world, and these are the most attractive European cities for tourists in terms of efficiency because tourists can optimize much better their space and time to visit the city’s tourist attractions during their holidays. Another important finding is that the public transport service plays an important role in museums and theme parks’ visits and the optimization of space-time for tourists when they are visiting a city and its tourist attractions on holidays, especially subways, trains and buses. Although time-space measures of accessibility in public transport in cities must be improved to optimize the time of the native population and tourists.

This research shows the complementary role of museums and theme parks as an attractive tourist package and an entertainment, cultural and educational activity to improve the quality of tourism supply and redistribute tourist flows in European countries. Moreover, there are limited studies that tackle the theme of parks and museums in a tourism context.

In this study, art is considered as a product subjected to marketing activities. In this context, this study aims to present a conceptual framework covering the research areas related to art marketing, the relation of art product with brand and consumer and how internet technologies can transform the art market. Finally, the situation of art marketing and its progressing process in a developing country and its potential horizons was discussed.

This study uses a literature review to present a conceptual framework about art marketing activities and their potential horizons in an emerging country.

Globalization, digitalization, democratization of access to art products, art becoming a subject for marketing, open up new horizons for western markets as well as for developing countries. Developing countries constitute a new market segment for the art market. Addressing the changes and the transformations in art market in terms of these markets will provide important opportunities for marketing researchers and practitioners.

This study elaborates the art marketing concept in a developing country. The marketing of art is a subject studied and elaborated mostly in western countries. It is thought that this study is differentiated in terms of addressing these dynamics from a developing country point of view.

Faced with increasingly tight budgets many museums have come under pressure to explore new sources of income. The marketing of museum assets seems to offer one possibility especially since there is an apparently insatiable demand for content from the multimedia and ‘edutainment’ industries. Furthermore, providing access to the cultural heritage of Europe has come to be seen as a major aim of the EU and various programmes have been set up to encourage and facilitate this. Apart from the economic potential of digital museum content, the concomitant legal and security issues are investigated.

So far, most studies in cultural tourism have looked at visitors in relation to the experience itself. This study aims to bring a broader view on what constitutes the daily environment of younger visitors and how museums could use this knowledge to develop a service delivery that is more adapted to their needs without sacrificing the museums’ integrity and authenticity. As such, this research brings a unique and deeper analysis of young visitor behavior, in relation to arts and cultural practices that could be expanded to other areas of tourism experiences.

The present study examines the main art and cultural tourism activities among adolescents. Using 32 in-depth interviews with adolescents between 13 and 18 years of age, this research takes a closer look at their experience and perceptions of art museums and exhibitions.

The findings show that adolescents’ perception of arts and exhibitions do not correspond to museum art criteria held by cultural tourism professionals. Based on the key theoretical themes emerging from the empirical investigation, a conceptual framework of adolescents’ attitudes toward arts and exhibitions is now presented to provide insights into the dimensions of adolescents’ art consumption in today’s western consumer society. Figure 1 provides a graphic model that visualizes adolescents’ art consumption experiences and summarizes the main findings and marketing implications in the arts field.

Based on these findings, new ways of engaging with adolescents in the field of arts are suggested to create new business opportunities for the museum. The findings lean toward the necessity to develop a more youth-centric approach, which differentiates between how adults define art and what adolescents believe art is supposed to be. Thus, the findings demonstrate that adolescents’ art consumption experiences are deeply anchored within the context of their social environment and the value judgments of their peers. The adolescent-centric logic within the arts experiential context is taken into account to underline the gap existing in many current arts marketing strategies that are targeting young visitors – and especially adolescents.

This study aims to determine museum experiences by analyzing the TripAdvisor reviews of the museum visitors in Gaziantep and offer suggestions for improving the visitors' experiences by taking museum curators' opinions.

The case study method was used as one of the qualitative approaches in the study. The research comprises two stages. TripAdvisor reviews about five museums in Gaziantep were analyzed in the first stage, and museum curators' opinions on the visitor complaint reasons and solution suggestions were discussed in the second stage.

The study showed that satisfying or non-satisfying experience factors might differ according to visitors, museum curators and both visitors and museum curators. Therefore, each museum curator should effectively manage every component of visitor experience factors by its target audience.

Although this study has some valuable findings and contributes to the literature, it also has limitations. The study's sample consists of five museums in Gaziantep. Further studies can be carried out on a larger population and sample. The data for determining visitor experiences, the first stage of the research, were obtained only from an online platform (TripAdvisor).

The proposed model provides a holistic perspective on evaluating and managing visitor experience. There may be structural problems (small size of the museum area, lack of parking spaces and elevators, etc.) with the museum beyond the manager's control. Also, the lack of information and communication (limited concept, lack of artifacts, etc.) causes criticisms of the museum.

This paper contributes to the museum management literature with a model for enriching the quality of the museum experience and increasing the museum's attractiveness. The study showed that museums contribute to the visitor's experience in all dimensions. While visitors thought museums primarily contribute to object experience, museum curators thought museums contribute more to visitors' cognitive experience and other experience elements.

The present study analyzed the visitor comments and the opinions of museum curators from a holistic perspective, considering the internal and external factors that are effective in the visitor experience, and revealed the reasons for the visitors' negative experience and the solution suggestions toward the improvement of the visitor experience.

This paper aims to identify the key quality attributes a museum or art gallery should possess and enhance to become an attractive business event venue.

The research adopted a two-stage case-study methodology. Firstly, three museums were selected in Manchester, UK, to explore the venues’ approaches to hosting business events. These were the Lowry Art Centre, Salford Museum and Manchester Art Gallery. Secondly, a business event at another museum in the city, Science and Industry Museum, was accessed to explore the audiences’ perceptions and industry requirements regarding the organisation of events in museums. In total, 21 qualitative semi-structured and structured interviews were conducted with the event delegates, event planners and museums’ management.

Thematic analysis was applied to identify three key attributes: venue character, memorability and functionality and feasibility. Venue character refers to the overall appeal of a venue, including its history, status and interior design. Memorability refers to the authenticity and uniqueness of the attendee experience at a corporate event organised in a museum. Finally, functionality and feasibility deals with the availability of functional facilities, space flexibility and diverse venue regulations.

The findings of the research provide valuable insights to both museums and event companies. The research reveals the main benefits and drawbacks of using a museum or an art gallery as a venue for business events and suggests key aspects to consider while staging a business event in a cultural institution. Museums could apply the findings in marketing to emphasise their uniqueness, authenticity and flexibility.