American museums, according to a new study, are in a bind. Visitation hasn’t gotten back to where it was before the Covid-19 pandemic, and expenses have risen dramatically, but institutions don’t think they can afford to invest in marketing robustly enough to increase attendance and thus box office. Museums’ traditional “build it and they will come” approach doesn’t always work, says the report, the latest from Remuseum.
Remuseum is an initiative of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, established and funded by entrepreneur and ARTnews Top 200 collector David Booth in 2023 with support from the Ford Foundation. The report came out of a convening of museum leaders organized with Arkansas’ Art Bridges Foundation, and is the second of three planned reports.
Museums have been resistant to spending on marketing at the same levels as other cultural organizations, says the report, which posits that the thinking may go that museums and art might even be demeaned by treating them like any other product.
Discussion about museums and marketing goes way back, the report notes, quoting two museum executives from opposite US coasts to illustrate the varying schools of thought. William Luers, president of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1986 to 1999, said in 1990 that “The use of words such as marketing… sets administrators against curators and develops a ‘we-versus-they’ mentality towards management. At the Metropolitan Museum, we therefore do not have a marketing office, a marketing individual, or a marketing committee.” By contrast, Harold Williams, who led the Getty Museum and Getty Trust, said of marketing, “We are doing it every day. We are going to continue doing it. We are going to do it better over time because we need to.”
Remuseum’s research shows that museums on average invest less than three percent of their operating budgets on marketing—comparable to the mining and construction industries, which hardly require public attendance for their fiscal health. Other cultural producers, like movie studios, can spend as much as half their budget on marketing a picture, and more in the case of blockbusters. Performing arts institutions have marketing budgets of three to four times that of museums.
The report presents two case studies of museums thinking about their approach to marketing. The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), in Salem, Massachusetts, used research data to develop “personas” for key audience segments. The AGO came up with target groups like Urban Families and Young Downtown Actives, while the PEM went a bit more fanciful with three personas: Artsy Alex, Learner Lee, and Social Sam. Focusing on those hypothetical visitors’ motivations, rather than demographic identities, as museums have more typically done, can provide new ways to think about their visitors and to target new ones.
While American museums have undergone a long period of expansion, says the report, few are near capacity, and can accommodate many more visitors. To achieve ninety percent or more of their “market potential,” per research by consultant Colleen Dilenschneider of Impacts Experience, museums should be investing anywhere from 13.9 to 18.7 percent of annual revenues in approaches like paid advertising, social media, and public relations.
At present, data from the DataArts project at Southern Methodist University found that museums are spending on average three to seven percent of annual revenues, based on a cohort of 75 museums of varying sizes. Median spend was even lower.
Remuseum’s research on 150 major museums found that on average they spend only two percent of their total budgets on advertising. DataArts found that non-profit theaters and symphonies spend three times that, and opera companies four times that.
