HI-Sense Corporate Museums

Abstract

Museums have been through a period of constant changes within the last five decades due to a number of reasons such as technology developments and visitor’s interests and needs changes. Practitioners and academics have been though new challenges that encouraged the generation of a new kind of museum that is described as consumer-centered rather than collection-centered. At the same time museums have received the influence of marketing and branding theories, and with the time museums have adapted profitable concepts to the practice. It must be able to satisfy various psychological needs of consumers and audiences, in addition to vitalizing corporate image and returning profits to company. In order for corporate museums, which pursue coexistence of brand and cultural values, to be actualized based on the essential goal of corporate and audience who live in a diverse society such as lifestyles, interests, education and culture, etc. There are exhibition spaces for promoting corporate image such as company history museums, promotion halls of corporate museums but their functions and characteristics tend to be concentrated on specific criteria. Nonetheless, branding for museum is a field where lot of research can be still developed; in fact branding appeared in just a shortage of existing insights that have been gained though audiences’ and visitors’ perspective, but very little research has been undertaken with audiences indeed. Driven by such changes of social concept today, an in-depth study on corporate museum for emotion is increasing and recognized to bring about a new turning point. However, it is not yet in appropriate state to construct theoretical background and to present various study methods on the corporate museum for emotion, whereas its application is limited only to specific fields such as product design, advertisement, emotional magazines but none to positive study or application in the field of corporate museum. This study aims to start on the assumption that emotional approach is positively necessary for creating consumer-centered and comfortable museum. This case study examines similar cases of museums run by automobile corporations and will three museums to be analyzed.