Museum Marketing : Marketing the Finnish Aviation Museum through Multimodal Marketing and Social Media

Abstract

Marketing a museum through digital marketing and social media represents a topic with an overall significance due to the worldwide rising importance of social media and communities as marketing channels of XXI century. Consequently, cultural organizations are more and more committed to employ digital media opportunities, in order to enable greater public participation and an efficient and costless two-way communication with peers and current or possible customers. By using YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, which are globally recognized social networking services, museums have adopted marketing strategies based on a user centric approach, perceiving customers as a vital source of information and innovation.

This study’s aim is to increase the awareness of Finnish Aviation Museum services and products with the use of multimodal marketing and social media tools. As an illustration, the study intends to highlight the case organization and its services and products for people and communities globally through the digital marketing techniques by designing and implementing a multimodal service for Finnish Aviation Museum: a viral video based on a user centric perspective encompassing three video clips. The video clips which are uploaded on Youtube and museum Facebook page, reflect the museum’s customer segments: aviation supporters, companies and educational organizations. Moreover, the study involves a second organization, The Chinese Aviation Museum, by realizing a comparison in terms of multimodal marketing between Finnish Aviation Museum and the similar institution from China.

This Bachelor’s thesis includes a theory section and an empirical section that deals with the case organizations. The theory section encompasses issues such as museum marketing and its specific strategies, digital marketing and social media marketing. The empirical section involved data collection mixed-method, analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data. Furthermore it employs a qualitative research methodology consisting of interviews with the Marketing Managers of Finnish Aviation Museum and Chinese Aviation Museum and action research through which the researchers acted in the real-world situations.

The interviews showed that the representatives of the Finnish Aviation Museum and Chinese Aviation Museum are aware of the importance of implementing the digital marketing techniques and promoting social media campaigns as useful means of providing an identity to their organizations. This idea was also confirmed by a significant amount of viewers who visualized the viral video realized by the study’s authors and provided pertinent comments regarding the Finnish Aviation Museum services and products.

Therefore, it is important for the representatives of the case organization to re-evaluate their management decisions in accordance with the research outcomes and the feedback of their customers. Moreover, the present study would be a very useful tool for museums and galleries in designing and implementing their marketing strategies based on a digital and social media marketing perspective.