Museums are commonly viewed as uninteresting and boring environments where old and dusty objects are on display, an opinion that museums are struggling to change. Today’s increasing competition from other cultural and leisure facilities put further pressure on museums to renew themselves. This indicates that museums today face great challenges in their work and a professional approach regarding marketing is necessary.

So how do museums market their exhibitions and activities? What differences are there between the museums ways of working with marketing? In this essay the writers take a closer look at four museums in Stockholm, Sweden.

The aim is to examine how the chosen museums work with marketing and compare the findings with each other. The results show that the museums implement recommended marketing strategies to a certain extent. Taken together, in order to develop exhibitions that meet the customers’ needs and wishes, museums need to study and involve their customers to a greater extent than is done today.