How potential audiences are out of our reckoning

Hello, I’m Richard, writing my first blog from the 2010 Communicating The Museum conference in Vienna. We have come to the end of the first day, except for dinner at the Albertina Palace (imagine I am typing this blog with the vigour of a hundred-metre runner, in an effort to build up an appetite). Apart from the stifling heat in the conference room – unofficially the subject of the day – we saw many interesting speakers, new approaches and a healthy divergence of opinion. 

From my perspective (attribute it to the cold-hard-stats Anglo-Saxon that I am), I was particularly interested in Andrew McIntyre’s discussion of inherent flaws in our attempts to profile and segment audiences. The way we have been concentrating on number of visits to the museum, rather than the visitor – whether current, past, or present – is, Andrew argued, misguided.

In the methodology employed by leading surveyors, such as the Target Group Index, numbers are calculated on a year-on-year basis, measuring visitors in the last twelve months. To label these people ‘regular visitors’ and to hold them central to our thinking, to the exclusion of all irregulars, is a skewed way of thinking and produces an inaccurate profile of an institution’s audience. According to both the TGI and the UK government’s own Taking Part survey, ‘regular visitors’ to museums and art galleries comprise some 47% of the population. However, as Andrew said, this adherence to quantitative data gathered in an economic-based time frame contains many pitfalls. Of course, such statistics are vital for budgeting: for a true understanding of the potential audience, though, we must let go of this economic-centred approach and put a qualitative approach to the visitor at the centre of our thinking. 

The TGI approach assumes that visitors whose visiting cycles are longer than one year do not count as ‘regular visitors’: they are, conventionally, thought of as ‘non-visitors’ (part of the 53%). As research shows that museum visiting cycles are often longer than twelve months, this is clearly not the case. What is more, from Andrew’s qualitative research, these ‘longer cycle’ visitors still consider themselves regulars.

When those who either have visited a museum or art gallery, or those who describe themselves as potential visitors, are taken into account, the percentage of ‘arts participants’ in the UK rises to over 90%. If marketing strategies, audience profiling and segmentation ignore almost half of an institution’s individual visitors, evidently we are missing opportunities.

This twelve-month approach to audience profiling can equally produce a skew in the opposite direction: large ‘blockbuster’ events, one-off exhibitions in the past twelve months which receive great publicity and therefore a bump in the number of visitors will give an inflated number of ‘regular visitors’, if measured year-by-year. A long-term approach, combined with qualitative surveying, irons out these inflated periods and gives a much more accurate audience profile.

I really liked the implications of what Andrew was saying, and, though it was very heavy on statistics, its theme of focusing our attention on the audience resonated with much of the conference. By counselling what is in effect less reliance on economic statistics and instead gathering qualitative data, we are redefining the entire concept of the audience. They are not simply those who visit regularly, as a purely economic picture would show.

As Damien Whitmore said of the V&A in his opening speech, the visitor is everyone who interacts with the museum, whether on location or on the opposite side of the world through web content. In the future, therefore, a more open approach – and an open mind – is clearly required.

Richard Hadden

Comments

[Laura Bustos-Cardona]

Dear Richard, thank you for your lines. I really feel as I could be in Viena in spite of I´m following the conference here in Mexico City.

[Milk]

These observations are very interesting. It is very hard to understand museum visitors because museums are very hard to define. Their nature is still very complex. The identity of who experiences them, how and why they experience them should be analyzed carefully and, I reckon, through a long term approach. At the same time I understand that this would be equally complicated because museums change quickly as do visitors’ habits and technologies.
I think we should try to understand where museums are going. We should try to go back to the start, understand what museums are for, what museums want to be or become and from there evaluate the best strategies.
I do agree with the necessity of marketing strategies, segmentation and audience development, but I also do wonder if these are distracting museums from their role and quality and what consequence this might have on visitors.
I am conducting my own research on this and I am writing a blog about it (http://artwhatwhyhows.blogspot.com/).
I think a very interesting debate has been going on in Vienna. Thank you for updating all of us who could not be there!