As international travel has become increasingly affordable, overseas visitors have become more important for many UK museums and galleries.
But being at the mercy of so many variables – weather, transport, exchange rates, economic upheaval – can make the market notoriously unpredictable.
Ten years ago, after decades of steady growth, the tourist industry was reeling in the wake of two massive and entirely unforeseeable crises.
The previous year’s foot-and-mouth outbreak, with its unsettling footage of blackened animal carcasses stacked high on funeral pyres, had already done a good job of scaring tourists away from the UK by the time the earth-shaking events of 11 September 2001 took place.
By 2002, inbound trips had plummeted 9.4% on the previous year and tourist expenditure was down 12%. It seemed at the time that numbers of overseas tourists could take years to recover, but in fact they bounced back surprisingly quickly. Five years later, the figures were reaching new heights, with the UK attracting a record 32.8 million international visitors.
That robust recovery offers much room for optimism, even amid the current climate of economic gloom. We’re only two years in and the teens (or whatever moniker will eventually be applied to the decade) have already produced one recession, one volcanic ash cloud, multiple austerity cuts and now a financial crisis sweeping across the Eurozone.
But though growth is certainly muted, visits from overseas tourists are showing remarkable stability. The latest figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) Travel Trends survey reveal that, after a dip in 2010, the number of North American visitors rose 6% in 2011.
Unsurprisingly, footfall from Eurozone countries has marginally dropped, but the rest of Europe (including Switzerland, Norway and Russia) is offering strong growth, up 33% in August to October 2011 compared with the previous year.
With the wider UK economy flatlining, a weak pound is one explanation for this continued resilience; but the variety, quality and affordability that the UK’s cultural and heritage offers has played no small part in attracting inbound visitors.
According to the most recent research from tourism body VisitBritain, museums and galleries boosted the economy by £1bn in 2009 and figures from the National Museum Directors’ Conference (NMDC) show this impact is holding up.
In 2010-11, overall visits by overseas residents to free national museums in England reached a new peak of 43.8m, a rise of 53% since the millennium.
But in spite of ongoing success in the tourist market, there are concerns that the museum sector is taking a reactive rather than proactive approach to changing visitor trends.
Tourism bodies have been forecasting audience expansion from the booming economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) for years now and, while the predicted rise is finally starting to materialise, some institutions remain unprepared.
According to the ONS, trips made by non-European and non-American residents grew by 12% to 4.7m last year, with BRIC holidaymakers accounting for much of that increase.
But according to David Brownlee, the former director of Audiences UK, cultural institutions need to start thinking much more about tailoring and assessing their offer in terms of these emerging markets.
“For museums and galleries, there’s real potential to be doing more to tap into them,” he says. “We need to think about new audiences but we also need to think about their needs and how to assess their experiences.”
Brownlee believes that some institutions may have built up an incomplete profile of their overseas visitors because of a failure to update simple things such as language facilities.
“The language barrier is absolutely fundamental,” he says. “The current data [on visitor feedback] is often flawed because it is skewed towards English-speaking visitors.”
The sector would do well to look to the continent. Visitors from the BRIC nations have grown more rapidly in countries such as France and many museums and galleries have now invested in facilities better tailored to their needs. But this expansion has highlighted other difficulties in marketing to BRIC audiences.
“In France we have found that [for a lot of BRIC visitors] the museums are just another thing to tick off the list,” says Corinne Estrada, head of Agenda Communications, a Paris-based international marketing agency for museums.
“They’ll do the Eiffel Tower one day, the Louvre the next day and Disneyland the day after. They want to see the icons but not the smaller museums.”
This remains particularly true of the Chinese market, which is steadily growing in the UK. It’s a largely untapped audience with huge potential – VisitBritain reports that the number of holidaymakers from China has doubled in the last year alone, while the level of outbound Chinese tourists is projected to reach 100 million by 2020, making it by far the largest overseas market in the world.
Many of those numbers arrive on whistle-stop tours with an inflexible itinerary so it can be difficult to penetrate the market. National museums such as London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) are forging their own connections (see box), but with fewer ancestral links and cultural reference points, Chinese visitors are proving more tricky to lure away from the major cities.
Some regions, however, are starting to reach out to them in more imaginative ways. Earlier this year, Barnsley announced plans to establish itself as a place of pilgrimage for the 70-million strong Christian population in China.
The south Yorkshire mining town is the birthplace of James Hudson Taylor, a hitherto-obscure 19th-century missionary credited with introducing Christianity to China.
Small groups of Chinese visitors recently started filtering into the town to pay homage to Taylor and the council is now planning a major initiative to boost their numbers, including – among other things – a permanent exhibition at the local museum, Experience Barnsley, telling the story of Taylor’s eventful life.
A spokesman for the initiative says: “[Barnsley] could be a place of religious interest, like Canterbury or Lourdes.”
Elsewhere, budgets for such all-encompassing campaigns may be squeezed at present but even small steps can make a difference, says Andrew McCarthy, the director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, Yorkshire.
“We have very limited resources and no member of staff dedicated to marketing,” says McCarthy. Instead, he says, the museum caters for its ever-growing influx of foreign tourists – particularly from Japan, where Wuthering Heights has a large cult following – through simple, cost-effective measures such as recruiting bilingual volunteers.
“Last year our visitor numbers were up by three or four per cent and that’s continuing with bookings this year,” adds McCarthy.
In spite of growth in emerging markets, English-speaking visitors from North America, Australia and New Zealand remain the dominant force in terms of non-European visitors to the UK.
Ancestral tourism forms a key element of many of those visits and marketing campaigns are proving more and more adept at tapping into nostalgic patriotism.
In 2009, Scotland used the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns to stage its first Year of the Homecoming, a nationwide initiative to reach the Scottish diaspora scattered worldwide.
The impact of the festival is still being debated. Organisers say it generated an additional £53.7m in tourist revenue for Scotland and 95,000 extra visitors.
Critics say domestic visits accounted for much of that number and the scheme’s global reach was limited. It was also criticised for underestimating arts and culture in its strategic planning.
For smaller regional institutions, however, the celebration was an ideal opportunity to boost their profile on the coattails of a wider campaign. “One of the key things in overseas promotion is working in partnership,” says Ian Gardner, head of marketing at the National Trust for Scotland.
“The impact that we can have in marketing a single attraction can be quite small. It’s much more effective if we become part of a wider message.”
The festival also allowed various bodies to create a joined-up offer for visitors through cross promotion, taking in museums and historic sites, distilleries, restaurants, hotels and sporting activities, as well as ancestral gatherings.
“We worked closely with Historic Scotland on things like linking up places on a map to family names to make it as easy as possible for people to see where they could go,” says Gardner. Another festival is in the pipeline for 2014, when Glasgow will host the Commonwealth Games.
Woven into the fabric of all of these initiatives is the internet, which is becoming an ever more powerful tool for reaching new audiences. Not only does it make cross promotion with tourist bodies and corporate entities much more straightforward, but the explosion in social media such as Twitter and Facebook means direct marketing and word-of-mouth publicity can now have a global reach.
Simple measures such as having separate Twitter feeds for press and visitors, cross referencing exhibitions with museums worldwide under Twitter hashtags, and installing a “Like” Facebook button on museum websites have all been cited as effective ways of reaching new visitors.
Even without taking into account any unforeseeable cataclysms, international tourism is undoubtedly facing a difficult few years. But with the Olympics, the Jubilee and the Titanic centenary coming up, 2012 could see a new peak in overseas visitors to the UK.
Through a strategic mix of old and new marketing, museums and galleries can ensure they remain at the forefront of that market, no matter how big their budget is.
Geraldine Kendall is a freelance journalist
“The V&A has developed into a much more global brand over the past 10 years by engaging with its international audience,” says Zoe Franklin, acting head of press at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Though the museum has a wide cultural reach, with 45% of its audience coming from overseas, it hovers around the lower half of London’s top 10 attractions.
But the institution has found that embedding cultural partnership in its marketing can make a real difference over time. According to Franklin, the museum has benefited from using its extensive collection of Chinese decorative art to raise its profile in the country through touring and UK-based shows.
Its tours to China have become a near-annual event – this year the museum is taking masterpieces of Chinese and European porcelain to Beijing as part of a wider festival to promote cultural links.
In the past few years, the museum has also staged a number of domestic exhibitions with a Chinese flavour, including China Design Now and Imperial Chinese Robes from the Forbidden City.
At 26,000 visitors a year, its current Chinese audience still represents a tiny percentage of overall numbers (3 million in 2010-11), but this is a marked rise compared with just four years ago, says Franklin, when the museum’s visitor numbers from the BRIC nations combined was less than 1%.
Partnerships with private companies and tour operators are playing an increasingly vital role in overseas marketing. Eurostar has recently launched a joined-up initiative with museums and galleries, restaurants and shopping precincts in London, Paris, Brussels and Lille, offering special discounts to all ticket-holders.
The scheme is specifically aimed at capturing repeat visitors and drawing them to new exhibitions. Frequent travellers can also earn loyalty points for their friends and family.
In Paris, institutions such as Jeu de Paume, the Musée d’Art Moderne and the Musée du Quai Branly are benefitting from the trade-off, while the Tate Modern and the V&A are among the institutions that have signed up in London.
Eurostar partners manager Rachel Calver says leisure travellers are increasing year on year, in spite of the economic climate. “Research has shown that during previous economic downturns, travellers have tended to protect their expenditure on short-haul leisure breaks,” she says.
But being at the mercy of so many variables – weather, transport, exchange rates, economic upheaval – can make the market notoriously unpredictable.
Ten years ago, after decades of steady growth, the tourist industry was reeling in the wake of two massive and entirely unforeseeable crises.
The previous year’s foot-and-mouth outbreak, with its unsettling footage of blackened animal carcasses stacked high on funeral pyres, had already done a good job of scaring tourists away from the UK by the time the earth-shaking events of 11 September 2001 took place.
By 2002, inbound trips had plummeted 9.4% on the previous year and tourist expenditure was down 12%. It seemed at the time that numbers of overseas tourists could take years to recover, but in fact they bounced back surprisingly quickly. Five years later, the figures were reaching new heights, with the UK attracting a record 32.8 million international visitors.
That robust recovery offers much room for optimism, even amid the current climate of economic gloom. We’re only two years in and the teens (or whatever moniker will eventually be applied to the decade) have already produced one recession, one volcanic ash cloud, multiple austerity cuts and now a financial crisis sweeping across the Eurozone.
But though growth is certainly muted, visits from overseas tourists are showing remarkable stability. The latest figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) Travel Trends survey reveal that, after a dip in 2010, the number of North American visitors rose 6% in 2011.
Unsurprisingly, footfall from Eurozone countries has marginally dropped, but the rest of Europe (including Switzerland, Norway and Russia) is offering strong growth, up 33% in August to October 2011 compared with the previous year.
With the wider UK economy flatlining, a weak pound is one explanation for this continued resilience; but the variety, quality and affordability that the UK’s cultural and heritage offers has played no small part in attracting inbound visitors.
According to the most recent research from tourism body VisitBritain, museums and galleries boosted the economy by £1bn in 2009 and figures from the National Museum Directors’ Conference (NMDC) show this impact is holding up.
In 2010-11, overall visits by overseas residents to free national museums in England reached a new peak of 43.8m, a rise of 53% since the millennium.
But in spite of ongoing success in the tourist market, there are concerns that the museum sector is taking a reactive rather than proactive approach to changing visitor trends.
Tourism bodies have been forecasting audience expansion from the booming economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) for years now and, while the predicted rise is finally starting to materialise, some institutions remain unprepared.
According to the ONS, trips made by non-European and non-American residents grew by 12% to 4.7m last year, with BRIC holidaymakers accounting for much of that increase.
But according to David Brownlee, the former director of Audiences UK, cultural institutions need to start thinking much more about tailoring and assessing their offer in terms of these emerging markets.
“For museums and galleries, there’s real potential to be doing more to tap into them,” he says. “We need to think about new audiences but we also need to think about their needs and how to assess their experiences.”
Brownlee believes that some institutions may have built up an incomplete profile of their overseas visitors because of a failure to update simple things such as language facilities.
“The language barrier is absolutely fundamental,” he says. “The current data [on visitor feedback] is often flawed because it is skewed towards English-speaking visitors.”
The sector would do well to look to the continent. Visitors from the BRIC nations have grown more rapidly in countries such as France and many museums and galleries have now invested in facilities better tailored to their needs. But this expansion has highlighted other difficulties in marketing to BRIC audiences.
“In France we have found that [for a lot of BRIC visitors] the museums are just another thing to tick off the list,” says Corinne Estrada, head of Agenda Communications, a Paris-based international marketing agency for museums.
“They’ll do the Eiffel Tower one day, the Louvre the next day and Disneyland the day after. They want to see the icons but not the smaller museums.”
This remains particularly true of the Chinese market, which is steadily growing in the UK. It’s a largely untapped audience with huge potential – VisitBritain reports that the number of holidaymakers from China has doubled in the last year alone, while the level of outbound Chinese tourists is projected to reach 100 million by 2020, making it by far the largest overseas market in the world.
Many of those numbers arrive on whistle-stop tours with an inflexible itinerary so it can be difficult to penetrate the market. National museums such as London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) are forging their own connections (see box), but with fewer ancestral links and cultural reference points, Chinese visitors are proving more tricky to lure away from the major cities.
Some regions, however, are starting to reach out to them in more imaginative ways. Earlier this year, Barnsley announced plans to establish itself as a place of pilgrimage for the 70-million strong Christian population in China.
The south Yorkshire mining town is the birthplace of James Hudson Taylor, a hitherto-obscure 19th-century missionary credited with introducing Christianity to China.
Small groups of Chinese visitors recently started filtering into the town to pay homage to Taylor and the council is now planning a major initiative to boost their numbers, including – among other things – a permanent exhibition at the local museum, Experience Barnsley, telling the story of Taylor’s eventful life.
A spokesman for the initiative says: “[Barnsley] could be a place of religious interest, like Canterbury or Lourdes.”
Elsewhere, budgets for such all-encompassing campaigns may be squeezed at present but even small steps can make a difference, says Andrew McCarthy, the director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, Yorkshire.
“We have very limited resources and no member of staff dedicated to marketing,” says McCarthy. Instead, he says, the museum caters for its ever-growing influx of foreign tourists – particularly from Japan, where Wuthering Heights has a large cult following – through simple, cost-effective measures such as recruiting bilingual volunteers.
“Last year our visitor numbers were up by three or four per cent and that’s continuing with bookings this year,” adds McCarthy.
In spite of growth in emerging markets, English-speaking visitors from North America, Australia and New Zealand remain the dominant force in terms of non-European visitors to the UK.
Ancestral tourism forms a key element of many of those visits and marketing campaigns are proving more and more adept at tapping into nostalgic patriotism.
In 2009, Scotland used the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns to stage its first Year of the Homecoming, a nationwide initiative to reach the Scottish diaspora scattered worldwide.
The impact of the festival is still being debated. Organisers say it generated an additional £53.7m in tourist revenue for Scotland and 95,000 extra visitors.
Critics say domestic visits accounted for much of that number and the scheme’s global reach was limited. It was also criticised for underestimating arts and culture in its strategic planning.
For smaller regional institutions, however, the celebration was an ideal opportunity to boost their profile on the coattails of a wider campaign. “One of the key things in overseas promotion is working in partnership,” says Ian Gardner, head of marketing at the National Trust for Scotland.
“The impact that we can have in marketing a single attraction can be quite small. It’s much more effective if we become part of a wider message.”
The festival also allowed various bodies to create a joined-up offer for visitors through cross promotion, taking in museums and historic sites, distilleries, restaurants, hotels and sporting activities, as well as ancestral gatherings.
“We worked closely with Historic Scotland on things like linking up places on a map to family names to make it as easy as possible for people to see where they could go,” says Gardner. Another festival is in the pipeline for 2014, when Glasgow will host the Commonwealth Games.
Woven into the fabric of all of these initiatives is the internet, which is becoming an ever more powerful tool for reaching new audiences. Not only does it make cross promotion with tourist bodies and corporate entities much more straightforward, but the explosion in social media such as Twitter and Facebook means direct marketing and word-of-mouth publicity can now have a global reach.
Simple measures such as having separate Twitter feeds for press and visitors, cross referencing exhibitions with museums worldwide under Twitter hashtags, and installing a “Like” Facebook button on museum websites have all been cited as effective ways of reaching new visitors.
Even without taking into account any unforeseeable cataclysms, international tourism is undoubtedly facing a difficult few years. But with the Olympics, the Jubilee and the Titanic centenary coming up, 2012 could see a new peak in overseas visitors to the UK.
Through a strategic mix of old and new marketing, museums and galleries can ensure they remain at the forefront of that market, no matter how big their budget is.
Geraldine Kendall is a freelance journalist
China to China
“The V&A has developed into a much more global brand over the past 10 years by engaging with its international audience,” says Zoe Franklin, acting head of press at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Though the museum has a wide cultural reach, with 45% of its audience coming from overseas, it hovers around the lower half of London’s top 10 attractions.
But the institution has found that embedding cultural partnership in its marketing can make a real difference over time. According to Franklin, the museum has benefited from using its extensive collection of Chinese decorative art to raise its profile in the country through touring and UK-based shows.
Its tours to China have become a near-annual event – this year the museum is taking masterpieces of Chinese and European porcelain to Beijing as part of a wider festival to promote cultural links.
In the past few years, the museum has also staged a number of domestic exhibitions with a Chinese flavour, including China Design Now and Imperial Chinese Robes from the Forbidden City.
At 26,000 visitors a year, its current Chinese audience still represents a tiny percentage of overall numbers (3 million in 2010-11), but this is a marked rise compared with just four years ago, says Franklin, when the museum’s visitor numbers from the BRIC nations combined was less than 1%.
Ticket-stretching deals
Partnerships with private companies and tour operators are playing an increasingly vital role in overseas marketing. Eurostar has recently launched a joined-up initiative with museums and galleries, restaurants and shopping precincts in London, Paris, Brussels and Lille, offering special discounts to all ticket-holders.
The scheme is specifically aimed at capturing repeat visitors and drawing them to new exhibitions. Frequent travellers can also earn loyalty points for their friends and family.
In Paris, institutions such as Jeu de Paume, the Musée d’Art Moderne and the Musée du Quai Branly are benefitting from the trade-off, while the Tate Modern and the V&A are among the institutions that have signed up in London.
Eurostar partners manager Rachel Calver says leisure travellers are increasing year on year, in spite of the economic climate. “Research has shown that during previous economic downturns, travellers have tended to protect their expenditure on short-haul leisure breaks,” she says.