Communication strategies in postmodern museology: communicated and conceived identity of the Pera museum

Abstract

This study aspires to discover the role of museums in Turkish society and to understand the relationship between museums and their visitors. Rather than focusing its limit only on museums' performances regarding visitor numbers and economic profit, the study looks at the communication tools of museums. In previous years, during the modern museology, the relationship between museums and visitors was at the level of visitors' visual experience of displayed objects. But in today's postmodern museology, the requirement is to establish mutual and interactive relations between the museum, its collections, exhibitions, services and their users. Today, many museums are interested in asking the following questions: Who is coming? What do they think about the museum? Is it enough to know who the visitors are? Who is not coming? How can we find out? In order to figure out who is not coming, the museum has to first look at who is coming; a question that can be answered by an audience development research. In that respect, this study focuses on one of the most distinguished museums in Istanbul, the Pera museum, and has three research questions to answer: Which image does the Pera Museum intend to communicate? Which is the visitors' image of the Pera Museum? How well does the communicated image correspond to the actual image of the Pera Museum? The AC2ID Test, which has been first developed as ACID Test, was applied in order to clarify how the Pera museum defines itself and how people perceive it as well as to measure the communication gap between the museum and visitors. © Common Ground, Elif Cigdem Artan, All Rights Reserved.