How do we keep them coming?: Examining museum experiences using a services marketing paradigm

This research models the interrelationship of service quality, perceived value for time and money, and satisfaction to establish a system of relationships that predicts repurchase intention and repeat visits in museums. With increased competition from many leisure pursuits and dwindling funding, museums have more constraints in managing and designing customer retention programs. As a sector that ranges in offerings from large diverse public museums to small themed regional venues, research into visitor behaviour offers support for the sector. Even though some museum managers are moving to marketing focused approach, the focus on custodianship is the legacy of many smaller and underfunded museum offerings. Although, a system of relationships including quality value and repurchase have been explored in other contexts, knowledge of the predictors of customer judgments in repurchase intention in a service paradigm is undeveloped in the museums sector. This article applies a model previously tested in the cultural arts, to identify whether the findings are replicated or whether explicit idiosyncratic effects exist for each context. A survey instrument customized to the museum sector was administered to a sample of 412 past and present museum visitors and examined using structural equation modeling. Results indicate that customers determine their repurchase intention based on the quality dimensions of the experience and perceived value for time and money rather than customer satisfaction. Unlike most other repurchase intention research there is no direct relationship of customer satisfaction to repurchase intention suggesting that customer satisfaction is a single transactional measure in a museum context. A patron is satisfied with each single event with this unlikely to contribute to the intent to visit at another time. It is evident that the decision to revisit is based on the value, quality, and utility created by the event in the consumer’s mind. This is the first known article testing and presenting this system of relationships in the museum context.