Marketing to families in the museum context

Families with children represent an insightful segment for several tourist and cultural service providers. During last decades, the literature on family decision making in tourism and leisure has expanded the knowledge on family group dynamics and preferences. Nonetheless, many issues keep apart from focused inquires. This is the case of the families as potential audience of museum visits. The aim of the paper is to explore the strategies and the policies adopted by museums for the creation and the communication of a family-targeted offer. The objective is to find out relevant patterns in terms of audience development. That means to outline the best practices to reach and engage families with children as museum visitors. Therefore, our main research question is: How do museums target families with children? The empirical context is based on the museums of Venice, one of the main tourism and cultural Italian cities. From a methodological perspective, we adopt the use of the case study. In particular, manifold sources of information are taken into account to conduct the inquiry: in-depth interviews with museum managers, contents from both museum and tourist information websites, other printed and online extra materials. The expected outcome is to contribute to the research on family leisure by providing alternative paths to target and attract families to museums. Indeed, the investigation takes place in a scarcely developed researched area and proposes elements of novelty in the study of both museum marketing and marketing to families.