Essay of Emilie Labonne

Cultural marketing two words who were few times opposite to each other. But why, because art is not something you can buy? Something has been done with passion? But it also something that since centuries exists, arts and craft are not the same as art for example, but some arts and craft who were sold in the old time are art pieces conserved in museum nowadays. So finally culture marketing has always existed.

Thank to the help of the book Marketing culture and the arts written by Francois Colbert with Jacques Nantel in 1994, we will explain how much marketing is important in the cultural field. In a first part we will explain what is marketing by talking about the two forms of marketing: the base marketing, and the cultural marketing. And then thanks to “Promotion et marketing culturel” an article written by Pierre-Yves Kairis and published in “Actes du colloque Quelle culture pour Liège?” in 2001, we will talk about the way to make the public aware of the culture through the marketing field, particularly as part of the new culture society, to illustrate it we will focus on two important points for this subject, who are, the art education, and the media field.

I. Marketing, a part of cultural field.

In the art and culture field marketing suffers a lot his reputation deficit. However, thank to it, it’s possible to make project, to make partnership, attracting and securing the loyalty of the public and make them able in equality to have access to culture, financing the material, the modern cultural organizations need a step and strict marketing tools adapted to their particularities.

a) The traditional marketing.

In the classical model, which corresponds to the reality of the commercial and industrial firms, elements must be considered to be a sequence having its starting point by the market view.

The marketing success has the principle that the firm tries to satisfy the needs of the costumer. With these information that the marketing system gives to the firm, it can evaluate the needs and makes itself to be able to answer to this needs, with the knowledge and the material it can have to transform the needs in a real product. Then it chooses four elements who are important in commercial composition, and adjusts some of them to each others to create what the costumer really needs. The four elements are: market, information system, firm and commercial composition. The market is in this case at the time the starting point and the arrival point of process.

There are to manners to consider marketing: the traditional business firms and the cultural firm. In the first case, the firm tries to know as we explain earlier the needs of the costumers to give them what they want, even if they have to change the production compare to the prototype, until the costumer has satisfaction of the product. In the case of  a cultural firm, it takes first the artist point of view and then searches a group who would be interested in the artiste work.

b) The cultural marketing.

Even if traditional marketing and cultural marketing have the same element to put their product on the market, the focus on the product use by the cultural firms  is different, so it’s an evidence that the model of traditional marketing can’t be use in totality by the cultural marketing. The starting point of a firm who sell artwork, is the product itself.

By this way the firm tries to find a market that would be interested in the art product to sell. When it’s done, and it notices that the product interests some costumers, it determines the three elements of the commercial composition (price, distribution, and promotion.) to catch potential costumers. For this type of firm the model processes is: firm as a product-information system, market-information system –firm-commercial composition-market. The starting point of the processes is the product in this case the artist art work, and the ending point is the market. This approach “product to costumer”, even if it can be used for others kind of firm, is typical of the art firm field. We can add that by the searching of a market for the commercial firm, the most important is the profit that it can do, it would be able to erase the production of a product if the costumer is not interested in. Opposite to that , the cultural firm is focused on the product, the goal is not the financial field, but in the art field, and it’s  to obtain the goal in an artistic way, thank to that it’s would be possible to measure the success of the firm. But it exists some cultural firms who are not focused on the product, but on the market, the target in this case is more to finance more than spread culture, in this case the traditional model of marketing would be better to use to put the product on the market field. We can take to illustrate it the examples of the show producers in Broadway or Hollywood studios.

II. Cultural marketing as an audience.

The notion of audience has been changed. Nowadays, we are more familiar to think about people like a lot more than a few. In fact we know that it exists different kind of audience for art, included the on who never come to the typical cultural place like museum, who is more considerate as a non-audience. We can also notice that there is also social disparities in the society, and it includes that some citizen can’t have access to the art culture.

The audience problem can’t be considerate only because of the museum entries or the social class and so on. The system still being the same but the situation changed since 30 years: we can notice a augmentation of the audience, and more versatile, for example the young people are more interested in culture than in the past.

This is because of marketing, The cultural marketing uses a lot of good material to make the target be interested in this field, with for example the media.

a) Cultural education.

It thanks to a cultural introduction that the children who are future adults and costumers that it’s possible to make them integrate the passion of culture and make them have an approach of marketing, in the good and in the bad way of this field. It thank to it as we told earlier that there is an evolution of the  audience about the cultural  field, there is more, nowadays an valorisation of culture in life.

For example school is a kind of promotion for the cultural field, by the way that the teacher talk about art with the children, so thanks to it, they are more sensitive to art, and it make them want to know more about it, it’s a kind of non-conscient marketing, at the moment it seems to be nothing but it forms the future adult to be a art consumer.

It’s the same at home, it’s up to the parents to make their children appreciate art, and by this way make them able to like it by themselves,

b) Media, a good help for marketing.

It’s thanks to the medias and the making of marketing that day-by-day the art promotion is better. Radio, TV, cinema, internet, are a very good way to spread the information about an event. Because of this intensive art promotion nowadays, the audience is more attracted to art and make the marketing able to develop it self, to make the art promotion better, as we said earlier it thank to that, that young people are more interested in arts, because they learn how to use media thanks to school, and they are interested in culture because they are the more active people in the media field.

Conclusion.

As we said, art marketing even if culture has first notion to do with commercial stuff, took an important place to promote and sell art, with a new system of marketing who is better and better day by day thanks to the cultural education we have actually in the society.