Defying type

Marketing geniuses like to peg people into little square holes called demographic types. Soccer moms, NASCAR Dads, men aged eighteen to forty-five, teenage girls, “urban” males, retirees. No matter your age, socioeconomic background or ethnicity, someone in a Madison Avenue high-rise office is looking at you through a microscope searching for ways to tear you and your hard earned dollar apart.

I like to throw them a curve ball. According to the marketing geniuses, there are certain things I should enjoy because of my age, gender, socioeconomic status and education, but I just don’t. I like to defy my demographic type. I can’t stand video games and Adam Sandler movies, but I’ll happily read books about museums and sit glued to Gilmore Girls.

I worked with such a genius in a previous job. We owned and operated an historic home, and she assumed all retired women loved it. So, certainly any exhibition project about the historic home would get women to come rushing through our doors and fork over eight dollars a pop, right? What about basketball? Basketball is big among men, especially in my state, so cutting my prep time short to open around Father’s Day is a surefire way to get dear old Dad out of the house. Right?

Not really. See, for generations museums catered exclusively to wealthy, educated, white males at the expense of, well, everyone else. But demographics are changing in many places across the nation, and museums can no longer afford to ignore large parts of their community. Many are doing well by defying type and programming for their traditionally underserved audiences. Car and sports museums are programming for women, community historical societies are preserving and sharing histories of African-Americans and Latinos. And as museum staffs and boards become more representative, they do a better job learning how they can serve their entire community and not just a small part.

But not at my previous job. We were about as homogeneous as they get, and pretty closed minded to boot. My staff thought it was okay that our landmark World War II exhibit had only a black mannequin to attract African-American audiences without a single label copy, artifact, or oral history to tell their story. In exhibition meetings, when I’d try to find ways to include our underserved communities, I’d frequently hear, “Oh, they (whomever they are) won’t come. We tried with (insert half-hearted attempt here), and they didn’t come.”

Well, of course not. People just don’t work that way. We can’t treat underserved audiences as bland demographics while ignoring the person within. An exhibition on African-American art won’t motivate your community’s African-American citizens to fork over eight dollars any more than retired women will for an historic home. There are plenty of NASCAR Dads who enjoy historic homes and soccer Moms who enjoy basketball. To successfully defy type, you need more. The histories and stories of every underserved person in your community is equally as important as those histories and stories your museum has told for generations, and until the museum treats it with the same respect, underserved audiences will remain underserved.

Try telling that to the marketing genius whose only vision of the world is through a demographics pie chart. I think it’s time museums learned something from Madison Avenue. The more we try to carve up our audience, the more we come off looking like the latest Adam Sandler movie – wholly unsatisfying.