Publicity for Exhibitions in Museums of Modern and Contemporary Art

According to marketing theory, promotion is an instrument used by organizations to communicate. Through promotion, an organization creates an image of itself and of its products, which usually reflects the organization’s core values. The four main tools used in promotion, as they are portrayed in marketing literature, are advertising, personal selling, public relations, and sales promotion. Publicity, also known as un-paid media coverage, is a promotional tool, and in these texts it is usually considered as a part of public relations. Publicity serves to promote a product or a company in the media without paying to advertise. Publicity is probably the most popular form of public relations work conducted by museum. In order to promote itself, the museum needs to find or create favourable news about its collections and exhibitions, and the news is helpful in stimulating public interest in new artists. Moreover consumers are more likely to be influenced by news and editorial copy than by advertising. In the literature about museum marketing, publicity is usually just mentioned in the form of free publicity and as such as one of several public relations tools. In this thesis we investigate how museums of modern and contemporary art make use of publicity for exhibitions. Museums invest a large part of their promotional efforts in publicity, therefore the subject is relevant and important. We analyzed three museums of modern and contemporary art in Italy and three museums in the United Kingdom, in order to compare the ways of using the publicity tool in two different countries. Due to the scarcity of literature about publicity for museums, and especially for exhibitions, an interpretive approach with mainly qualitative methodology has been chosen. The research methods used are: content analysis, media coverage analysis, and non-structured interviews. While for the content analysis and the non-structured interviews, we have followed a qualitative approach, media coverage analysis has been used to quantitatively evaluate some aspects of publicity, although the results of the analysis have been interpreted from a qualitative point of view. The aim of this research is to provide an overview of the functioning of publicity for exhibitions in museums, taking into account in particular the creation of press releases, the choice of a media list and the media coverage. This research does not aspire to act as a manual for publicity or to criticize the work performed by museums and their publicity departments, but rather to give insight into an important aspect of museums and their promotion and, possibly, to open a new branch of research in this field.