Don’t box me in!

I’ve been having an interesting debate on Twitter about the usefulness of applying categories or segmentation models to museum visitors. I’ve previously blogged about Falk’s Identity model and Morris Hargreave McIntyre’s Culture Segments, and several museums have their own in-house audience segmentation models that they use to inform exhibition development, programs and marketing.

But some people have a problem with such categorisation: I recall many years ago the first time I was introduced to the Myers-Briggs Type Index in a training workshop – someone in my group found the very idea offensive. So while some people may feel a sense of self-revelation when they discover they are an ENFJ or ISTP, others think it has as much insight as a tabloid horoscope. Their starting premise is that people are each individuals and are not so easily typed and categorised.

Personally, I think visitor typologies are useful, at the very least as heuristics: yes each visitor has their own unique interests and circumstances, but it’s not practical to consider each and every visitor as a unique individual who cannot possibly be grouped in any meaningful way. Conversely, we know the public is not an undifferentiated mass with the same interests, needs and prior knowledge. So segmentation is a middle ground and visitor research tends to bear out the fact that there are patterns in the visiting public, even if the emergent categories are not exactly the same for every museum and at every time.

I wonder if resistance to categorisation arises when such categories are used inappropriately or injudiciously – when they become laws of the land rather than rules of thumb. For instance I’ve taken the MBTI test on more than one occasion and each time I’ve come out with a slightly different result. Therefore it would be wrong to say something like “Person X is an INFP. It necessarily follows that they will do Y in circumstance Z”. Similarly with visitor categories – they are not meant to be dogmatic and they can be fluid: the type of visitor I am today does not necessarily predict the type of visitor I will be tomorrow.

What do you think? When are visitor categories useful and when are they constraining?

13 Replies to “Don’t box me in!”

  1. Nice post. This morning I was doing some reading on Generic Knowledge, or knowledge about ‘kinds’ of things. As the author writes, “One of the most interesting properties of generic knowledge is that it is not rendered invalid by the existence of what seem to be counter-examples.” (Read the whole paper here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661399014291)
    So what it is saying is that it is possible to have knowledge about things based on a perception that some things have common or shared characteristics, even though some of the specific examples of that kind of thing, do not have those characteristics. ie while “dogs” have four legs, when sometimes a dog might only have three, but it is still a dog.
    I wonder if this is a useful way to approach the subject of visitor categories, particularly in light of your discussion about personality profiling. That there can be “kinds” of visitors; but those kinds of visitors will still have individual variations that mean that their particular behaviours will be unique to them as person. Does that make sense?

    1. Thanks for the link. It reminds me a bit of the psychological concept of schemas – archetypal representations of concepts such as “dog”, “table” etc that embody the essential characteristics of “dogness” or “tableness” in our mind (come to think of it, schemas might date back to Plato). Real dogs and tables might vary from these schemas without violating this essence – three legged versions of each are possible – although once it departs too much from the schema it becomes something else (e.g. a cat with four legs is neither dog nor table as “catness” is defined by other essential criteria).

      That’s a rather long-winded way of saying that I get what you mean and I think a similar logic could be applied to archetypal visitor types: tourists, parents with kids, art loving solo visitors, etc etc

  2. I agree, I think they are meant to be fluid. I’ve heard it said visitors can belong to multiple segments – they’re not exclusive or definitive.

    The only thing I would add is that – from what I’ve seen – segments seem to arise both from the researcher and the visitors being surveyed. Natural groupings can be seen to arise from a large enough data set, common characteristics between visitors. So I don’t see the segments as being imposed, but growing organically out of the researcher/visitor exchange. I like that.

    1. Good point that these categories generally emerge naturally from visitor data. That suggests we are describing and interpreting actual phenomena rather than imposing a conceptual straitjacket for the sake of it. It also suggests that we should continually re-verify our segmentation with our audiences because our initial interpretations may have been incomplete, or may not directly translate from one context to another. Plus, visitors evolve and what was true in 1987 may not always be today (particularly when attitudes to technology are part of the equation). So we should see visitor typologies as an evolving concept – not set them in concrete for all time. 🙂

  3. Audience segmentation can be really useful at an aggregate level, but any categories are just tools for thinking with – it’s always useful to have a reminder of the importance of explaining the limits of segmentation alongside discussion of how it’s been used.

    It’s particularly relevant to me right now as I’m part of an action research project (http://weareculture24.org.uk/projects/action-research/) that’s extending work done at the Indianapolis Museum of Art on ‘Exploring the Relationship between Visitor Motivation and Engagement in Online Museum Audiences’ (http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2012/papers/exploring_the_relationship_between_visitor_mot ) by placing one question surveys asking ‘What did you come to our site today to do?’ on 22 partner websites in the UK. We can then link the answers to Google Analytics data on people behave on the site to get some insight into how different motivations translate into paths through a website, and hopefully from there understand how well (or not) a website meets the needs of different types of visitors and possibly figure out some ‘signatures’ of different types of visits. But we have to be careful about over-generalising in our analysis as motivations are complex and you can’t read too much into individual behaviours.

    1. Good point on the limitations of segmentation. What is useful on the aggregate may not be so helpful when considering a particular visitor to a particular site on a particular day. Sometimes segments are exemplified in the form of a “character” who represents a composite of the segment’s characteristics. (e.g. “Ann” is a 36 yo with a college degree and 2 kids age 8 and 10…) Thinking in terms of such archetypal visitors can make it easier to visualise the sorts of people we’re referring to, but should be handled with caution.

  4. In general, I’m not a fan of typology, and I really hate MB tests and the like. I do appreciate some people find them useful, but I think they tend to be overused. I have met people who actually use MB tests as the basis for their judgement of others. I knew someone whose boss made everyone fill one out.

    When it comes to museum visitors, I’m all I’m favour of getting bums through the door, but at the end of the day I think the question of whose bums they are is less important. I’m wary of any method that places people in categories and labels some of them as intrinsically more valuable than others.

    I’m not saying visitor typologies and surveys can’t be useful. I just generally have a very cavalier attitude to these things. It’s a personal bias, I admit.

    1. You have no disagreement from me that certain metrics like MB tests are over-used. Some managers seem to think that psychographic testing gives them tools to “scientise” their workforce and such thinking can be at best useless, at worst dangerous. I find the idea of judging others based on their MB type quite startling.

      Similarly, I’d be worried if people were somehow saying that some visitors are more “valuable” than others based on segmentation. Sorting doesn’t necessitate ordering, and saying that two groups of people are different doesn’t mean to say one is better than the other. Quite the opposite – it’s a recognition that we can’t please all the people all the time and indeed some people’s needs are mutually exclusive from those of others. We need to understand these needs before we can accommodate them. So while a particular exhibit or program may be designed with a particular segment in mind, on balance it should even out and all audiences should be recognised and valued.

  5. I often find that visitor categories are a good place to begin when you’re working with staff and/or volunteers who don’t have an extensive (or any) background in visitor studies. Trying to learn who your visitors are, what they want to do, and what they want from you is a big goal, and tools like Falk’s Identity Model can help make the process feel more manageable. But I’m always careful to caution people that this is not a be-all-end-all approach, and there have been several instances where a museum I’m working with come up with their own categories that they feel fit what they’re seeing and hearing from their visitors. Sometimes those categories are much more useful than the published ones, sometimes not. But either way the process gets people thinking and talking and looking at their visitors in new ways.

    1. You are right. The more I think about it, the more I think that it’s the thinking behind segmentation models that’s just as important as the segments themselves. As you say, they are a way of getting people within an organisation to get in the minds and shoes of people that may have very different interests and motivations from their own. In the absence of these, we may be left conceiving “what visitors like” as being more or less as an extrapolation from “what *I* like”.

      But they are *guides* to thinking and observing, not a substitute for them. Segments need to be used thoughtfully and reflexively, not mindlessly.

  6. Great post. It made me wonder how many museums and heritage sites actually use either identity or personality profiles as audience segmentation models in their development. I find most people in the UK talk about ‘under-represented (target) groups’, which are themselves characterised by demographic attributes. In fact, our local authority’s reporting structure forces this onto the museums service, in that it literally asks which community segments – based on demographics – most benefit from our programmes. Heritage Lottery Fund do the same thing, as does Arts Council England. Audience Development, which should be about understanding people’s motivations to visit, benefits from heritage, and all the factors that influence their part in communication, becomes too much about rigid group definitions – something Emma Waterton has recently criticised as completely missing the point (see e.g. https://nicoledeufel.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/target-audiences-and-access-in-interpretation-practice-emma-watertons-critique/). As long as this is the case, it will be difficult to firmly establish more fluid and communication-focused segmentation in the sector.

    Thanks,
    Nicole

    1. Thanks for the link to the critique. It resonates with some of the problems I have had with some of the discourses surrounding “exclusion”. Are we refusing to acknowledge “informed exclusion” – people who know what’s on offer and simply aren’t interested? As you say, it seems we apply different values to heritage than in other cultural pursuits. When I lived in the UK, no one expressed concern that I was “socially excluded” from football . . .

  7. For those who doubt the fundamental interconnectedness of all things (HT Dirk Gently), my regular scopus alert came up with not one but two new articles on audience segmentation this morning:

    “Cultural tourists: An attempt to classify them” – a study of tourists to Cracow, Poland identifies five main clusters: ‘Purposeful’, ‘Serendipitous’, ‘Sightseeing’, ‘Incidental’ and ‘Casual’.
    http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/10.1016/j.tmp.2012.09.006

    “Visitors of two types of museums: A segmentation study” – a more methodological paper investigating statistical methods used for clustering and segmentation, based on visitors to an archaeological museum and a contemporary art museum
    http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/10.1016/j.eswa.2012.10.039

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