Natalia Dudareva
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MUSEUMS IN SOCIAL MEDIA What makes social media relevant for arts and culture marketing: a study applied to Facebook pages of three museums in Copenhagen Natalia Dudareva Master Thesis | Cand.soc. in Management of Creative Business Processes 84 pages, 174,300 characters Supervisor: Gurli Jakobsen, CBS Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility Copenhagen Business School, May 2014 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work would not have been possible without the collaborations, assistance and help that I received. I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who supported me throughout this project. Golden Days and Kulturkik provided support by sparring about the research problem and gave the invaluable help in establishing museum collaborations. The communication departments of The National Gallery of Denmark, The National Museum of Denmark, and The David Collection supported me by giving me the opportunity to reach to their audiences and providing the necessary background information. My friends gave me valuable feedback about my ideas and participated in testing and proofreading of the survey. The views expressed in this work are solely of the author and do not reflect those of studied organisations or other individuals. 2 ABSTRACT What is the relevance of social media for marketing of arts and culture museums? Who are the virtual followers of their social media? I described the users of museums’ Facebook pages, grouped them according to their motivations for following these pages, and analysed how this knowledge can be useful for marketing and communication specialists of arts and culture museums. Three museums in Copenhagen distributed the quantitative survey developed in this work: The National Gallery of Denmark, The National Museum of Denmark, and The David Collection. The survey described their Facebook followers and divided them into five types: ‘Enthusiast’, ‘Connected’, ‘Contributor’, ‘Interested’, and ‘Informational’. This research demonstrates that social media provides opportunities both for strengthening the existing audience relationships and for establishing the new ones with those who are not active in visiting museums. It identifies that many users take inspiration for the visits from the Facebook pages, and the most engaged social media followers also tend to be more active visitors. Moreover, it suggests that social media communication is becoming a cultural experience of its own. This research places social media as a unique tool of museum marketing strategy that enables the museums to engage their audiences in direct two-way communication and co-creation of the cultural experiences. Thus its role is to supplement the other elements of museum marketing strategy by providing more opportunities for audience involvement, establishing long-term relationships, and community development. Keywords: museums, Facebook, social media, marketing strategy, consumer behavior, relationship marketing, typology 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 2 ABSTRACT 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS 4 PART 1. INTRODUCTION 6 1.1. RESEARCH QUESTION AND OBJECTIVES 7 1.2. CONCEPTUAL DELIMITATION AND ARGUMENTATION DEVELOPMENT 10 1.3. COLLABORATING MUSEUMS 14 1.3.1. THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF DENMARK 14 1.3.2. THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF DENMARK 15 1.3.3. THE DAVID COLLECTION 15 1.4. BACKGROUND OF THE RESEARCH 15 PART 2. RESEARCH METHODS 19 2.1. RESEARCH APPROACH 19 2.2. RESEARCH OBJECTIVES AND THE NEED FOR DATA 22 2.3. SAMPLING 22 2.4. DATA COLLECTION 24 2.5. SURVEY DESIGN 25 2.5.1. TYPES OF QUESTIONS 25 2.5.2. FORMULATION OF QUESTIONS 26 2.5.2.1. General information about the respondents 27 2.5.2.2. Use of Facebook 28 2.5.2.3. Museums on Facebook 29 2.5.2.4. Museum attendance 30 2.5.3. QUALITY CONTROL 31 2.6. DATA ANALYSIS 31 2.6.1. IDENTIFICATION OF PATTERNS AMONG THE RESULTS 32 2.6.2. FORMULATION OF TYPOLOGY 32 2.7. VALIDITY 34 2.8. SUMMARY 35 PART 3. LITERATURE REVIEW 36 3.1. SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF MUSEUM MARKETING 36 3.1.1. GOALS OF MUSEUM MARKETING 36 3.1.2. EXPERIENTIAL NATURE OF THE CULTURAL PRODUCT 38 3.1.3. MOTIVATIONS FOR CONSUMPTION OF CULTURAL EXPERIENCES 39 3.2. SOCIAL MEDIA AS A MARKETING TOOL FOR ARTS AND CULTURE 42 3.2.1. THE NATURE OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING AS A RESULT OF CHANGES IN USER BEHAVIOUR 43 3.2.2. APPLICATION OF MUSEUM MARKETING TO SOCIAL MEDIA 44 3.3. RELATIONSHIP MARKETING LINKING THE MUSEUM AND ITS AUDIENCES IN SOCIAL MEDIA 46 3.3.1. AUDIENCE STUDIES REFLECTING THE VALUES AND MOTIVATIONS 48 3.4. FRAMEWORK OF LOYALTY IN APPLICATION OF RELATIONSHIP MARKETING TO MUSEUMS 50 3.5. SUMMARY 51 4 PART 4. FINDINGS 52 4.1. CHARACTERISTICS OF MUSEUM AUDIENCES ON FACEBOOK 52 4.1.1. DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS 52 4.1.2. FACEBOOK USE BY THE RESPONDENTS 54 4.1.3. FINDING INFORMATION ABOUT MUSEUMS 55 4.1.4. LEISURE INTERESTS 56 4.2. COMPARISON OF VISITS TO MUSEUMS AND SUBSCRIPTIONS TO THEIR THE FACEBOOK PAGES 57 4.2.1. RESPONDENTS WHO FOLLOW MUSEUMS ON FACEBOOK 58 4.2.2. VISITS TO MUSEUMS 59 4.2.3. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VISITS AND FACEBOOK SUBSCRIPTIONS 61 4.3. FIVE TYPES OF RELATIONSHIPS 62 4.3.1. ENTHUSIAST 66 4.3.2. CONNECTED 67 4.3.3. CONTRIBUTOR 68 4.3.4. INTERESTED 69 4.3.5. INFORMATIONAL 69 4.4. SUMMARY 71 PART 5. DISCUSSION 72 5.1. HOW TO STUDY AUDIENCES OF MUSEUMS IN SOCIAL MEDIA 72 5.1.1. QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH AS A TOOL 72 5.1.2. COMPARISON WITH OTHER STUDIES 73 5.2. CONNECTION BETWEEN FOLLOWING AND VISITING 76 5.3. AN EMERGING DIGITAL AUDIENCE OF MUSEUMS 77 5.4. THE QUEST FOR PARTICIPATION 78 5.5. USING SOCIAL MEDIA AS A PART OF MUSEUM MARKETING STRATEGY 79 PART 6. CONCLUSION 81 LIMITATIONS 83 OPPORTUNITIES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH 84 BIBLIOGRAPHY 85 APPENDIX A 90 APPENDIX B 100 5 Part 1. INTRODUCTION Social media is transforming the way people interact with each other, navigate their daily lives, and receive information, which has a profound impact on communication practices of companies and organisations across different sectors (Qualman, 2009). Museums are also seeking to find out how they can embrace these media for encouraging interaction among their audiences(Hausmann, 2012), innovating their experiences (Bakhshi & Throsby, 2012), and maintaining relationships with their consumers outside the actual visits (Petkus Jr, 2002; Yucelt, 2000). This work is aimed at creating new knowledge about the use of social media for museum marketing. It takes the perspective of strategic marketing and puts the audience at its centre. Therefore, each step of this thesis focuses on developing knowledge about the consumers of arts and culture museums in social media. While there is a wide variety of social media platforms, I chose to concentrate on Facebook, which is one of the world’s leading social media platforms that offers opportunities both for private communication, public discussions, and interaction between individuals and companies (Qualman, 2009). Museum marketing seeks to attract more people to visit the museum locations and to increase access to the cultural experiences they provide (N. Kotler & Kotler, 1998: p. 29). Social media offers a potential to support these goals set by museum marketing and communication. Research shows that by finding out what motivates people to like pages on Facebook and to interact with them it is possible to get a better understanding of strategies that can be used to improve communication between organisations and their followers (Wallace, Buil, de Chernatony, & Hogan, 2014). Therefore, I dedicated this research to exploring the motivations and values that underlie the decisions of Facebook users to follow and interact with the pages of museums. Despite the fact that the use of social media is increasingly becoming integrated in the daily lives of the Danish population, research shows that only a small percentage uses these channels to experience arts and culture, and even smaller share uses the cultural experiences provided by museums through these platforms (Bak, Madsen, Henrichsen, & Troldborg, 2012). At the same time museums are developing strategies and approaches to attract the 6 numerous users of social media platforms to their online profiles (Grøn, Hansen, & Holst Mouritzen, 2013). It is therefore necessary to study what motivates the social media users to engage with museums through these platforms and how museums can use this knowledge to integrate social media into their marketing and communication strategies. 1.1. Research question and objectives To investigate the role of social media for museum marketing I formulated the following research question that reflects the main focus of this work: HOW IS SOCIAL MEDIA RELEVANT FOR MARKETING OF ARTS AND CULTURE MUSEUMS? ‘Relevance’ in this question means that this work is seeking to understand how social media can be used as a part of museum marketing strategy. This is an exploratory question, where the main goal is to describe the potential of using social media for the purposes of museum marketing. Defining museums is complicated due to the variety of their kinds and approaches (N. G. Kotler, Kotler, & Kotler, 2008: p. 3). In academic research a ‘museum’ is understood as “an organised and permanent non-profit institution, essentially educational and aesthetic in purpose, with professional staff which owns and utilises tangible objects, cares for them and exhibits them to the public on some regular scheme” (N. G. Kotler et al., 2008: pp. 6-7). In this work I am expanding this definition by taking the intangible digital and online components of cultural experience into consideration on the same level as the tangible objects presented by museums. As a discipline museum marketing is a result of a long history of research and practice in particular in applying the classical concepts of marketing to the activities of museums and the cultural experiences they provide (N.