A corporate museum is a museum institution established, owned and operated – either directly or indirectly, through a non-profit organisation – by a company currently competing on a market. Its collection and displays consist of artefacts which are related to the firm’s core economic activity. Present in the museumscape since the beginning of the 20th century, the number and popularity of corporate museums have increased considerably in the last three decades, both in Europe and elsewhere (Augello, 2022). Despite the fact that they have recently attracted great scholarly attention, still little is known about their general characteristics. Does their relationship with the parent company make them different from other museums?
Research on the subject based on case studies highlights that it is intrinsic in corporate museums’ nature that they should indirectly benefit, in many different ways, the parent firm. In fact, they are meant by definition to (also) serve specific corporate needs in the context of their relationship with diverse stakeholders, which is summarised in Table 1.
Table 1: The purposes of a corporate museum from the parent company’s perspectives
This may lead to doubts as to whether this museum type is able or inclined to pursue the broad range of traditional museum missions, defined as collecting, conserving, researching, displaying and communicating tangible and intangible heritage to diverse publics for the purpose of education, study and enjoyment (ICOM, 2022). However, some authors claim that economic and non-economic aims pursued by corporate museums do not have to be in conflict with each other (Riviezzo et al., 2022). After all, they are distinct from those corporate exhibits only meant to advertise the brand, and they are producers of collective awareness that a given good has a cultural value attached to it.
Our study aims to shed light on corporate museums by examining a large sample of them in a specific national context: Italy. This country is presently home to the largest number of corporate museums in the world (Augello, 2022). We use data coming from the 2018 museum census by the Italian Statistical Office, which we complement with information coming from their websites. A first qualitative assessment of the 120 institutions identified as corporate museums reveals that they are generally young, mostly located in the North of the country and belong to diverse industries (from automobile to fashion), with a slight prevalence of food and wine producers and with the presence of many “Made in Italy” iconic brands.
We then move on to quantitative analysis to verify whether corporate museums’ connection with the competitive and efficiency-oriented world of companies makes them different from other museum types. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first quantitative analysis on corporate museums. We investigate whether corporate museums’ service provision is quantitatively different from the provision by the rest of private museums (belonging to either religious or non-religious institutions) and by the three different types of Italian publicly-owned museums (whose classification is by organisational mode: traditional, autonomous, outsourced). We consider service provision in the dimensions of core museum functions (research, collection management, dissemination) and visitor friendliness (provision of signage and information, restaurant or café, bookshop, organisation of events, catering to the needs of particular visitor groups such as children and the disabled), following Bertacchini et al. (2018) and Cellini et al. (2020). We also focus on digital services, which we interpret (also) as a proxy for attitude towards innovation (Vicente et al., 2012; Li et al. 2023, Cavalieri et al., 2023). We use count data models estimation methods, and in order to account for possible confounding effects, we include other explanatory variables referring to museums’ characteristics and contextual factors: a dummy equal to 1 if the institution is a museum and not a monument or an archaeological site; square meters; number of employees; number of employees per surface unit; age; membership in a network of museums; presence of a free admission policy; number of museums in the same province; regional dummies to control for size of the local population, tourist vocation, institutional quality and internet accessibility.
Our analysis reveals that, on average, corporate museums do not provide more core services than other museums, as it was to be expected given the public good component of this category of services. Perhaps contrary to expectations, we find that corporate museums are not among the museums providing the largest number of (non-digital) services enhancing visitor friendliness. On the other hand, corporate museums do not provide less services in both dimensions than the vast majority (over 75%) of museums. Finally, corporate museums provide more digital services than traditional public museums (the largest category) and private museums owned by churches, and not less than other museum types.
All in all, our conclusion is that corporate museums are, on average, not so different from other museums. Therefore, they are not just marketing tools, but true cultural institutions, though a stronger commitment to core museum functions and visitor friendliness is desirable if they wish to consolidate their image as such. Far from being detrimental to corporate museums’ service provision, their relationship with the parent company is probably the reason for their good performance in the digitalisation dimension. Corporate museums’ higher levels of digitalisation may be seen as the effect of a knowledge spillover between the more profit-oriented business world, where digitalisation is often essential for survival and success, and the non-profit cultural sector.
References
Augello, M. (2022). Curating Italian fashion. Heritage, industry, institutions. London: Bloomsbury.
Bertacchini, E., Dalle Nogare, C., & Scuderi, R. (2018). Ownership, organization structure and public service provision: the case of museums. Journal of Cultural Economics, 42, 619–643.
Cavalieri, M., Ferrante, L., Martorana, M., & Rizzo, I. (2023). The ITC strategy of Italian museums: institutional, supply and demand side drivers. Economics of Innovation and New Technology, 33(4), 489-509.
Cellini, R., Cuccia, T. & Lisi, D. (2020). Spatial dependence in museum services: An analysis of the Italian case, Journal of Cultural Economics, 44, 535–562.
ICOM, 2022. Museum definition, https://icom.museum/en/resources/standards-guidelines/museum-definition/.
Li, C., Coll-Serrano, V., & Rausell-Köster, P. (2023). Exploring the evidence-based driving factors of innovation in arts and cultural organizations. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 41(2), 567-590.
Riviezzo A., Mason, M. C., Garofano, A., & Napolitano, M. R. (2022). Uncovering the worth of the past: the relationship between corporate museums’ strategic orientation and dual performance. Management Decision, 60(7), 1852–1874.
Vicente, E., Camarero C., & Garrido, M. J. (2012). Insights into innovation in European museums. Public Management Review, 14(5), 649–679.
About this article
Dalle Nogare, C., Murzyn-Kupisz, M. Core functions, visitor friendliness and digitalisation: a comparative analysis of corporate museums’ performance. J Cult Econ 48, 405–437 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-024-09515-z
About the authors
Chiara Dalle Nogare is Associate Professor at Università degli Studi di Brescia
Monika Murzyn-Kupisz is Professor at Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakowie
About the image
Lavazza Museum in Turin, source: author
