Marketing, Business Strategy, And Museums

Today's museums have many challenges: ever demanding requirements from the public, bigger budget, insufficient funding and how to better serve the public. The traditional idea of museum as a state sponsored institution and its sole purpose being preserving and displaying collections is no longer valid in the new market environment. Change is inevitable.Marketing is the process via which a firm creates value for its chosen customers. Value is created by meeting customer needs. Thus, a firm must define itself not by the product it sells, but by the customer benefit provided.Although museums are nonprofit organizations, they too must serve the need of customers. To develop an effective museum marketing strategy, museum must first understands the needs of customers. Then, by analyzing its own resources and deciding target markets, it can come up with a mix of marketing strategies that will serve the needs of customers.In this thesis, the author studies the new marketing approach of museum management and how to implement different marketing strategies in museum system.This research will be divided into three parts: The first part outlines the basic concepts and principles of marketing. The second part introduces the concept of marketing based museum management and discusses its theoretical soundness. The third part describes several marketing strategies in great detail. They include market segmentation strategy, displaying strategy, museum store strategy, pricing strategy and distribution strategy, at the same time discusses the prospect of applying marketing strategy in Chinese museum system, analyzes the need to introduce marketing in Chinese museum system and outlines some specific choices that can greatly improve the Chinese museum going experience.