Digital Communication and Museum Experience. A Multichannel Approach

Today, tourists can no longer be considered passive recipients ofproposals, but co-creators of travel experience (Campos et al., 2018;Prebensen et al., 2018). For this reason, companies and cultural organizationsneed to adopt a «multichannel» strategy that is able to attractthe tourists towards the value proposition, combining physical and digitalchannels in order to offer a personalized consumption experience,without barriers between the different communication channels, to createengagement and building relationships of trust (Evans et al., 2011).These features are even more relevant for the twenty autonomous publicmuseums in Italy, as the museums’ need to attract audience is anemerging issue, as the European Union has launched different fundingprograms on the audience development (Bamford and Wimmer, 2012),and the autonomy in the resource management has been the drivingforce for the development of new initiatives, especially concerningcommunication. Particularly, one of the main effects of the Ict impacton the cultural tourism offer system is the evolution from traditionalcommunication tools to digital ones, the transition from top-down tobottom-up approaches, and from single-media messages to those multimediaones (Rentschler, 2007). Object of the work is to understand thepotential of this emergent marketing approach (Napolitano and De Nisco,2017), with the aim of offering the museum experience as specialtourist product. In this regard, we used a survey (dataset of 1,200 respondents) to analyze the visitors’ choice of the National ArchaeologicalMuseum of Naples who intercepted at least one digital marketing channelin 2019, divided into 4 clusters (Gen-Z, Millennials, Gen-X, Babyboomers).Evidence shows that digital technologies are confirmed to beable to facilitate interactions with/among cultural tourists and that themulti-channelling is an advantage to get in touch with all types of targetaudience (Wickham and Lehman, 2015). The use of a digital multichannelcommunication strategy would allow museum managers to respondmore effectively to the needs of tourists and to oriented them towardsomnichannel strategy.