Evaluating The Use Of E-Marketing Within Cultural Institutions

How can you build relationships with people who are not able to to visit your sites? You take your sites to them! In today’s digital age world, more businesses have been looking into e-marketing to help allow their information and services to be more accessible. E-marketing is growing at a dramatic pace and it significantly impacts customer and business market behavior. As a result, most businesses have started developing e-marketing strategies for the web. What exactly is e-marketing? E-marketing is the marketing of products or services over the internet. It is when modern communication technology meets marketing principals. E-marketing consists of all the activities a business conducts on the web. (Liew and Loh 40).

Cultural institutions these days are also employing digital media as a form of marketing. Abbey states that, the “number of North American art museums with a presence on the internet has more than doubled since 1999. ” (34). E-marketing enables greater public participation and is an efficient and inexpensive way to communicate with users vice versa. By using websites and social networking services such as; to name a few, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, museums have adopted e-marketing strategies based on a user centric approach, to connect with people and to allow people to connect with cultural institutions. The purpose of this essay is to evaluate how e-marketing has increased accessibility of information from cultural institutions by examining examples of education and visitorship. Museums have always included education as a goal. “The word museum comes from the Greek mouseion, a temple of the Muses—in Greek mythology, goddess of inspiration and learning and patrons of the arts. ” (Kotler, Kotler and Kotler 9).

A crucial objective of the museum is to educate. They have the capacity and the ability to provide education as they have the tools and materials for doing so in their extensive museum collections. In terms of online education, it is more accessible due to e-marketing more specifically, web and online marketing. Many museum websites incorporate educational materials such as resource libraries, virtual museums, collections information, interactive exhibits, and more. According to Cameron, “knowledge about museum collections is now taking the form of a database of separate elements including media, images, sound and texts that can be linked and navigated in a variety of way” (82). In the last few years, there has been massive growth in the use of digital technologies for learning in museums and galleries. The availability of the Internet allows cultural institutions, through e-marketing, to reach people who may not have the chance to physically visit the museums, but will benefit from interacting with the online resources. The effects of web and online marketing has pros and cons on education. An example of a pro is the effect museum e-marketing has on school education. Schools can work with museums as a form of educational support through, educational programmes, guided museum visits, and classes. Through e-marketing, schools can bring museum education to their classroom. “Many museums’ education pages include links that enable teachers to download educational materials for classroom use” (Kotler, Kotler and Kotler 403).

This feature not only allows the school to vet if the museums’ education programme is in line with the schools’ cirriculum, it also allows the students to experience a form of museum education without having to leave the productive learning environment of a school classroom. Students can also broaden their knowledge through online collections-based educational activities. (Kotler, Kotler and Kotler 403). While they can get educational benefits by using online materials, they would lack the experiences that cannot be transmitted through the internet. Which brings me to the cons which will be addressed in the next paragraph. In Frost’s view, she acknowledges that digital technology is making access to information more accessible, but, she reasons that a person visiting a museum website is at an overall disadvantage to a person who visits the physical museum. She points out that “in visiting a museum website, the learner may lose the benefit provided by the museum guide who serves as an intermediary to bring context, personalization, and similar assistance to help enrich the understanding of museum objects. ” (Frost 238). Frost’s view is agreeable because e-learning is a personalized one to one activity between the user and the information sourced from online. Without a museum guide to give a user the intended artistic context of the artwork, one will not be able to control the way information is perceived by the receiving end. Thus, even though an online experience allows an individual the freedom to access all kinds of information, e-learning is limited in the aspect of guidance and context. (Frost, When the Object is Digital). E-marketing has helped increase visitorship both physically and virtually.

Providing online access to information has helped cultural institutions expand visitorship profiles, allowing them reach a larger audience. In the article by Liew and Loh, they use the example of the international tourist. “In this cultural context, the international tourist refers to a person who adopts assistance from any type of information-receiving appliance to access information as an enhancement to and overall museum or gallery experience. ” (41). With 24-hour access to websites, the international tourist is able to gain information on the upcoming exhibitions, stay updated with the latest museum happenings, browse the museum’s online resources, plan their visit and have total control over the museum experience all because of e-marketing. Another way e-marketing has increased visitorship is through online virtual tours.

A virtual tour is an e-marketing tool to provide users with a virtual experience of an exhibition. Kotler et al notes that there are two types of virtual exhibitions. The first one heavily involves the use of photographs of the museum’s surroundings which creates a 360-degree view. The user will be able to move the mouse and view the exhibition through photographs of the actual online museum space. The second one is the creation of a three-dimensional modeled virtual world. The user will get to view the exhibition in this virtual reality realm. (407). The virtual exhibition is meant to help visitors to plan their visits and to entice them to come for the actual exhibition or for visitors to re-visit the exhibition. Thus, this helps to increase both physical and on-line visitorship. However, due to the accessibility and convenience of virtual tours and exhibitions, a potential problem that could arise in the future would be that users might decide not to go to the physical exhibition or tour because they would have already ‘experienced’ it online. This claim is supported by Müller’s perspective of looking at museums via the internet. He writes that because most, if not all, museum collections are slowly being transferred to a database, a museum would no longer require a building. (303). To elucidate his point, he refers to the example of The Nuovo Museo Ellettronico (NUME)’s virtual museum where visitors do not go to an actual museum but visits the site through PAD devices, websites or virtual theatres. (Müller 304).

Therefore, what was to help cultural institutions increase visitorship physically has now become a problem. In conclusion, e-marketing has definitely increased accessibility of information from cultural institutions. However, while there is ample evidence that e-marketing has definitely increased accessibility of information from cultural institutions through websites, there is also evidence that if we over rely on digitalization it could affect authentic experiences and physical visitorship to museums. I predict that museums will definitely continue expanding and growing their online identity so as to reach even more people to fulfil their mission which is to provide people with a platform to learn about culture, art and education.