Museum branding and museum retailing: A study in private and state museums in Istanbul

Today museums have become multifunctional cultural spaces due to changing and diversifying requests of the visitors and turned towards improving their financial resources to provide and facilitate unique experiences for their visitors. Within the scope of new museology which entered the literature as of the 1980s, museums are no longer responsible for merely exhibiting their collections and have focused on the satisfaction and engagement of the visitors with various cultural and leisure time activities. In this regard, the museums have become non-profit institutions that applied marketing and branding processes to become prominent and well-known in the cultural industry. Applying marketing mixes to their structure, practicing to get to know their visitors, making internal and external market analyses, and developing advertising and promotion activities in order to do so; the museums have become global cultural institutions with their brand identities. This research is focused on one of the commercial activities museums adopted namely, museum retailing and museum store practices. After researching the marketing and branding processes of the museums, the museum stores are analyzed as a means of outcomes of such processes. Museum stores, their designs, their existence within the museum complex, and retailed products are evaluated in terms of the relationship between the museum store and the museum's educational mission and commercial benefits. In addition, historical development and evolution of museum stores and the first products that emerged as a souvenir in the cultural heritage sites are presented within the framework of the thesis. After the literature review on the subject, the evaluations were carried out by means of visiting the subject museum stores in Istanbul, interviewing the store personnel, and directing the store managers the questions prepared for the scope of the research. In the first chapter, the museums that have become brands in abroad are examined with their museum store features after introducing the subjects of museum marketing and museum branding. The entry of marketing as a business term into non-profit institutions and its evolution into services marketing has been examined respectively. In this section, the adaptation of marketing to the museum, the situation of marketing mixes in museums, visitor segmentation studies, museum experience, and visitors' motivations are evaluated from a general point of view. In the second chapter, topics such as the historical development of museum stores, the concept of souvenirs and museum stores, and their products which are associated within the scope of museum branding and museum marketing are listed with relevant visual examples. In the final third chapter, the general focus is turned into research area Istanbul, Turkey and Pera Museum and Sakıp Sabancı Museum as private museums and Istanbul Archaeological Museum and Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts as state museums which have two different governances and networks are examined in terms of their museum stores and retailed products. Finally, by comparing subject examples with each other, it is emphasized that how museum retailing, which is one of the most important financial supporters of the museum, is crucially important for promoting the museum and making it a sustainable institution and in this direction personel comments and recommendations are listed for the development of museum stores in our country. Keywords: Museum Stores, Museum Souvenirs, Museum Marketing, Museum Branding, Museum Store Products