Strategies Employed by the Metropolitan Museum of Manila in Communicating its Market Orientation to the Publics

Abstract

During the 1970s, museums face a number of serious and sometimes critical funding challenges such as cutbacks in public funds, increased competition for private support and operating costs, and reduction or loss of tax privileges and other subsidies. They were made to face the challenges of defining a distinctive, engaging mission and striking a workable balance between the mission and demands from outside; building a solid audience and community support, and generating funds and reserves to sustain a museum over the long run (Kotler & Kotler 1998: 28). They are expected to review their positioning in the society from “purely academic institutions to educational and leisure establishments” (Fopp 1997: 4) and “collecting objects to serving audiences” (Kotler & Kotler 2000: 3). From a non-profit institution, created to serve the public by preserving and collecting artefacts on human sense, museums are challenged to adapt business functions such as marketing, promotions, public relations, and the like. Developing a market orientation requires the museum people to look at their audiences as customers, to see then museums through the customers’ eyes, and to adapt their facilities and programs to meet the latter’s needs and wants. The integration of marketing in the museum’s operation affects the management, operation, and communication within the museum and towards its public. Moreover, museum marketing is something that is new not only to the management but to the publics as well. It is very important indeed for the museum management to apply various strategies in order to effectively communicate market orientation and manage the inevitable resistance from people or other organizations involved in the museum. However, little has been written on how concepts and activities such as marketing are communicated to the internal and external publics. Specifically, there is little understanding of how a non-profit organization such as a museum should communicate its market orientation to its publics. This study sought to answer that gap in knowledge by posing this main question: What strategies did the management of the Metropolitan Museum of Manila employ to communicate its market orientation to the publics? In order to answer this, a case study was done on the Metropolitan Museum of Manila using a descriptive and exploratory approach. Interview schedules and survey questionnaires were used to solicit data on marketing strategies and communication of it to the museum publics. Qualitative data were analyzed thematically and integrated into thick description while quantitative data were analyzed using the weighted mean of the frequencies in each scale. Findings showed that the Metropolitan Museum of Manila is a private but non-profit organization that relies on museum attendance for its income. Because of the low gate receipts in the past years, the management was prompted to apply marketing in the museum through the creation of a detailed marketing plan and strategies such as corporate partnerships, sponsorships, intensive communications and promotions, and add-on sales. The communication strategy used by the management in delivering its marketing initiatives, although not formal, are through tools such as meetings and memoranda for the internal public and talks and feedback generation for the external publics while the approach is informational. It is therefore concluded that the informal communication strategy employed by the management of the Metropolitan Museum of Manila fall under the empirical-rational strategy.