Stakeholders Collaboration as An Agent Of Promotion: An Observation On The Kelantan State Museum

Abstract

Promotion strategy is considered as one of the vital elements in ensuring continuous visits and engagements from visitors to the heritage sectors, including museums. It is because a poor promotional strategy will be less likely to attract visitors and communities alike. Moreover, the volume of visitors will decrease, eventually distorting the museum establishments’ prime objective; to become an informal educational institution for the public. Due to limited research on a promotional strategy towards museum management in Malaysia, this study only seeks to explore the promotional strategy adopted by the Kelantan State Museum. This paper aims to investigate the promotion strategy adopted by the Kelantan State Museum, responsible bodies involved, and challenges in promoting the museum, especially during the pandemic of covid19. Hence, this study implements a qualitative descriptive study using purposive techniques and snowball sampling by interviewing personnel in the Kelantan State Museum to achieve this objective. The data was then analysed by adopting Braun & Clarke’s six steps thematic analysis framework. A few aspects of marketing strategies, activities, and primary funding were discussed based on the findings. It also identified essential stakeholders and their form of involvement in promoting the museum. The significant outcome from the overall findings identified few challenges faced by the museum management in promoting the institutions to the public, such as visitor’s expectation, funding cut and digital adaptation, reducing the museum expenses due to Covid19, closure of many museums hubs for physical visitations, resulting in new rules introduced to cope with the current changes in ensuring the visitor’s safety. It is suggested that the new norm has affected the museum management in promoting its institution and require new methods to reach a more significant engagement from the public.