Exploring Museum Marketing Performance: A Case Study from Italy

Abstract

The public funding of museums should be linked to performance results in order to reward institutions that are more efficient. Performance measurement tools rely heavily on figures based on visitors numbers and tickets sold. In this paper an indicator is proposed, called PMMP (Performance of Museum as a Marketing Product) consisting of 4 dimensions derived from the four P’s of marketing. The tool is applied to two art and archaeology museums, one private and one public used as case studies in this exploratory phase. Publicly managed facilities could be proving inefficient in performing high levels of marketing performance, thus reducing visitors numbers. The subsequent revenues decrease makes it difficult to preserve the facility without asking for more public money. The simultaneous reduction in public funding asks for some criteria of selection and the indicator could be also useful as a checklist in evaluating museums’ marketing strategies and for internal benchmarking assessment.