Introduction
The Bangkok Museum of Contemporary Art is a renowned cultural space that has been successfully operating since 2012. The collections include works by renowned Asian artists and sculptors. Over the 20 years of operation, the managers have managed to successfully establish a sales mechanism for souvenir products. However, the realities of the pandemic have placed new strategic and operational demands on the administration and marketers. Attention must be paid to the new ethical and environmental needs of consumers.
Main body
According to the goals of the museum, several recommendations can be formulated. First, an important step, given the new ethic of consumption during the pandemic period, is to develop channels of continuous interaction with customers. Consumers tend to choose a product from a manufacturer who cares about being in touch in such volatile times (IBM Newsroom, n.d.). Consequently, it is necessary to launch messengers, where people can ask any questions they have and receive a timely answer. Secondly, an important step in increasing responsibility could be the development of a product visualization service.
Since today not every customer has the opportunity to be in the store in person, it is important to place detailed images and videos of each souvenir on the sites. Managers will be able to create the effect of a customer’s presence, which can be a significant morale booster. Finally, it is necessary to sponsor the development of a souvenir delivery service that covers as much territory as possible. In this way, people accustomed to buying basic products remotely will be able to transfer the new model of consumption to the purchase of gift items.
The modern information society has special requirements for the museum’s activities nowadays. Presenting information in traditional ways significantly limits the reach of the audience. Specialists are forced to master a new information space, including social communications (Zutshi et al., 2020). In this case, social networks are the high-grade information channel through gift shops that could improve ways to promote products through the improvement of some aspects of the site. Good usability not only increases the relevance of the site and the number of sales but also affects the position in search.
The right structure, in terms of promotion and usability, not only implies a clear grouping of products according to various criteria but also helps customers estimate the ecological awareness of the museum. The following aspects are recommended to be covered:
- age factor;
- gender;
- cost;
- the purpose of use;
- the section of history or art to which the souvenir belongs.
- the information on the ways a gift can be recycled
- the data on from what materials the product was recycled
By filtering by criteria, the user will find it easy to find, for example, an environmentally friendly postcard or shopper. Besides, text content plays an important role, both for the customer and for the ranking of the resource by search engines (Petro, 2022). Such filling of the site is part of the strategy of promotion and expansion of the target audience. The short descriptions perform SEO functions, as high-quality, optimized content is one of the factors of website ranking in search engines (Giannini &. Bowen, 2022). For this purpose, targeted queries are placed in the texts, which the user enters the site by entering them into the search engine. Hence, the products become more sustainable since they are always present on the first pages of search engines.
Conclusion
Thus, a convenient and modern design of the online store should be supported by a clear internal structure. A reasonable solution would be to use convenient navigation and various filters to search for a particular product. Quality, useful texts will help the user to decide on the choice of souvenir, and with the correct use of targeted queries, they will also become a factor in determining the ranking of the site in search engines. In general, the promotion work should be aimed at ensuring that each client can easily select and make a purchase for themselves without experiencing technical and navigational difficulties.
Reference List
Giannini, T. and Bowen, J.P. (2022). Museums and digital culture: From reality to digitality in the age of COVID-19. Heritage, 5(1), pp.192–214.
IBM Newsroom. (n.d.). IBM Study: COVID-19 Pandemic Impacted 9 in 10 Surveyed Consumers’ Views on Sustainability. [online] Web.
Petro, G. (2022). COVID-19, Sustainable Retail, and the New ‘Values Shopper’. [online] Forbes. Web.