Investigating the role of marketing in museum management: Australia's state museums

Abstract

Museums have been slow to consider marketing in an operational sense, with the term ‘marketing’ not appearing in the UK museum sector until the late 1980s (Kawashima, 1997). However, as Rentschler (2002) has noted, over the last 25 years museums have responded to an increased interest in their visitors by incorporating marketing into their organisational strategies. During this period marketing moved from the periphery to take a more central role in museum management. This is not to say that marketing has been universally accepted by the museum profession. There is still some scepticism about the usefulness of marketing in cultural organisations such as museums (Kolb, 2000), and confusion within the profession about the marketing concept itself (Neilson, 2003). Nonetheless, marketing does now appear to be part of the discourse of the museum sector.