Marketing and selling are different. Popular euphemisms and sloppy language confuse marketing and sales with such terms as telemarketing or direct marketing. Those activities are more accurately telesales and direct sales. But negative connotations of the word sales (pushy sales, automobile salesman, door-to-door salesman, cold calling sales, etc.), force corporations to "dress up" these activities with the label marketing.

In healthy organizations the marketing department represents the market as the organization addresses key questions. Marketing poses and attempts to answer the question: How does (not should) the market behave? The very core of marketing has to do with understanding actual and potential audiences. In museums, marketing nurtures audience by discovering how each market segment values the museum’s resources and capabilities. Marketing also provides an advocacy link between the market and the museum. When the marketing department interacts with other museum departments, it advocates what audience segments value, trying to shape museum products to fill the audience need. Conversely, when addressing the audience, marketing advocates the museum’s products and values, serving to explain these in a way that makes sense to the audience. Here advertising and public relations come into play.

Knowledge of how markets behave can lead the museum to define the Six Ps of nonprofit marketing:

1. What products and services should we offer?

2. What position (e.g. family audience, general adult visitors, teenagers, tour groups) should we take?

3. In what place shall we deliver our products and services?

4. How shall we price our products and services?

5. How shall we provide for donations to support our products and services?

6. How shall we promote our products and services?

The best answers to these questions come when audience needs and behaviors match mission-driven curatorial, educational, and organizational capability, resources, and values.

Too often, the unproductive tension between the marketing and other museum departments engenderes debate or, even worse, too little interaction, and too late. Exhibitions are delivered for promotion after they are developed without market consideration in the early phases of exhibit planning. When this happens, marketing is reduced to sales. Dialogue between marketing and other museum departments, on the other hand, begins with a commitment to meeting customer needs. Museum customers may be the visitors (real or virtual), scholars, donors, members, community leaders, granting agencies, or other museum departments. When exhibitions are being developed, planners thoughtfully address the Six Ps.

Marketing defines the possibility of a transaction between the audience and the museum, sales manifests (or closes) the transaction. Marketing defines the whole; sales comes to terms with the individual. Advertising is a proper part of promotion and it costs dearly. It is most effective when it is an integral part of a strategically designed marketing program that considers the Six Ps.

Museums usually underplay the role of sales because they lack strategic marketing plans that lay out the market, advertising, and sales potential of all activities, and the attendant requirements for board, staff, and volunteer training. Museum sales activity usually concentrates on big donors and foundations but significant sales improvements can also be realized in the gift shop, at the membership desk, and when anyone calls the museum for information. All of these are sales opportunities.

Just as in business, success in the nonprofit sector, demands sophisticated marketing. Done correctly, marketing links museum collections, products, and services to customers so well that selling becomes easy.

To be most effective, marketing should be a museum- wide view that guides board, staff, and volunteers operating on two principlese:

1. Define the customer’s needs within the museum’s values, resources, and capabilities.

2. Design products and services to meet those needs.

3. For more reading on this topic see:

"Linking Objects to Audience," NoIT, vol 1, no1, Spring 1996, Guerrilla Marketing Handbook by Jay Levinson and Seton Godin, and Chapter 1 of Service America by Karl Albreiht