Mastering Economic Performances in Italian Museums: Who are Masters behind portraits

From 2007 to 2016, Italian museums faced keen competition and crisis of resources. Due to exogenous scarcity of public and private funding, the crisis heavily impacted on performances of museums. Otherwise, some highlighted museums ‘hit high notes on this stage of scarcity’. Their Boards (or Masters) revised their governance with focus on marketing to visitors who are paying for tickets and ancillaries like merchandising, on one side and with focus on fundraising from sponsors and donors, on the other side. Branding was a signalling strategy for both marketing and fundraising. The aim of the paper is the analysis of economic performances and marketing of a sample of Italian museums in challenging times and above all, according to 2016’s accounting data. The sample includes museums listed for their public grants, admissions (from ticketing), other revenues (like merchandising), private contributions, advertising expense (as signal of marketing, fundraising and branding efforts), personnel expense, total expenses and total revenues. 2016’s data were considered as concerns their weight on total revenues and total expenses and they were Ward clustered in order to give evidence to significant performances of two poles. The most crowded cluster includes museums, whose ‘Masters’ are ‘hitting high notes’ of positive performances for admissions, private contributions and other revenues. Museums boards were interviewed as concerns their marketing, fundraising and branding, so that they confirm that economic performances match with increasing focus on signalling strategies.