Some thoughts on the British Museum

Talk about your grand marketing schemes! There's nothing like a poster as tall as your already considerably large museum to draw attention.

Actually I'm not really very keen on what the British Museum had done here. Sure it's impressive and you definitely notice that they have an exhibition on Hadrian on. But blocking out part of the facade of your beautiful historic building with what is primarily an expanse of black? Can't say I think that was a particularly great decision.

Then again it does fit with all the other marketing materials the British Museum produced for the exhibit, so at least the expanse is consistent. I have to admit that it does fit rather nicely with the museum's theme of presenting important and significant artifacts. I don't have any arguments as far as the appropriateness to the brand is concerned! By making the advertisement the size of the museum itself it does give the exhibition a sense of importance. The sombre colours also reinforce the significance of the exhibition. It would be hard to take any billboard that size covered in rainbow hues particularly seriously. It would look even worse next to the classic British Museum facade too...

Researching Museums

I’ve been researching how various London museums market themselves these past few days. I have to say that I do love these museums, mostly because I like the concept of learning for its own sake. Very rarely do I go to one of these places because I need to research a specific subject anymore, it’s normally because I want to see the assorted pretty and cool objects or art on display. My tastes are pretty eclectic too, I’m just as interested in the fashion display at The V&A as I am in the dinosaur skeletons at The Natural History Museum or the combination of art and medicine at The Wellcome Collection.

However, not everyone has the time or the inclination to see every London museum so it’s important for these places to provide information to potential visitors on what they offer. This is what made me think that the marketing produced by museums would be interesting to explore. Each one has a different feel and theme to it which might appeal to different age groups, genders, nationalities and other variables. The need to attract both tourists and local visitors was one that I found particularly interesting. Not to mention that when you consider the different campaigns for different exhibitions within the same museum there’s a lot of information available from even a small selection of museums.

Incidentally The Science Museum and Natural History Museums are my favourites. I love the interactive displays and their subject matter. Not to mention the Natural History Museum has a gorgeous building. Then again most of the old places do. The British Museum is very impressive. Since they all have posters on them they’re part of the marketing as well!

Marketing Presentation

Last Wednesday I went to a marketing presentation on "How to Market your Business" by Stephen Campbell at the Westminster Reference Library. To be honest it was something that I needed to do to improve my knowledge of marketing, but it was also very useful for finding out about strategies to promote yourself. That's what I really needed to learn about, simple ways to make yourself more visible on the web.

It also made me aware that there are a lot of useful course out there to that you can take advantage of in order to improve your knowledge of something. I'm going to have to try and find a few more of these sorts of things to go to, especially if they are free like this one was.

On a side not the Westminster Reference Library is a good place to start finding things out as well. It's stocked with books for any research project, and if you work there there aren't any other things to distract you. Perfect if you get distracted by shiny objects like I do!

Most curiously the Westminster Reference Library is located just off of Leicester Square, which means that I must have been around it many times before, and yet never realised that it was there.

Sarah's Opening Post!

Hi there!

The idea of these blogs is to provide a log of what volunteers on Vital Regeneration's Vital Re-evolve project are up to. The goal of Vital Re-evolve is to provide a resource to young people looking to get into business and to do this we volunteers are researching various aspects of our chosen interest.

I'll be looking at marketing, and have so far been looking at the type of media produced by museums in order to market their exhibitions and facilities. The aim of this is to break down the techniques used by them to attract customers, in this case tourists and researchers. I'll be writing up my finding soon, so keep checking back for this and other developments.