“Destination competitiveness and museum marketing strategies: An emerging issue in the Italian context”

The aim of this paper is to inform the development of effective marketing strategies for provincial Italian museums. Being long-standing organisations, the characteristics of museums are deeply rooted within the context where they are located. As such, they must reflect an awareness of the location in which they are situated. With this in mind, we investigated the multifaceted nature of major Italian museums, located in a range of different provinces that had different degrees of competitiveness. We explain these variations in competitiveness by means of a descriptive analysis, in which we report on the most popular Italian museums and the levels of competitiveness in the province in which each museum is located. It is possible to categorise the most popular Italian museums in terms of those that are extreme outliers and those that fall into clusters. The differences in the number of visitors and the levels of competitiveness in the Italian provinces where the museums are located indicate that specific marketing strategies are warranted for the museums investigated, as determined by whether they are extreme outliers or part of a cluster. Marketing strategies for museums that are based on an analysis of the number of visitors and the degree of competitiveness of the province concerned have not been previously investigated. By using a novel approach of this kind, we present a preliminary attempt to develop strategies that are appropriate to the Italian context.