Engaging audiences of all ages at the Australian National Maritime Museum; Image supplied
What do you do when everything you have stood for – your world as you thought it existed – changes?
This is what many maritime museums globally are facing. As Kevin Sumption, Director & CEO, Australian National Maritime Museum (ANMM), described to a room of museum professionals, three years of research ‘told us there wasn’t a lot of interest in most maritime museums … the maritime museum as a notion is a 19th Century concept.’
‘It’s fair to say that we’ve institutionally faced a significant challenge about our identity and relevance,’ Sumption added.
The ANMM’s commitment to trying to understand their audience, and their relevance, led not only to a change of logo but a total recalibration of how they activated their collections.
They found that audiences are ‘more interest in stories about the present and stories of the future … [and] they also told us, very critically, that the health of our world’s oceans is fundamentally what they expected to hear and see in a maritime museum,’ Sumption said.
That was not a cue to deacquisition their musky collection of old boats, but rather to put “SEA” at the heart of their narrative – and also their rebranding.
Image supplied
Rebrand reflects global urgency
When your audience tells you that you are off-point, then you listen.
Taking that new knowledge and acting on it – to such an extreme level – is perhaps one of the bravest things an institution can do. Museums are a little like oil tankers – they move slowly and carry a lot of weight.
Sumption said: ‘The subject matter had to change with us … Ocean conservation is first and foremost in our interests … we are now a space where science is curated, and we are storytellers using all the new technologies to take people to places offshore.’
Other museums internationally that have successfully recalibrated for relevance are London’s Natural History Museum, The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco – all of which needed to reconnect with audiences – an exercise they recognised went well beyond a new logo, website and digital tools.
Read: Museum Brands that stand out of the crowd
Sumption continued: ‘We have also grown to appreciate that people want multi-sensory experiences in the museum; they are not interested in didactics. Maybe that is because we are now competing with the home.’
He believes that the veracity of museums will always be there because, the home has become the epicentre of all shopping, all learning and all entertainment, based on ‘billions of dollars of research that is very difficult for museums to compete with’.
‘The beauty of what we do is still the primacy of the object, of collections,’ continued Sumption.
Rebranding through cultural diplomacy
Sumption is of the belief that relevancy and rebranding are also integrally linked to knowing your network. Arts professionals have long been schooled in the idea of context – to know where you are placed and what you offer. At ANMM they have taken that a step further.
‘We have consciously moved into the cultural diplomacy state; we do a lot of work in Turkey, in France and increasing work in the UK. However, most of cultural diplomacy work now is focused in Indonesia,’ Sumption said.
Sumption sees museums as part of a bigger philosophical ecosystem that has to do with trust.
‘I believe we are not passive environments. It’s very important that we recognise in the world that there is increasing confidence in public institutional truth – we are one of the key places where people have real confidence,’ he said.
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As part of that leadership and diplomacy role, ANMM has taken its name to heart, working better at being ‘genuinely national’, says Sumption. ‘We are not only a maritime museum, but a migration museum in much of our storytelling.’
The museum has been formative in establishing a network of the 11 major and community migrant museums across Australia.
‘We have worked with very hard to come up with a plan quite deliberately in this period of the [Federal] Election to seek additional funding for education resources, for outreach initiatives, for exhibition development across that network of institutions,’ Sumption reported.
Collectively, those 11 migrant museums had 3.7 million visitors around Australia last year. Sumption says the numbers show that myths can be broken, that people to engage when you find the pathways for connection.
Testament to this journey, the Australian National Maritime Museum will be the host venue for the next Communicating the Arts conference, a gathering of international museums, arts companies and arts marketers rethinking the trends of communication and relevance.
