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"What is Marketing?"
Is your museum's definition inside out?

by Katherine Khalife

Marketing is the process of planning and
executing the conception, pricing, promotion,
and distribution of ideas, goods, and services
to create exchanges that satisfy individual and
organizational goals.
- American Marketing Association

At a Pennsylvania heritage tourism summit I attended in May, 2000, Carnegie Museums president Ellsworth Brown opened a morning workshop with the provocative question, "What is marketing?" I wasn't surprised to hear several museum professionals in the room respond, "It's getting people to want what you have." That belief about marketing is a common one. And it's at the core of most of the marketing problems many museums have.

Think Outside-in, Not Inside-out
Thinking of marketing as the process of getting people to want what you have is what I call the inside-out approach. Unfortunately, it's a one-sided, afterthought approach that only works if what you "have" also happens to be what people need and want. As Rebecca Leet, author of Marketing for Mission, put it, "what people want has a great deal to do with what they purchase - with their money, their time, their energy, or their attention. Whether you're selling a commercial product or a nonprofit service, unless it meets the desires of people, most of them won't buy it."

Real marketing requires an outside-in approach, which Leet describes as "a mindset even more than a set of skills. The mindset is based on achieving mission through identifying what the client (or customer or supporter or volunteer) needs and desires and then delivering programs that achieve mission by being structured responsively to client needs and values."

Museums and the Marketing Mindset
Many museums, though, have a difficult time adjusting to the idea of needing to develop a marketing mindset. As consultant Will Phillips wrote in an excellent 1996 article, Linking Objects with Audience, "Historically, museums emphasized collecting and understanding objects and specimens, not audiences. The resultant strategy played on a field of dreams: Collect it and they will come." But today, as Phillips notes, audience needs and values must become a primary focus if museums want to attract more visitors. The new mantra needs to be "Know them and they will come."

Adopting this outside-in focus doesn't mean you'll have to replace your wooden wheel exhibit with a water slide. It may mean, though, that the wheel exhibit needs to be open on Friday evenings, or that some of those Tuesday afternoon wheel lectures would be better replaced with hands-on wheel-making workshops on Saturday mornings. And maybe it's time to add a few more benches to the exhibit hall, or baby-changing stations to the restrooms.

Knowing, Respecting and Responding
Knowing, respecting and responding to audience wants and needs is the key to effective marketing for museums. As Phillips says, "The audience requires as much respect and consideration as the objects museums so lovingly manage."

That reality, however, can be a bitter pill for some in the field to swallow. Don't we all know a few curators who secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) wish that museums were open only by appointment? And at least a guide (or two) who honestly believes that visitors with little knowledge deserve withering replies to "dumb" questions? And what about board members whose greatest pride is in their ability to keep the institution "the way it's always been"?

Developing a marketing mindset requires us to look at our audiences as customers, to see our museums through their eyes, and to adapt our facilities and programs to meet their needs and wants.

"This doesn't mean 'dumbing down' your content as some would have us believe," assured consultant Shellie Williams in a keynote presentation to the Philanthropy Center's Nonprofit Leadership Conference in Orlando, Florida. "It just means making it accessible. And that means recognizing that people have different modes of learning and different attitudes around learning. We as presenters can offer a 'tiered' educational experience, where visitors choose how much learning they want -- is going to the performance enough, or would they also like a short history and aesthetics lesson before the performance? Or how about the six week course?"

"Audience" Doesn't Just Mean Visitors
Effective museum marketing requires us to integrate our own needs and desires with those of our audiences -- all of our audiences -- in order to create exchanges that satisfy both their goals and our own. But many institutions make the mistake of equating the term audience only with visitors. In actuality, though, members, donors, staff and volunteers are audiences too. Looking at them in that way -- as customers -- allows us to be more mindful of the exchange nature of the relationship. And it also paves the way for marketing to become a museum-wide function.

Marketing Shouldn't be an Afterthought
Unfortunately, too many organizations relegate marketing to afterthought status, confusing it with promotion, which is only one of its components. Exhibitions, special events, education programs and even new facilities are often completely planned before marketing is even considered. The "product" is conceived and developed in a vacuum -- then tossed over to "the marketing people" to "sell."

That kind of inside-out approach minimizes marketing's importance, restricts its potential effectiveness and helps perpetuate the marketing fears and disdain still prevalent in many institutions today.

Getting rid of those fears and adopting a marketing mindset requires that everyone in the organization become a stakeholder in the marketing process. First, by understanding what marketing really is -- and that it supports mission rather than undermines it. Then by making marketing a museum-wide function and an integral part of all planning -- an inclusionary process that allows ideas to be freely expressed. And heard. Only then can inside-out truly be replaced by outside-in.

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Copyright © 2000 Katherine Khalife All rights reserved.
For reprint permission, please e-mail kkhalife@museummarketingtips.com

Katherine Khalife is a freelance writer and publisher of the MuseumMarketingTips.com website, used every month by thousands of cultural institutions and other nonprofits seeking practical tips to improve their marketing and customer service. Her marketing and customer service articles have also appeared in History News, Museum Store, Vijesti, Product News and Management Insight, on a number of websites, and in association and convention and visitors bureau publications worldwide.

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