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Abstract:
In times of financial constraints, people tend to change their consumer behavior in such ways that this adds even more complexity to the planning process of the companies that try to constantly adapt to those changes from their working environment. In these circumstances, for a cultural organization like a museum it's even more important to develop resilient marketing strategies to make sure that they can maximize the added value offered to the customers while at the same time keeping their costs at a reasonable amount.
But not even the best strategy in the world can cope with the situation when people simply decide to cut the visits to the museums, so that's why it is very important for a museum to adopt A strategy that will prevent from the beginning the people to simply cut the visits.
In this context, this paper explores how perceived household budget pressure influences consumers’ willingness to minimize the museum visits and examines what marketing strategies could help cultural organizations to remain attractive during financial constraints.
The study assumes that even if museums bring social and educational value, they can still be very vulnerable when people reprioritize spendings as a measure to rebalance the living costs. The research adopts a quantitative approach based on a questionnaire designed to measure perceived economic pressure, spending-cut priorities and museum visit behavior under budget constraints to establish who are the consumers categories that are most likely to reduce or cut visits, and the appropriate strategies that the museums must build in order to preserve demand, such as price-related incentives, better communication, family-oriented offers, free-entry days, and enhanced visitor experience.
The relevant contribution of this paper is that is bringing a clear understanding of consumer behavior toward cultural organizations in times of financial pressure and provides important marketing strategies that contribute to increase the marketing resilience by identifying the best measures that may help museums remain relevant and accessible when household budgets tighten and prevent the “by default cut of the visits” in some consumers.
Keywords: Consumer behavior, financial constraints, museums, cultural organizations, marketing strategies, marketing resilience, budget pressure, visiting intention
