Abstract

Today, tourists can no longer be considered passive recipients of proposals, but co-creators of travel experience (Campos et al., 2018; Prebensen et al., 2018). For this reason, companies and cultural organizations need to adopt a «multichannel» strategy that is able to attract the tourists towards the value proposition, combining physical and digital channels in order to offer a personalized consumption experience, without barriers between the different communication channels, to create engagement and building relationships of trust (Evans et al., 2011). These features are even more relevant for the twenty autonomous public museums in Italy, as the museums’ need to attract audience is an emerging issue, as the European Union has launched different funding programs on the audience development (Bamford and Wimmer, 2012), and the autonomy in the resource management has been the driving force for the development of new initiatives, especially concerning communication. Particularly, one of the main effects of the Ict impact on the cultural tourism offer system is the evolution from traditional communication tools to digital ones, the transition from top-down to bottom-up approaches, and from single-media messages to those multimedia ones (Rentschler, 2007). Object of the work is to understand the potential of this emergent marketing approach (Napolitano and De Nisco, 2017), with the aim of offering the museum experience as special tourist product. In this regard, we used a survey (dataset of 1,200 respondents) to analyze the visitors’ choice of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples who intercepted at least one digital marketing channel in 2019, divided into 4 clusters (Gen-Z, Millennials, Gen-X, Babyboomers). Evidence shows that digital technologies are confirmed to be able to facilitate interactions with/among cultural tourists and that the multi-channelling is an advantage to get in touch with all types of target audience (Wickham and Lehman, 2015). The use of a digital multichannel communication strategy would allow museum managers to respond more effectively to the needs of tourists and to oriented them towards omnichannel strategy.