Category Archives: Glossary

C, Glossary

Community

Posted on by Joyce Kwon

What it means

The word community means different things in different contexts. For our purpose, because museums exist to serve the public, we define community as members of the public who share an identity, affinity, and geography, be it physical, digital, or psychological.

How it’s used

Museums typically invest in engaging with community for the purpose of developing authentic, trusted, long-lasting, and mutually beneficial partnerships. This engagement often happens through co-creation of content such as programs or digital products, as well as the leveraging of user-generated content (UGC). Community represents a shift in marketing, away from a mindset of transaction and broadcasting of messages, toward investing in collaboration and relying on micro-engagements with people who are taking time out of their busy days to talk about the museum, be it through word-of-mouth, likes, comments, or shares. Community members with a wide reach are referred to as influencers.

The museum must be clear about which communities it wants to engage and support. (See also Audience Segmentation.) Before the museum engages with or attempts to define community, it is best practice to talk to community members to understand how they want to be engaged and how they define themselves. A conversation with a museum employee, who is also a member of the identified external community, does not completely fulfill this need. While tapping into employee experiences and perspectives is useful, there is a need for ongoing dialogue with external community members in order to gather and learn from various perspectives and voices.

Why it matters

Fostering community is a strategy for audience growth and engagement. In an increasingly hybrid world, communities form a strong foundation, especially for the digital relationships a museum must foster. If a museum is relevant to a community, word-of-mouth will spread, through their members and thought leaders (i.e., influencers). We have defined community as an audience group but it can also refer to the community that is centered around a museum itself, such as staff, volunteers, and fans.

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See: Marketing of the Bronx Museum

C, Glossary

Communications

Posted on by Joyce Kwon

What it means

Communications is a word that can mean different things in different contexts. Communications may refer to an organizational team or discipline, or it might be used in reference to outreach tactics—proactive as well as reactive. In all instances, the term communications encapsulates the focus on crafting and sharing messages in service of the museum and its institutional goals as well as helping build awareness and trust with the public and all institutional stakeholders, both internal and external. (See also Brand Equity.)

How it’s used

While communicating is something everyone does as part of their work, communications as a discipline—which is often, but not always, tied to marketing—strategically crafts and disseminates information and stories that support the museum’s value, mission, and contributions to the communities it serves. Communication also refers to, and is equally important for, both internal and external audiences.

Communications activities and tactics may include distributing information to the media via press releases, media alerts, and individual pitches; conducting media training and interview management for leadership and other staff, as well as sometimes serving as a spokesperson for the museum; developing key messages and talking points for museum leadership and other staff; developing language for the museum’s website and other external-facing materials (e.g., Annual Reports); and managing external public relations firms, crisis communications, and social media platforms.

Why it matters

Strategic communications outreach requires holistic knowledge of the organization, the museum field, and the political and social environment at large. It is important to have a centralized communications plan that supports the museum’s mission and values because the brand’s integrity and reputation are dependent on public perception.

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See: What is a brand?
C, Glossary

Campaign

Posted on by Joyce Kwon

What it means

A marketing communications campaign is a strategic mix of paid, owned, and earned media efforts combined with partnerships, promotions, or grassroots initiatives calibrated to meet objectives such as expanding audiences, building awareness, growing earned and contributed revenue, or supporting raising capital.

How it’s used

Aligned with goals and budget, the marketing communications campaign can range from a full multimedia suite of owned (e.g., email, social, and website with built-in audiences), paid (e.g., advertising to reach current and new audiences), and earned (e.g., publicity) media channels coupled with promotions, which are especially effective for launching new exhibitions or brand awareness initiatives.

A micro-campaign consisting of only digital marketing communication efforts is typically used for driving audiences to museum programs or motivating redemptions for special promotions.

Integrating partnerships and grassroots efforts to the campaign mix is especially important for goals that include engaging non-traditional museum audiences and communities. These relationships are built on trust—something that paid, owned, and earned media efforts alone cannot cultivate without listening to and partnering with the community.

It’s essential to measure a campaign’s success during implementation, to gauge performance and deploy responsive measures as needed, as well as post-implementation to determine if KPIs (key performance indicators) of goals have been met.

Why it matters

Campaigns break through the clutter of too much information and a fragmented media landscape by providing consistent messaging and imagery that touches the audience in multiple contexts to strengthen retention and recall.

Campaigns offer a strategic, actionable, and measurable approach for any marketing communications operation to balance the implementation of year-round media initiatives and partnerships in support of various department and institutional goals at the museum.

For this reason, cross-functional support from visitor services, the shop, design, programming, curatorial, and other departments all contribute to the success of a campaign.

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An oldie but still relevant more than a decade later: Advertising in the Facebook Age, Bronx Museum Campaign

B, Glossary

Brand Equity

Posted on by Joyce Kwon

What it means

Brand equity is the power or value of your brand. You create it by building recognition and familiarity, which leads to positive perception. It is built over time and encompasses every touchpoint with the museum (e.g., what’s on your front door, welcoming and branding statement on the website, and how you interact with partners/sponsors).

How it’s used

All strategic decisions have an impact on brand equity so it should always be a consideration. It’s everyone’s responsibility because even small decisions affect organizational brand perception and thus, accumulated equity. The brand is not static; brand equity is affected by both intentional and unintentional decisions made by everyone involved with the museum.

How does a particular decision (e.g., exhibition selection, social post, or interaction with a visitor) advance or diminish our reputation?

Why it matters

Brand equity translates into people’s willingness to spend time or money in support of your museum. A well-known and trusted brand contributes to the cultural organization’s ability to advance its mission as well as its societal and revenue-based goals. Brand equity allows a museum to have greater influence and impact in building relationships with and for the communities it serves.

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Brand equity can be lost from an ill-advised rebrand. The urge to change things is sometimes driven by boredom. Here is a cautionary tale on brand fatigue and some valid reasons to go ahead if it is indeed time: Why Rebrand.

B, Glossary

Brand

Posted on by Joyce Kwon

What it means

A brand is the way an organization or product is perceived by the person who experiences it. Your brand is not static. It is the accumulation of feelings, thoughts, and perceptions that a person has about your organization. A museum’s brand is derived from every touchpoint a person has with the museum, from advertising to the greeting at the front desk. Brands are represented or summarized in marketing tools such as logos or taglines and they are reinforced by your advertising and promotional imagery, as well as day-to-day employee behavior and operational decisions, such as whether security guards are briefed on exhibition details.

How it’s used

A strong brand idea is expressed through clear, trusted, and unique offerings. What makes your museum different from the one down the road? The written articulation of a brand is its brand strategy, which typically answers the questions “what,” “how,” and “why,” and states core values and the expression of the brand in a simple, easily graspable idea. It includes the ways the brand is created and reinforced with a museum’s audiences. With a brand strategy in place, you can assess whether your brand offers a unique value proposition and ensure you keep the voice of the brand consistent. Brands are most powerful when they are reflected in the culture of the organization and benefit from continued reexamination and reflection.

Why it matters

People are emotional, intuitive beings and make decisions largely based on gut feelings. Brands help museums cut through the chatter, allowing audiences to more easily make a connection. When an organization expresses its core beliefs and identity clearly, it inspires loyalty and excitement, creating brand equity. Each time the public interacts with your museum is an opportunity to build the brand you desire. It’s a useful lens to view decision-making in an organization (i.e., is this “on brand”?).

If the organization does not actively cultivate a singular idea, the public will arrive at one by itself—often erroneously and in a manner that is less aligned with the organization’s mission. A brand, when implemented in support of the business strategy, serves to coordinate and accelerate organizational performance. Strong brand equity and a strong brand has a chance to create more dedicated audiences who feel an affinity to your museum, which then leads to higher attendance, a stronger pool for fundraising, and more.

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It’s good to be better but it’s better to be different. Being better at something than your peers is easy to see internally, much harder to be seen from the outside. Finding the simplicity that brings power to a brand, without resorting to something that can easily be claimed by others is not easy.

 

Can we just not bother? See: Is the Museum Brand God Dead?

A, Glossary

Awareness

Posted on by Joyce Kwon

What it means

Awareness is a key marketing success metric used as one way to evaluate a brand’s health. Awareness measures the target audience’s familiarity and associations with a particular brand, its features, products, and benefits. Awareness can be measured and categorized as “aided” or “unaided,” which describes how quickly knowledge of the museum or its offers comes to mind with and without help.

How it’s used

Awareness is often the first step in the sales funnel or purchase process (see also Audience Journey) and the first priority for a marketing effort because visitors must first be aware of an offering before taking any additional actions.

If your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room, then growing awareness and making sure audiences know who you are (and can talk about you at all) is an essential goal of any marketing strategy. Advertising, public relations, ambassador programs, exterior signage, partnerships, loyalty marketing, and social media are all ways that brands grow recognition and familiarity.

Awareness can be tracked via population surveys, website traffic, and social engagement.

Why it matters

People choose brands they know and trust. Audiences need to know who you are and what you stand for before they can choose to visit your museum. Growing awareness is essential to attracting new visitors, while staying visible and relevant is essential to remaining top-of-mind.

Notes

Awareness is sometimes tracked in an Awareness, Attitudes, and Usage (AAU) study for insights into brand health and to track trends in sentiment and behavior.

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Familiarity begets positivity. We make decisions with our more primitive brain and it is not naturally attracted to the unfamiliar. Intellectual curiosity is a function of our homo sapien brain and in the context of decision-making, it is not the decider but rather the part of our brain that works to rationalize our decisions. As such, it is critical to cultivate familiarity, as this is the foundation for all other engagements. See: Brain Science and Marketing

A, Glossary

Audience Segmentation

Posted on by Joyce Kwon

What it means

Audience segmentation is the process of identifying subgroups within an audience in order to deliver more personalized and meaningful messaging to cultivate stronger connections. The subgroups can be based on demographics such as geographic location, gender identity, age, ethnicity, income, or level of formal education. Subgroups can also be based on behavior, such as types of past purchases or attendance of particular types of events, or psychographics, such as personality types, values, attitudes, and beliefs.

How it’s used

Audience segmentation allows a museum to focus the message when communicating with a particular audience on those things that are most relevant and important to that group. Segmentation helps exhibitions, interpretation, and programming teams to tailor offerings and the message about those offerings based on our understanding of the needs of the intended audience.

Why it matters

Segmentation ultimately improves the effectiveness of museum marketing, communications, and audience engagement, enhancing the museum’s capacity to shift perception, grow audiences, increase participation, and through these things, expand the museum’s opportunities to serve the public.

Notes

This definition was adapted from Mailchimp: https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/audience-segmentation/.

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“Where should we spend our limited marketing resources?” Lack of focus when answering this question results in a lot of waste. One tool we use to help assess the best allocation of marketing resources is a Marketing Targets Diagram.

A, Glossary

Audience Research

Posted on by Joyce Kwon

What it means

Audience research refers to any study conducted, reviewed, or considered on audiences with the goal of gaining insight into the audience’s behaviors, attitudes, values, motivations, and perceptions to better meet the needs of those the museum aims to serve.

Audience research has many methods, and is evolving, scalable, and dependent on the goals of the organization or project. Audience research can be qualitative and focused more on deeper insights or it can be quantitative and focused on statistically significant sample sizes. It can be conducted via online surveys/digital applications, online panels, focus groups, intercept surveys, observational studies, in-depth interviews, and more.

The U.S. Census, Convention Visitor Bureau, other cultural organizations, and commercial firms may be resources in this work.

How it’s used

Applications include informing strategy, optimizing revenue opportunities, crafting messaging, and enabling the museum to see itself as others see it.

Why it matters

Museums exist to serve the public, and therefore, understanding audiences is a foundational component of making that work meaningful. It’s a useful measure of the success of other initiatives such as branding, social impact, or mission effectiveness. It should inform such overriding questions as organizational purpose.

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One tool we find useful for sifting through data to find actionable insight is a Competitive Advantage Diagram mapped from the audience’s perspective.

 

Another good resource is the Visitor Studies Association at visitorstudies.org.

A, Glossary

Audience Persona

Posted on by Joyce Kwon

What it means

An audience persona (in for-profit terms, a customer persona) is a semi-fictional character that is created to represent your target audience. It’s a concise snapshot of all of the relevant information you can obtain about them, all packaged together to form a “person” you can focus your marketing efforts toward. Personas usually take the form of stories based in research and capture a fuller picture of a target audience’s life and priorities. They can include things like where a “persona” lives, their daily routines, commute, hobbies, pets, social life, beliefs, family, and media consumption.

How it’s used

Museums will usually have several audience personas (e.g., “Busy Suburban Moms” and “Cool Downtown 20-Somethings”) and may even go so far as to name them (e.g., “Jacob”) and give them pictures and bios. They serve to deepen your understanding of individuals or groups with shared interests, psychographics, or demographics, especially to bring a visitor’s needs, goals, behaviors, and motivations into sharper focus. Thinking through possible decisions and evaluating programs, services, media plans, or materials from the perspective of different audience personas is a useful tool in understanding the impact on different audiences.

Why it matters

Audience personas help organizations understand audiences in a more tangible and nuanced way, especially when demographics seem abstract (e.g., “What would “Jacob” think of this?”). They offer museums the ability to package research into an easy-to-use tool to challenge preconceived ideas and facilitate audience-related discussions or strategies and make decision-making easier and the “why” clearer. They can also help teams avoid assumptions or the application of unconscious bias when considering a particular audience and their needs.

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See: What Sally Can Show You

A, Glossary

Audience Journey

Posted on by Joyce Kwon

What it means

Audience journey refers to the path individuals, groups, or audience segments take, or are encouraged to take, as they move through various touchpoints, interactions, and experiences with museums. It often takes the forms of a diagram—a map, a pyramid, or a funnel—that visualizes the different steps in the process, all from the audience’s perspective.

How it’s used

Mapping an audience journey helps staff understand interactions from the viewpoint of the visitor or web user, and see how all of the different pieces can fit together.

One common audience journey is the audience development pyramid. Within museums or arts organizations, this often takes the form of moving people along a journey from being unaware to aware (e.g., knowing who you are and what you offer), to attracted (e.g., visiting for the first time), to attached (e.g., visiting multiple times, recommending to friends, becoming a member), and to becoming advocates (e.g., being a donor or identifying with or championing the museum).

Another is the audience journey map, which maps out all the different moments a visitor interacts with your museum, from first hearing about it (e.g., listening to a news story) to actively seeking more information (e.g., searching online, visiting a website) to walking in the door to after the visit (e.g., posting pictures on social media).

The same technique can be used when developing new projects like websites or digital interactives (user experience/UX journey). It’s also a key organizing principle in fundraising and audience development, leading to the use of Customer Relationship Management software/CRMs like Salesforce.

Why it matters

How effectively museums engage audiences at these critical junctures along their journey can have a powerful impact on an institution’s economic sustainability and mission. Knowing and understanding audience journeys is a key decision-making and strategic tool. It also helps to lay out relationships between different touchpoints or the entire constellation of actions that are possible for visitors or an audience member to take.

Notes

See also Audience Persona and Audience Segmentation