Attracting and Building Audiences
The secret to attracting and building audiences is helping potential visitors understand that the museum can meet and satisfy their individual identity-related needs.
The heart of the modern museum is its visitors. Logically then, the first questions every museum wants to ask is how can we best attract audiences? How can we keep past visitors coming as well as how can we build new audiences? In response to these audience-related concerns, museums over the last twenty-five years have become increasingly market-driven. Marketing budgets have swelled (though nowhere near as fast as those in the private sector) and every museum of any size has added full-time marketing staff. Commensurate with perceived importance, the top marketing person in larger museums is usually ranked just below the Director/President with the title of Vice President. Museums appreciate that they operate within a crowded marketplace and considerable energies are invested in trying to attract and retain audiences. At the expense of over-generalizing, I will assert that the vast majority of museums are not investing their limited marketing dollars as wisely as they should. Despite the sincere intentions of museum marketers, they are operating from a frame of reference that handicaps their capacity to make a difference. This is because of a combination of factors. Clearly problematic are the continued use of questionable strategies and beliefs about the nature of the museum visitor experience such as a continued over-reliance on demographic segmentation of visitors, a tendency to cling to the historical content-first view of what makes museums attractive places to visit, and a dependence on the audience focus group as the primary mechanism for collecting visitor input. All of these factors show a lack of institutional awareness of the larger framework in which the public’s museum-going decisions are made.
What are the major factors that contribute to whether someone opts to visit a museum? Historically, the answer would be framed in terms of the great objects and exhibitions on display and the ability of the museum to communicate about both to the public. As discussed in the first section of this book, the assumption is that the factors that most significantly influence museum-going are events within the museum—the creation of great exhibits and the successful marketing of those exhibits. I have tried to make the case that the factors that most influence someone to visit a museum primarily originate outside of the museum; ideas, experiences, and events that have only a tangential relationship to what is currently happening within the museum. Although we’d like to believe that the museum has a significant amount of control over who visits our premises, it’s sobering to discover just how limited is our actual direct influence. Is the public really visiting because of the “cool stuff” on display and the great advertising of that stuff? Why is it that most first-time museum visitors report they are not exactly sure what is on display at the museum? The public’s visit decisions are influenced by perceptions of the institution, but these perceptions are typically general in nature and are only slightly based upon a detailed reckoning of what is currently on exhibit.
Museums are jostling with many other organizations and institutions for a piece of the public’s leisure time. Currently, an overwhelming percentage of the public has been to a museum within the past year; 80% claim to use such sites on a regular basis.1 In other words, people know about museums and have a general sense of what kind of leisure experiences they afford. Most leisure experiences are initiated not by a desire to see or do something specific, but as outlined in the museum visitor experience model, as a desire to fulfill one of many highly need-specific, identity-related motivations. The decision to visit a museum is normally a group decision, but almost always it is initiated and promoted by a single individual. If that individual’s identity-related motivations align with his or her perceptions of what a museum is like, then he or she will decide that a museum might be a good venue for a leisure experience. If the museum visit idea progresses this far, then the visit decision will need to be run through the person’s mental accounting system for price, convenience, and perceived value, as well as through a process of approval from others in his or her family or social group. The order of these two steps may vary, but again typically one individual is leading the decision-making process and after arriving at a solution, attempts to “sell” it to the others in his or her social group. All the other members of the social group will have their own decision-making process about the museum visit; each will weigh their own understanding of what the museum affords against their own personal set of identity-related needs. To the extent the museum visit emerges as a good idea, each visitor will create their own set of identity-related museum visit motivations. Then, and only then, the decision to visit a museum will begin to be actualized.
That’s all true, you might think, but isn’t the visit decision still basically determined by the content of the museum, in particular the promotion and advertising of what is currently on display? Years of museum market research consistently tells us the answer is “no”! As outlined in the first chapter, a majority of museum-goers report that the primary thing that influenced them to visit was a word-of-mouth recommendation from friends and/or family.2 Not surprisingly then, the more friends and family one has who are museum-goers, the more likely it is that you will also go to museums. Not only do people hear about the institution through word-of-mouth, it also was the single most important factor in influencing them to actually visit. For all museums, advertising and publicity programs account for less than 20% of visitors. The previous visitor who made the word-of-mouth recommendation may have seen the same current exhibits and may have seen and heard the same current museum promotions, but just as likely the recommendation is based upon outdated informaton. Thus, the primary catalyst for causing an individual to visit a museum in the present, are events that happened in the past, including exhibits and marketing. It is not that the museum’s content and promotions are unimportant, it is just that they are rarely as central and important as most museums have thought them to be.
As outlined in the first section of this book, the impetus for someone to promote a museum visit to a friend, family member, or colleague is their own successful visit experience; by definition, it is one that has fulfilled a person’s entering identity-related motivation for visiting. The most productive way to influence future museum visits is to ensure that current visitors have a great experience. This, of course, becomes somewhat circular—in order for there to be successful word-of-mouth promotion, people have to go the museum in the first place, for people to go to the museum in the first place, they need to be encouraged by someone else who had a successful museum experience. The key message here is that museums need to think very differently about their institutions. They need to see them as part of a much larger whole than they have historically done; museums are part of a much larger leisure system. They are one of many possible venues that create high value free-choice learning experiences. Deriving from a combination of an individual’s own prior museum experiences; the museum’s reputation, advertising, and word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family; museums are currently perceived as supporting one of five general types of leisure time identity-related outcomes. Most of these outcomes have some kind of free-choice learning leitmotif. The most effective things museums can do to influence who and how many people visit are to understand the nature of the different identity-related needs the public perceives they afford and then, help to distinguish for the public how they best support these needs. It also matters whether or not the museum actually fulfills these identity-related needs when someone does visit. Let’s take a look at what some of these needs might look like for each of these different types of identity-related visitor motivations.
MARKETING FOR IDENTITY-RELATED NEEDS
Research to date seems to suggest that virtually all visitors arrive at museums hoping to satisfy one or more identity-related motivations; the majority arrive with a single dominant visit motivation. Although it is possible that the same individual can possess a different visit motivation on different days and that an individual can and occasionally does switch his or her motivation during a single visit, research suggests that most visitors will arrive at your museum with a single dominant identity-related visit motivation. This visit motivation will persist throughout the visit and drive much of what transpires during the visit. The entering identity-related visit motivation will also shape much of what is recalled about the museum experience long after the visit has ended and will thus, influence future visits.
Research also suggests that although most museums attract visitors possessing all five of these types of identity-related visit motivations, the public tends to pigeon-hole individual museums as disproportionately affording certain kinds of experiences. For example, the majority of the public perceives that science centers and children’s museums are great places for adults to visit with children and they are particularly well-suited as places for adults to enact their role as parental facilitators. They are not widely perceived as settings where adults could or should visit by themselves, particularly if they have a Recharger motivation. Meanwhile, art museums are generally perceived by large sectors of the public as settings well-suited to adult exploration of high culture; they are generally not perceived as places that optimally support family experience-seeking. The result is that most visitors arrive at a particular museum with both a specific, pre-determined concept of what that museum is capable of affording them in the way of a leisure experience, and a preconceived concept, almost a “plan” for what they personally hope to get out of that experience. All of this suggests that museums can, and should work to influence the public’s museum visit experience expectations. The broad term under which this kind of influence falls is marketing.
One of the key insights the museum visitor experience model suggests is that marketing is important but only if it is the right kind of marketing. Marketing will be successful to the extent that it supports the expectations and needs of each of the major kinds of audiences the museum is likely to attract. The expectations and identity-related needs of individuals with an Explorer motivation are not the same as those who plan on using the museum to satisfy a Facilitator or Recharger motivation; appealing to these different types of visitor motivations requires very different types of messages. Most museums don’t just attract visitors with a single type of identity-related motivation; some percentage of visitors is likely to expect each of the five basic kinds of experience. Hence, a typical museum needs to communicate multiple messages, each appealing to a different subset of the visiting public. However, it is quite likely that every museum currently attracts a very specific profile of visitors. This profile has been determined in part by the past actions and activities of that particular institution, but it has also been determined by the perceptions within the larger society of that type of museum. If you have the word “museum” or “center” in your name, and if you modify that name with words like “children,” “history,” “art,” “science,” or “nature,” then you can safely assume that the majority of the public already thinks they know what they can expect from your institution. Accordingly, each institution can decide whether it wants to market to all the possible audiences that might be attracted to their institution, or whether they want to put all or most of their marketing “eggs” into a single identity-related motivational “basket.” Whichever decision a museum makes, what follows are some thoughts on how they might approach marketing to these different motivational segments.
Attracting Explorers
Explorers are individuals who say they are visiting the museum because of curiosity or a general interest in discovering more about the topic or subject matter of the institution. Large numbers of these visitors self-describe themselves as curious people who enjoy learning new things. Explorers believe that visiting museums reinforces who they perceive themselves to be; museum visits confirm their self-image. The typical Explorer visitor perceives that learning is fun!3 This is indicated by comments like, “If you don’t try to revisit your knowledge in some way by reading or watching TV or [visiting] museums like this I think you forget a little bit on the educational part and these things are very important.” And “I think about the same things all the time on my job, I don’t get to think about different things. Not many things I do allow me to be on a steep learning curve. When I’m on a steep learning curve, it’s fun. It’s a brain vacation when I’m on a steep learning curve.”4
Explorers may or may not be well-educated in a traditional sense with a college degree, but, as a group, they are individuals who highly value learning. They are inclined to read newspapers, listen to news programs, enjoy watching educational television, and love to discover new and interesting facts about their world. The typical Explorer is likely to possess only a slightly better than average knowledge of the subject matter of the museum they are visiting. Although not particularly knowledgeable, they are likely to be highly interested and eager to learn about the content. Typical are the comments made to me by the same Explorer visitor quoted at the end of the last paragraph when talking about her recent visit to an art museum, “Actually I hoped I’d learn a little about art. In particular, learn a little bit about [the artist on exhibition]’s art. I’ve had no art education. I stopped doing art after I was allowed to in the 9th grade. I’m on a steep learning curve. I wanted to go learn about this artist, become more literate. I wanted to be able to look at pictures in a different way.”5
Explorers are visitors who actually care about the content of the museum, but they care in generic not in specific terms. Although an Explorer might say they are an art, science, or history lover, that doesn’t mean they are an expert. They are the group most likely to be attracted to visit because of a new exhibition, primarily because it appeals to their desire to expand their horizons rather than dwell upon the details of the exhibition. Quoting another Explorer, “The more you are exposed to [the content of the museum], the more you are going to want to learn and you know hopefully want to strive for more.”6 Explorers are mostly visiting museums so they can “expand their horizons” but not in order to learn anything in particular.
As a generalization, individuals who seek to satisfy an Explorer visit motivation tend to be the kind of people who regularly visit museums. They not only regularly visit museums that support their specific interests; for example, if they like art, they will regularly visit all of the art museums in their region as well as any art museum they might encounter while traveling, but they are also likely to visit any and all museums. After all, their goal is to satisfy their curiosity, which is as likely to be generic as specific. As one woman said to me, “Of course I visit art museums, actually I visit all museums. It doesn’t really matter what’s going on, I just like to see what’s there.”7 Consequently, people with an Explorer motivation are likely to be relatively frequent visitors to their local museums and first-time visitors at museums when they are traveling. They are museum-savvy and begin with a well-formed concept of what a museum is likely to afford.
How would you attract someone seeking to satisfy an Explorer visit motivation? Given their interest in museums in general and their desire to expand their intellectual horizons, it makes sense that promotions that emphasize opportunities for seeing new exhibitions displaying rare and/or unusual things would be appealing to them. In part, this is why Explorers are often attracted to blockbuster and special exhibitions—the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the artifacts from King Tut’s tomb, all of Vermeer’s art, or the recovered contents of the Titanic. Things like this are grist for the Explorer’s intellectual mill. Given that this is typically how most museums market their institutions these days, it is not surprising that most museums currently attract many Explorers, particularly larger art museums who have lived off the blockbuster exhibition for years, but increasingly science centers, zoos, and aquariums which have also migrated to this mode of running their institutions.
Promotional materials should feature the most compelling images—the unusual, the rare, and the intriguing. Since Explorers are motivated by the desire to push their own intellectual boundaries, they’ll be attracted by marketing that suggests there’s much to see and investigate, things that few have seen before, and vast depths of material ideally suited to the intrepid visitor. Hence, multiple images are likely to work best, particularly if they imply depth and variety. Since individuals with an Explorer motivation are attracted by the opportunity to learn new things, promotions that emphasize conceptual themes and describe the opportunities for multiple sources of inquiry may also be appealing.
Explorers are influenced by word-of-mouth recommendations as much as any visitor, but they are particularly influenced by others who share their interests and curiosity. A good “buzz” about a new exhibition or program will be highly motivating for them, but it needs to be a buzz that is consistent with their desires and interests. It needs to communicate opportunities to see and do new things; particularly appealing is the allure of seeing and doing things that most people rarely get to see and do. Remember, these are intellectually adventurous folks, looking to broaden and expand their intellectual horizons. They don’t want to become experts, but they do want to be challenged. In framing promotions, it’s important to strike that fine line between the lowest and highest intellectual common denominator.
Attracting Facilitators
In contrast to Explorers, Facilitators are visiting in order to satisfy the needs and desires of someone they care about rather than just themselves. Facilitators tend to come in two broad sub-groupings, Facilitating Parents and Facilitating Socializers. Facilitating Parents are commonly parents or grandparents who visit in order to accommodate the needs and interests of their (grand)children. Facilitating Socializers are adults visiting to satisfy the needs of another adult, for example, a spouse, friend, or boyfriend/girlfriend. Sometimes the goal is to “host” a visiting relative, or sometimes it is just to spend quality time in a convenient and attractive space with an adult the Facilitator cares about. When asked why they came to the museum, a Facilitator will say things like “Science is important for the children.” “It’s a fun place for kids to run around and interact with the native habitat of [area] and maybe get some nature learning in. Sneak it in there.” “We both enjoy these kinds of places and it’s fun to do this together” or “I knew Mary would enjoy visiting.”8 In all cases, the primary objective of a person with a Facilitator motivation is to ensure that their companion is satisfied.
Facilitators are truly altruistic; they regularly defer their own intellectual interests to those of their companions. Make no mistake, though, Facilitators are just as invested as any other visitor in satisfying their own personal identity-related needs. It is just that their identity-related goals for a visit are defined as being a good parent or a good social companion; it is not being a curious knowledge-seeker.
A large percentage of Facilitators fall into the category of committed parents—individuals who say they like to visit museums because they are places that present information on art, history, nature, or science in an enjoyable and interactive way for children to learn. As Frank from Chapter 6 said, “[I] wanted [my daughter] to pick a few things, not many things because she’s so young, just focus on a couple of things that we could talk about later.” While another father said, “We can enjoy it together, and learn something whilst we’re there.”9 Like Explorers, most Facilitators not only perceive that learning is fun, they do not discriminate between learning and fun.10 Facilitating Parents are motivated to visit a museum because they believe that the visit will be a valuable experience for their children; the fun and learning are aimed at their children, not themselves. In fact, a number of these individuals are quick to say, “I wouldn’t be here without children” or “I personally would rather go elsewhere.”11 They see museums as fun, educational places where others will be the beneficiary.
In a parallel way, the visit goal for Facilitating Socializers is social and other-directed. Although there are quite a few Facilitating Socializers who visit museums in order to support the needs of a loved one, the object of attention for the vast majority of Facilitating Socializers are not spouses or relatives. Most Facilitating Socializers are individuals who have discovered that museums are great places to meet and hang-out with friends. They’ll regularly meet at the museum for lunch or a quiet stroll through the galleries, happily chatting away, occasionally glancing at exhibits or labels. Although they are likely to become members (for economic and perhaps, status reasons), their primary objective is to gain access to what the museum affords socially rather than what it offers intellectually.
Facilitators may or may not be particularly knowledgeable about the content area of the museum. When asked, they will be quick to say that they think that the content of the museum is significant, but they will also point out that their own personal knowledge and interest are of little or no particular importance. Since this visit is for someone else, what’s important is that the other person finds this place interesting and educational. Facilitators say things like, “Billy loves animals; that’s why I come here.” “I want Francine to have an opportunity to see more art; she’s very talented and this is important.” “I’m somewhat lukewarm about the place, but my friend really loves the place and I find it to be one of the nicest places to meet people in the city.”12 However, when asked the open-ended question, “What other things like this do you do with your child/friend?”, individuals with a facilitating motivation are likely to say that they like to go to the movies, shopping, or visiting a park as they are to suggest that they go to another museum. Facilitators view these museum visits as opportunities to exercise their social role as providers of fun, positive experiences for their children in the case of Facilitating Parents and great places to gather and bond in the case of Facilitating Socializers. Neither type of Facilitator sees the museum primarily as a place for extensive personal learning and growth. It is quite common for Facilitating Parents to adamantly assert that a museum visit was a great learning experience for their child but when pressed, be totally incapable of specifically stating what it was that their child learned. This apparent paradox can be easily explained when it’s appreciated that for the parent, what the child actually learned was not really that important. The goal was satisfying their identity-related need to be perceived by themselves, their children, and others as being a good parent.
By and large, Facilitators are regular museum-goers. Often, they’ll visit many different museums—the children’s museum this week, the science center next week, and the zoo the following week. Facilitating Socializers may visit a given museum weekly in order to gather with friends. Those who take relatives to visit are infrequent visitors; maybe visiting only once every few years. If Facilitating Parents are inclined towards becoming members, they are often quite pragmatic about membership. For example, they might be members of the children’s museum this year, the science center next year, and the zoo the following year so that their children are exposed to many different types of settings and experiences; they are also likely to be quite price-conscious. Facilitating Parents will make a cost-benefit decision on whether the price of the membership today will pay off over time if they make repeated visits. When they travel with their children, Facilitating Parents are likely to visit appropriate museums in the new city they are visiting; that tends not to be the case for Facilitating Socializers. Facilitating Parents are also highly likely to sign their children up for afterschool, weekend, and/or summer programs at the museum.
The Facilitator’s reward for a good visit is the happiness of their companion or child. A Facilitator is attentive to the child who demonstrates that they are having fun and says they want to come back again. They are also attentive to verbal and nonverbal behavior of a companion who gets excited about what they are seeing and doing. These are the kinds of feedback a Facilitator is seeking from their visit, and when they receive this feedback they deem it to have been a good visit.
What does it take to attract a Facilitator? Given that their interest is generally not the topic(s) of the museum, but their wish for a positive social experience, promotions that emphasize people doing fun and engaging things will be most appealing. Traditional marketing that features some compelling image of a rare object or striking exhibit is not what is going to push their buttons. Instead, particularly for Facilitating Parents, images of adults with children, where the adult is shown helping a child learn, will be highly salient. Images of just children will be sufficient but not as engaging as an image of a parent and child interacting together. Given that the Facilitator wants to feel good about their decision, anything that reinforces that this is a place that good parents bring their children to or that good partners bring their significant others to will be successful. Individuals wishing to enact a Facilitating Socializer agenda will be attracted by a picture of two adults talking over a cup of coffee or perhaps, strolling through a garden deeply engaged in conversation. This is not how the museum typically sees itself, but this is how a Facilitating Socializer is likely to see the museum.
Facilitators are highly susceptible to word-of-mouth recommendations from others like them. Since the goal of a Facilitator, particularly a Facilitating Parent, is to be seen as a good parent, and currently museums are widely viewed as excellent educational experiences for children, having other parents know that they take their child to a museum is an important thing for them to talk about. Facilitating Parents like to “brag” about having taken their children to the museum, and about all the things their children learned. They find that encouraging others to do so also helps to solidify and reinforce their self-perception that they are good parents. If someone else praises your decision, or even better yet, takes your advice and goes to the museum, then clearly it confirms the value of having done it yourself. So, promoting museum visits through organizations like the PTA, church, reading groups, or other types of social networks where parents, particularly mothers, are likely to share parenting ideas, makes great sense. Advertising in parenting magazines or on the education page of the local newspaper are also excellent places to reach Facilitators. Remember, the motivations for these visitors are their children, so describing how a visit to the museum will do wonders for their child is what’s important. The specifics of an exhibit or even what someone might learn is less important than the fact that these experiences are what will help ensure a child’s later success in life.
As mentioned above, more than most visitors, Facilitating Parents are likely to be quite price-conscious. On average, the adults accompanying children are younger than the adults accompanying other adults. Many are at a stage of life where there are numerous expenses associated with raising children and although they are eager to provide the kinds of experiences represented by museums, museum-going can become quite expensive, particularly since the typical museum visit experience involves more than just admission. Museum marketers need to be very aware that the trip to the museum equally involves food and a stop at the gift shop; supporting this experience for 3 or more people is costly. By contrast, individuals motivated by a Facilitating Socializer goal are likely to be price-conscious in the opposite direction since hanging out at the museum is likely to be a less expensive way to spend time with their friends than are many other options, such as going to a spa or going shopping. Often, Facilitating Socializers will only spend time in the free parts of the museum, the café or entry areas, or purposefully select museums that have free admission; either way these venues represent a marketing opportunity.
Facilitators are also likely to be very mindful of the biggest variable limiting museum-going—time. Facilitators are often the self-appointed time-keepers during a visit. The Facilitator in a group will be the one who knows when the parking meter is running out or when they promised to be home so Aunt Martha can drop by. When trying to attract Facilitators, it is important to frame the experience within a time context—a great way to spend a couple of hours or a full day’s enjoyment at a half-day’s price.
Attracting Experience Seekers
This group of museum visitors, often tourists, are typically motivated to visit primarily in order to “collect” an experience, so that they can feel like they’ve “been there, done that.” When questioned, many of these individuals indicated that they came in order to fulfill the expectations of others—“My brother-in-law was on my case because I hadn’t taken the kids here yet,” or driven by recommendations or opinions of others—“We were on vacation and looking for things to do and the guy at the hotel said, you should go to the Getty Museum.”13 This category also includes a variety of different types of specific self-aspects. One visitor self-described her motivation by saying she was “a tourist,” and another person said he is the kind of person who likes “fun and exciting” things to do on the weekend. There was also the individual who was satisfying his girlfriend’s directive and described himself as wanting to spend his weekends more productively instead of just watching football games on TV. When questioned further about the use of the word “productively,” he said, “like making sure we see the new movies when they come out, going to a concert at least once a year, maybe going to a nice restaurant once in awhile, you know, things like that.”14 The primary goal of Experience seekers is to see the destination, building, and what’s iconic or important on display. There is a temptation among museum professionals to denigrate the Experience seeker motivation, and to view this need as somehow more trivial or less important than others. This would be a mistake;after all, who among us has not felt compelled to visit some shrine or icon in order to have the experience of being in the presence of greatness or uniqueness? Experience seeking is as pure and appropriate a motivation for visiting a museum as any other.
Most Experience seeking visitors are also socially motivated visitors; a large part of their visit motivation relates to having a good day out with friends and/or relatives. They are generally not strongly motivated by the specific topic of the museum, regardless of whether it is art, history, natural history, science, or animals; they are motivated by the idea of being in a culturally important place. Experience seekers are quite mindful that they are in an educational setting. Despite visiting the museum for primarily recreational reasons, they are well-aware that they have not come to a theme park. Consequently, they are likely to value that the setting affords “learning” but they are unlikely to rate “learning” as their highest visit priority. For example, one Experience seeking-motivated individual said in recalling her science center visit, “I remember having a great time. For example, there were things they [children] thought [were] pretty funny. The burping of the body and where it makes sounds as the food goes up and down and stuff like that, all the little gross sounds, they loved that.”15
Visitors with Experience seeking motivations are, as a group, less likely to be regular visitors to a single institution or even regular visitors to museums in general. They are unlikely to have visited museums as children. Large numbers of visitors with this visit motivation are inclined to visit museums now because museum-going has become increasingly viewed as a “good” and “in” thing to do. Except for the large iconic institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian museums, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, J. Paul Getty Museum, or the British Museum, most museums do not attract large numbers of pure Experience seeker-motivated visitors; most are hybrids such as Experience Seeking Facilitators or Experience Seeking Explorers. These hybrids are likely to be attracted by a mix of messages characteristic of both modalities.
Individuals with an Experience seeker motivation are looking to visit the “must-see” destinations within a community. This is a status that relatively few museums attain; as much as it seems like every museum in the last twenty years has strived to convince their boards, donors, and local politicians that they are! A museum like the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History can expect to attract five million visitors per year, approximately half of whom will be Experience seekers, without investing in marketing and promotion. But they have been in this situation for more than 100 years. Trying to achieve this kind of iconic status if starting from an unknown status is not easy; but it’s not impossible either. The following example of the Washington, DC-based International Spy Museum provides a compelling case study of how it is possible.
This relatively small, privately funded and operated Museum has been able, almost overnight, since its opening in 2002 to position itself as a must-see, tourist attraction for anyone traveling to Washington, DC. To accomplish this, the International Spy Museum invested heavily in marketing and was able to generate amazing buzz. Even though it was competing with many of the world’s most visited museums, most of which were free, the International Spy Museum was able to generate tremendous pre- and post-opening press. The Museum worked on getting its name mentioned on virtually every travel brochure and included in most packaged tours. The International Spy Museum staff made a point of meeting with local concierges, taxi drivers, and tour coordinators and they focused on paid ad placements in tourist publications. They also flooded the local news media with press releases and invited press to pre-opening tours. All of this special attention paid off as these folks now regularly recommend the International Spy Museum as a “must see” visit while in Washington, DC.
Of course, success breeds success. The millions of visitors since the 2002 opening go home and tell their friends and relatives that they had a great time in DC, and to prove it they show them pictures and relate stories of having gone to the International Spy Museum which, of course, proves they’re hip and on the cutting edge of what there is to see and do in DC.16 This inspires the next round of Experience seekers to visit the International Spy Museum when they come to visit.
Attracting Experience seekers requires convincing potential visitors that this is a one-of-a-kind experience—something that they cannot afford to miss if they want to feel like they’ve had a complete visit to Washington, DC, or wherever. This is well-illustrated by what Amanda Abrell, Media Relations Manager for the International Spy Museum has to say about her museum, “The International Spy Museum is the only public museum in the United States solely dedicated to espionage and the only one in the world to provide a global perspective on an all-but-invisible profession that has shaped history and continues to have a significant impact on world events.” If your museum has a rare or one-of-a-kind object that everyone should see during their lifetime, that is what you want to feature in your promotional material aimed at Experience seekers. Alternatively, as does the International Spy Museum, try to make the whole visitor experience seem rare and unique. Although one would think that Experience seekers are attracted by blockbuster and special exhibitions, they generally are not. They are actually more interested in the permanent collections and are disinclined to spend the extra money that usually accompanies temporary exhibitions.
If you wish to attract Experience seekers, don’t forget that these visitors are looking for the whole package—exhibits, food, gifts, and a good time. Marketing materials for this group should prominently feature the food services–great food at a moderate price, the gift shop–great values and unusual gifts for the entire family, and generally emphasize how much fun will be had by all while participating in a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Attracting Professional/Hobbyists
Typically, individuals with a Professional/Hobbyists motivation represent the smallest category of visitors to most institutions, but they are often disproportionately influential. Given that these individuals often possess strong ties to the people who work in the museum, because of their content and/or professional knowledge, their satisfaction is often deemed extremely important. Subject matter curators want to make sure that people with content expertise will judge the content to be accurate. Designers want to make sure that others with knowledge of design will find the exhibits innovative and creative. Educators will want to be sure that other educators will find the exhibitions and programs engaging and educational. Everyone wants their peers to come and see what they’ve created, and at the same time worry about if they will be harshly judged.
And judge they do! Professional/Hobbyists are often the most critical visitors, since unlike Experience seekers or Explorers, their primary motivation in visiting is not some generalized goal but typically something quite specific. Although occasionally a Professional/Hobbyist could visit just to wander around and discover whatever attracts them, that is not the norm. These visitors are typically on a mission. Classic examples of Professional/Hobbyists are museum professionals themselves. When a museum professional visits a new museum they tend to view the museum through very different eyes than the typical visitor. We are extremely savvy about museums, and our visit agenda significantly differs from that of most visitors. The typical museum professional is looking critically at how an exhibition is put together, how labels are written, whether certain objects are on display or not, what the front of house services are like, and all of the details that any professional would be concerned about when viewing a competitor’s work. If queried after a visit about what really stood out, a museum professional is most likely to talk about a specific nuance of design or museum practice, rather than the content of the museum; that’s an appropriate response for a Professional/Hobbyist.
Museum professionals are not the only visitors who are more interested in learning about how the information in a museum is conveyed rather than the information as such. For example, in interviewing science center visitors, I have had individuals say, “I’m in the medical field and [the science center] does an extremely good job in describing to nonmedical people how our body works and how we process food and turn it into energy [which I use when talking with others].” Another spoke of the desire to learn some specific nuance of the content, “We home-school our children and we were studying human development at that time. We came so we could use the chick and frog hatching exhibit as part of our lesson for that day…. I explained to [the] kids about how the chicks hatched and which eggs would work and which did not.”17 At a history museum I had someone say, “I’m a history teacher and I always get ideas for how to convey tough concepts by when I visit history museums.” And a glass artist once told me about her visits to art museums, “I guess for me specifically, I’m always looking for ideas for my work. I always like looking at shapes and forms for my work, giving me ideas for different patterns and colors that I might be able to use.”18 The latter comment is typical of a relatively small, but not insignificant number of all art museum visitors who are art students, artists, or academics visiting in order to aid their studies, to critically engage with the art, to get ideas for teaching, or perhaps, to just inspire them or stimulate their creativity. The Professional/Hobbyist’s motivations are NOT your typical visit motivations.
While interviewing zoo and aquarium visitors about their reasons for visiting, individuals with a Professional/Hobbyist motivation jumped out of the crowd by virtue of the very conscious, specific, and frequently narrow purpose they ascribed to their visit. One zoo visitor said he was a professional photographer who used the zoo to capture great close-up images of wildlife as such candid pictures in the wild were difficult to get. Another individual described his visit to the aquarium as primarily for the purpose of going to the gift shop. He had just started a saltwater aquarium and was hoping to find some good books on the topic in the store. One living history museum visitor told me that he was an amateur blacksmith and he regularly visited the museum in order to swap ideas with the blacksmith, as well as just generally learn from this older, more experienced craftsman. And one of my graduate students described talking to a marine science center visitor she had intercepted in order to ascertain his reasons for visiting that day who was trying to find out information on good places to go crabbing. After completing the interview, the student helpfully pointed the man in the direction of a local volunteer who could answer that question. The visitor walked over to the volunteer, asked him about crabbing locations, got the information he was looking for, and promptly left the science center to go crabbing! In short, there are thousands of possible reasons someone could find for using a museum to support one’s profession or hobby, but what all visitors with this motivation have in common is the desire to use the museum setting as a vehicle for achieving usually one narrow, personally-important task. Although the museum clearly affords these opportunities, few museum professionals think of their institutions as settings primarily designed to support these purposes; but why not?
Professional/Hobbyists are generally not visiting in order to see a new exhibition, in fact if they can, they may avoid visiting during these periods or going into these spaces because of the crowds. Or, if like Mara in an earlier chapter, their day job prevents them from visiting during quiet times, they grudgingly accept others in their space. Because of this, Professional/Hobbyists are among the least likely individuals to visit the museum as part of a social group. Social interaction is not what motivates them to visit. Perhaps more than any other group of visitors, individuals who are Professionals and Hobbyists have the clearest, least ambiguous, and most conscious motivations for their visit. They can tell you without hesitation why they are at the museum, how they plan to achieve their goal, and by the end of the visit, whether or not that goal was achieved. In many ways, attracting individuals with a Professional/Hobbyists motivation should be easy.
At the most basic level, you do not need to find Professional/Hobbyists, they’ll find you. They know you exist, know what you have to offer, and know how to use your resources to best meet their needs. Professional/Hobbyists are the ultimate insiders; in some ways they are already us. As compared to most other visitors, individuals with these motivations are in temperament and knowledge the visitors that most closely mirror those who work in museums. Given their interest in the topics of the museum and their desire to use its resources to extend their professional or avocational goals, what these visitors need from the museum is an invitation to visit.
You don’t effectively reach Professional/Hobbyists through mass marketing strategies; these are the ultimate micro-niche audience. They are unlikely to be lured in with typical brochures or billboards; they need to be reached where “they live.” Fortunately, technology is making it ever easier to reach out to these widely scattered—geographically, demographically, and socially—individuals. Using Internet tools, it should be possible to identify and directly market to specialist groups—hobbyist sites of every possible kind, support groups surrounding a specific hobby or profession, suppliers of specialist tools or materials, professional schools—whomever you can imagine might find the specific setting, objects, programs, and experiences of your museum of interest.
An entirely different approach to reaching these audiences is to make space available to any and all hobby groups working in topic areas related to your museum. Making space available for meetings and social gatherings, at a reasonable price, is a great way to forge long-term relationships with individuals who could prove to be important supporters and benefactors of the museum. These small groups, only some of whom are officially organized, are usually operating with limited funding and almost always under the management of volunteers. Having an established organization like a museum provide direct services such as space for meetings, photocopying support, or even minimal administrative support can represent the difference between viability and not. These small gestures can generate huge dividends in loyalty and even financial support from the organizations and their individual members.
Another strategy that has proven to work wonders is to run annual “collector” or “hobbyist” fairs. Museums are typically perceived to be the local “authority” in a particular topic area such as natural history, art, or animal husbandry. By inviting all of the amateurs in the community with these interests to gather on one particular day, to share their collections, to get advice from the experts, or just to have an opportunity to meet with others with similar interests, has the potential to generate tremendous amounts of good will towards the museum and help open doors for future visits by Professional/Hobbyists who may not see the museum as a resource. For example, the Florida Museum of Natural History inaugurated their annual Collectors’ Day event more than a quarter century ago with very modest expectations. They initially envisioned it as a relatively small event that would serve a small, but important group of museum users, but it has proven to be among the most successful and popular days of the whole year. Not only did collectors from all over Florida converge on the museum to display their collections, so too did all the future Professional/Hobbyists in the general public; the former to share with their peers and the latter eager to see what these “real” collectors had to offer and to be able to talk with them about their particular interests. What began as a “small gesture” towards the collecting community ended up being the biggest visitor attraction of the year and one of the greatest win-win decisions this museum ever made.
Marketing to Rechargers
Although comprising a modest percentage of visitors at most museums, individuals with a Recharger motivation represent a discrete and important visitor population. These are individuals who visit in order to reflect, rejuvenate, or generally just bask in the wonder of the place. Some kinds of museums, for example, art museums and aquariums, and many botanical gardens and natural area parks, may well have a large percentage of their visitors falling into this category.19 These individuals express an awe or reverence for the subject matter or setting. They say things like, “This is such a beautiful building, I often come here just to look at the space.” “I always enjoy the quiet and tranquility of this place.” “The Science Center is a place for introspection, a place to be surrounded by science.” Or occasionally, “This place reveals the wonders of God’s creation.”20
The vast majority of Rechargers see museums as places that afford them an opportunity to avoid, if only briefly, the noisiness, clutter, and ugliness of the outside world. They see the museum as a respite from the world and often think of the institution’s spaces, collections or scenery as sources of inspiration. Most Rechargers are seeking opportunities to become rejuvenated, what Steven Kaplan and Jan Packer have described as restorative experiences.21 To be restorative, experiences need to be effortless and physically or mentally removed from one’s everyday environment.
The kind of person who would feel that they should visit a museum in order to recharge their life would typically be one with a strong sensual aesthetic, not just while at the museum but across their whole lives. They would be the kind of person who would consciously seek to fill their daily life with good food, drink, travel, music, art, and literature. Visiting a museum for this reason is rarely “by accident.” Although most museum visitors would agree with “visiting the museum is an enjoyable break from my daily life,” relatively few would offer this as their primary visit motivation upon entering the museum. However, if the question is framed properly, Rechargers will say that this is the reason why they come to visit. Although mindful of the educational opportunities afforded by the museum, most Rechargers would not suggest that learning is a high priority for their visit. Although they are as likely relatively well-versed in the content of the museum, it is not what primarily drives their visit. For the individual with a strong Recharger motivation, rest and relief from the stresses of everyday life predominate as reasons for visiting. They see mental and physical rejuvenation as important uses of leisure time, and museums as excellent venues in which to accomplish this goal. Although they are willing to get their rejuvenation wherever they can find it, generally, if they like art, they frequent art museums; if they like history, they frequent history museums; if they like nature, they frequent outdoor sites.
Given their interests, attracting Rechargers requires selling the museum as a place of wonderful beauty and/or tranquility. For some institutions, this is an easy sell as they already have a reputation within the broader community as being places that possess these attributes. National Parks, most botanical gardens and arboretums, most art museums, and many aquariums are widely perceived to be such places. By contrast, most science centers, children’s museums, history museums, and zoos are perceived to have many attributes, but peace and tranquility are unlikely to be at the top of the list. For those institutions that are already perceived by the public as possessing the qualities a Recharger is seeking, they need only emphasize those attributes in their promotions. By contrast, if your museum is a place that defies this stereotype, then you will need to work hard at convincing individuals with this motivation to visit. To accomplish this, you’ll have to generate marketing materials that reinforce the attributes a Recharger is seeking.
Images of beautiful, deserted spaces would be a big draw. Objects will be less of a concern for the committed Recharger; the objects are just part of the scenery. If a grizzly bear wanders across the horizon while an individual with a strong Recharger motivation is perched on a high vista at sunset, all the better, as long as it doesn’t attract a crowd. The Recharger didn’t travel to this distant spot in order to see bears, they came to get away from people! Consequently, Rechargers will rarely be attracted to blockbuster and special exhibitions—the only thing these promotions will communicate to the erstwhile Recharger is CROWDS! Given that these are niche visitors, it’s best to approach marketing to this group as a niche group. Although potentially pricey, ad placements in culinary magazines or high-end travel magazines are likely to reach these very discriminating and cultured visitors.
Rechargers are not immune to good word-of-mouth recommendations from others like themselves. If you can encourage your Recharger visitors to communicate to their friends that the museum is one of the great, little known secrets—a refuge of quiet and tranquility right in the middle of the busy city—you might just discover that you attract a whole new cadre of visitors. But like any buzz, it needs to be consistent with the desires and interests of the user group. The Recharger buzz needs to communicate that the museum affords fabulous opportunities to become refreshed and rejuvenated, to get a new lease on life. Remember, these are sophisticated visitors and they can afford to go virtually anywhere and partake in virtually any leisure opportunity the community has to offer. You need to make sure your marketing efforts are as specific to the needs of this audience as you can possibly make them. This is definitely a time when one size does not fit all!
BUILDING AUDIENCES
As should be clear by now, the marketing goal of the museum should be to escape the idea that a single promotional strategy or approach will suffice. We can’t create a single message, a single set of images, or utilize a single type of media outlet such as print ads in the local newspaper, and expect these to work. We also need to leave behind any notion that segmenting visitors using traditional demographic or even social grouping categories will ever buy us much. The museum visitor experience model suggests that we should try and segment audiences as a function of their identity-related motivations, beginning with the five basic motivational categories: Explorers, Facilitators, Experience seekers, Professional/Hobbyists, and Rechargers. One cautionary note as we proceed—all of these five categories include not just a single type of visitor motivation but are a cluster of several closely-related types of visitor motivations, each with their own unique identity-related needs. Research to date seems to suggest that these five basic categories are sufficiently robust to allow important generalizations and predictions to be made that will help us move down the road towards greater specialization and customization. However, we should never deviate from the longer term objective of getting better at making fine distinctions among and between visitors. For the moment, the approach I have described promises to give us the basic tools to begin to more effectively customize marketing efforts and to better appeal to the underlying motivations that drive people to visit museums.
In the previous section, I outlined some ideas about how a museum might selectively think about attracting individuals with each of these five motivations with the goal of focusing on how they develop audiences within each individual segment. This is clearly the most straightforward approach to the issue, but, to date, efforts are insufficiently advanced to know just how it will work. To illustrate these ideas, I will return to an audience development effort I have previously described.22 This effort was made long before the ideas described in this book were formulated. Still, the results of that audience broadening effort can be reinterpreted using the framework I have presented here. I believe the results actually make more sense now in light of these new ideas than they did at the time Lynn Dierking and I were first describing them.
In the early 1990s, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), with support from the Lila Wallace Foundation, committed to making a sincere effort to be more inclusive to a group of visitors that had historically been seriously underserved by the museum—the African American community of Richmond. The VMFA’s concept for how to accomplish this task was to reinstall their vast African art collection. The assumption was that emphasizing this focus on Africa would be a natural way to appeal to the African American community. In so doing, more African Americans would visit the museum and their goal of broadening their audience would be accomplished. It probably does not surprise anyone that the museum believed that it could achieve its goal by primarily focusing on its collections (and there are still many museum professionals who believe this strategy should work, after all there are testimonials to the effectiveness of this approach presented at virtually every museum conference). And it would also not surprise anyone if I told you that the marketing approach the VMFA initially launched to support this initiative featured beautiful images of some of the fabulous African art objects in the collection. These images were utilized in all the normal ways—stunning, glossy brochures in print ads placed in the major Richmond daily newspaper and on the banners the museum hung on the outside of its building. Despite all this effort, the number of African American visitors to the VMFA hardly changed.
Conversations with members of the African American community revealed that most thought that the objects shown in the brochures and banners were truly lovely, but neither these particular objects nor the marketing strategy seemed sufficient to change the attitudes among Richmond’s African Americans towards visiting VMFA.23 In fact, the VMFA was discovering, whether they fully realized it or not at the time, that their basic assumptions about how to effectively attract underserved audiences was seriously flawed. To the credit of the Director and her staff, they did not just throw up their hands and say, “Oh well, we tried.” In the absence of a good working model for how the museum visitor experience works, the VMFA was left with the old tried and true method—try a number of different approaches and through the process of trial and error see if we can figure out how to make this work. They were also aided by a very hard-working and creative African American woman with considerable marketing experience who spear-headed new efforts to reach the African American community. In the end, they were successful and in the process they discovered some very interesting things about audience-building, all of which accord very nicely with the model presented here.
With the help of their new audience development leadership, the first thing the VMFA “discovered” was that the African American community was not monolithic. There were large differences in the interests, experiences, and receptiveness of this community relative to the idea of visiting the VMFA; there were also huge cultural impediments to overcome from years of overt, as well as covert, racism. Interestingly, as the museum tried to figure out how to break down historical barriers and become truly supportive of increased visitation by African Americans, they discovered that they needed different message content and delivery for different groups within the African American community. For example, there was a group of African Americans who really enjoyed art, and who already were regular visitors to art museums. Although many of these individuals did not regularly visit the VMFA because of perceptions of current and past racism, they were open to reconsidering their relationship with the museum. When the VMFA engaged these African American art lovers in conversation, they were told that the museum’s emphasis on African art was interesting but unmoving. For most of them, their motivation for going to art museums was to see art, broadly defined; they were as interested in exhibitions on Baroque and Impressionist art as they were in African art. If and when they went to the VMFA, they were interested in exploring all kinds of art and discovering new things, whatever the origin or media. In other words, these individuals were operating from an Explorer or even a Professional/Hobbyist motivational perspective. As a consequence, the marketing approach the museum used, in particular emphasizing just African art images, was insufficient to overcome the other more social and cultural impediments to visiting. What it took to move these individuals to become more frequent visitors to VMFA was not the reinstallation of the African art collection, but a change in the attitudes of the institution towards black visitors, starting with the guards and other service personnel, but including the creation of special events and other promotions that made them feel welcome.
Another group of African Americans, though, was highly interested in the new African Art Hall and a small percentage of these individuals actually did show up to see the reinstalled exhibition; but most only came once. They did feel a deep sense of identity with African culture and were interested in the expansion and reinstallation of the VMFA’s collection. Some of these individuals possessed expertise in African art that exceeded that of the museum’s curators. Once these individuals were identified, the museum was able to invite these Professional/Hobbyists to become more involved with the museum and the collections. However, the challenge was the identification of these individuals. It turned out that there were many more individuals within the Richmond African American community who possessed a strong knowledge and interest in African art and culture than there were those who were aware of the new reinstallation at VMFA. Working primarily through black churches, the museum was able to begin to reach these individuals. Some of the churches already had African culture interest groups, but even those without such a specific program were able to find ways to reach those in their congregations who possessed such interests. Through the churches, the museum organized a series of special tours of the exhibition, lectures, and even behind-the-scenes discussions with the curators. Some who participated in these events became so excited by the exhibition that they volunteered to become docents and in the process, became long-term “visitors” to the museum. For this relatively small group of individuals, the content of the original images worked well, but the placement of these images did not. They came from all strata of the African American community, but few regularly read the major Richmond newspaper and fewer still drove by the highly segregated area of town in which the VMFA was located. By working with the black churches in town, as well as promoting the exhibition through the local black newspaper that most Richmond African Americans read, the museum was able to reach this population of potential visitors.
Finally, there was a third group of African Americans in Richmond who potentially were amenable to visiting the VMFA, but who never felt welcome or thought of it as a place that would fulfill their specific leisure identity-related needs. These were African American parents. When the VMFA began to create advertising materials that showed African American parents doing things with their children in the galleries, large groups of African American parents began, many for the first time, to envision the VMFA as a possible place to visit. When the VMFA first distributed literature through black beauty salons and barber shops and advertised on the sides of buses and through the local black newspaper, these same African American parents became aware that the VMFA was not only a possible leisure site, but a potentially good one. Thus for Facilitators, the key was highlighting this social facilitator role. The fact that the advertised content related to African art was a nicety for these black parents—they were happy to share this particular experience with their children, but it was not a sufficiency—content alone was not an adequately compelling reason for visiting.
But the real coup in convincing African American parents to visit the VMFA was a museum supported school-based program of African music featuring a world-renowned African musician who taught African drumming and dancing to the children. The live performance was held at the museum, which reinforced that this was a great place for families. However, arguably the event would have been just as effective if it had focused on early twentieth-century art and involved children in learning about jazz or mid-century modern art and involved children in learning about the roots of rock-and-roll and rhythm and blues. The key was that the museum emphasized that it was a great place for parents and children to do things together; it was this focus on facilitation that ultimately helped to significantly increase the number of African Americans visiting the VMFA.24
In the end, the conventional wisdom prevailed that what worked was reaching out to the black community using methods and messages that related to this community and their interests. A reinterpretation of the marketing effort reveals that the VMFA was discovering that “one size does not fit all.” It also suggests that defining the problem primarily as a race/ethnicity issue was not a useful framework for changing visitation patterns. And finally, reinterpreting the results through the perspective of the museum visitor experience model suggests that different segments of visitors, as defined by their identity-related needs, require different messages and different delivery mechanisms.
Up to now, I have suggested that the way to approach the problem of attracting audiences is by creating different messages for different people. This, however, is not the only way to accommodate the ideas represented by my museum visitor experience model. An interesting alternative was developed by the Tyne & Wear Museums of northeastern England. Their marketing strategy was designed to help potential visitors self-select which museum in their community might best fit their specific leisure and identity-related needs. Rather than trying to convince the public that each individual museum could meet any and all of their needs, the museums in the community worked collaboratively to divide the different visitor identity-related niches that offered options to the public. The museums devised a scheme that helped drive visitors with specific motivations to the appropriate venue for satisfying that motivation. This strategy was made somewhat easier because the regional government in northeast England oversees 11 different institutions as part of the Tyne & Wear Museums. However, there’s no reason why all of the museums and cultural organizations within a community could not do something similar if they were willing to work in a collaborative manner.
The Tyne & Wear Museums include archaeology, history, natural science, and art institutions. Using the museum visitor experience idea as a departure point, these museums experimented with promoting different lifestyle and identity-related motivational leisure interests and needs using the Web as a delivery mechanism. Their website (www.ilikemuseums.com) features more than 80 different visitor experience “trails,” each beginning with the phrase “I like ….” Some examples are: I like… a challenge, I like… architecture, I like… celebrities, I like… dressing up, I like… monsters, I like… Romans, I like … scary things, I like… science, etc. When you click on any one of these museum-related self-aspects, the web site will help you plan a personalized Tyne & Wear museum experience that meets your specific interests. For example, if you click on “I like… a challenge,” the web site encourages you to “Exercise your grey matter at this selection of museums” and then gives you a list of eight different institutions where you can be intellectually challenged with directions and specific information about each institution. In this way, the Tyne & Wear museums have allowed the visitor to actively self-select an experience that is customized to meet their specific identity-related needs. Through this process the likelihood that the loop between needs, expectations, and experiences will be closed has been significantly increased.
Reaching New Audiences
Finally, I would like to directly address the vital question of how insights contained in the museum visitor experience can be used to attract audiences who have not historically visited museums. How can we use these ideas to reach new audiences? When museums such as the VMFA have attempted to broaden their audiences, they approached the problem by doing basically the same thing they’ve always done—create new exhibitions and invest in more marketing. The fact is that such “more of the same” approaches rarely work. The museum visitor experience model provides some interesting insights into how to attract new audiences. What the model suggests is that the reason most people do not attend a museum has everything to do with the fact that they do not perceive that the museum will adequately satisfy their leisure, identity-related needs. Rarely are issues of race, gender, age, ethnicity, education, or even economics (except in the extreme), the primary reason individuals opt not to visit a museum. The primary reason for not visiting is invariably a lack of perceived value which often correlates with some of these demographic characteristics; it is descriptive of underlying realities but not predictive. People who perceive no relationship between what they think museums afford and what they see as their identity-related needs will not have any desire to visit a museum. Those that do perceive that such a relationship exists, or could exist will be at least inclined to visit. Although the VMFA defined their problem as an African American problem, the problem really was not about African Americans, it was about individuals feeling like the museum did not meet their needs.
Every person has identity-related needs and interests. The need to express one’s curiosity, to support being a good parent, or to provide relief from the stresses of daily life is not unique to people who visit museums. These and other similar identity-related needs are common to virtually all people in the twenty-first century, at least to those who have obtained some measure of economic, political, and social security. What separates those who visit museums from those who do not is the perception that a museum is a good and reasonable place for satisfying those needs. Thus, the key to broadening audiences is communicating (and delivering) on this promise. That is what the VMFA was able to do, for example, with African American parents in Richmond. The fact that the topic related to the big ‘I’ or “African” identity of the audience undoubtedly played a role, but more importantly, the museum was able to appeal to the little ‘i’ identity needs of these Richmond mothers and fathers and reinforce that the VMFA would be a good place for fulfilling their parental identity-related needs. Arguably, the key ingredient was communicating that this is a good place for Richmond parents to help their children be successful in life and that it was a comfortable and welcoming place in which to accomplish this. In a similar way, it required that the VMFA staff understand the needs of potential visitors with Explorer and Professional/Hobbyist motivations and communicate to them that the museum could be a suitable and welcoming environment for satisfying their needs.
Thus, we can observe that whether attempting to entice those who are already inclined to visit the museum or encouraging those who have never visited the museum to come for the first time, the tasks are similar. Building and sustaining audiences requires an understanding of the real needs and interests of the public. It requires a commitment to communicate to prospective audiences that your institution has the capability to satisfy every individual’s personal identity-related needs and interests. And finally, building and sustaining audiences requires a willingness and the means to actually deliver on this promise if and when the public actually shows up, so that these individuals will leave as satisfied customers who will in turn encourage others like themselves to visit. It is to this latter challenge—supporting the visitor experience itself—that we now turn.