Museum visitors’ profiling in the experiential perspective, value co-creation and implications for museums and destinations: an exploratory study from Italy

Cultural heritage management (CHM) literature and visitor studies are important sources of information not only for cultural organizations and museums as an aid in their management and development, but also for tourist destinations due to the fact that the former may play an important role in determining the attractiveness of the latter and may be one reason why tourists choose one travel destination over another. However, as regards museums in particular, the literature reveals that few studies have been designed to fully explore the components of the experience desired by visitors in order to define a correspondingly suitable museum offer, and to underscore the relationship between this offer and destination attractiveness, and thus, to highlight the implications of such studies for destination management. The present study aims to contribute to filling this gap in the literature; it has one main objective: to cluster museum visitors (Lattin et al., 2003; Wedel and Kamakura, 2002) according to the desired experiential dimensions. To attain this goal, we conducted a survey via face-to-face interviews (Yin, 2009; Brangule-Vlagsma et al., 2002) on a wide sample of visitors to the National Gallery of the Marche, one of the most important Italian, state-run museums focused on the Renaissance period. The museum is located in Urbino, today a World Heritage Site. The empirical research revealed an interesting and unexpected picture of the Urbino Gallery with five different clusters of visitors identified from the cluster analysis: Occasionals, Aestheticals, Routine-breakers, Global experientials, and Aesthetic learners. Some clusters may be considered the “classic” museum visitors who are mainly interested in the aesthetic and learning dimensions of the museum experience, while other clusters represent the “new targets” who are interested in other dimensions of experience, such as entertainment, evasion, and/or socialization. The main managerial implication for the Gallery - and a preliminary implication for other museums - consists in recognizing the importance of investing resources in all five types of desired experiences in order to satisfy a heterogeneous target of visitors. To this end, it is essential for museums (and cultural institutions in general) to collect complementary resources and skills from local stakeholders. In fact, one of the main implications for destinations is to include museums and cultural institutions in the design and management of a destination offer.