MARKETING ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESOURCE PROTECTION

Harvey M. Shields

Introduction

Marketing archaeological resource protection may appear confusing to archaeologists and historic preservationists, who generally receive little or no training in business administration. The two most definitely relate, in that marketing can provide a unique and, hopefully, more successful way of organizing and implementing a concerted archaeological resource protection program. To better understand this relationship, think of marketing as an alternate paradigm by which one can observe, analyze, and affect a dynamic social process. Before proceeding any further, I must digress for a moment in order to overcome any prejudices that you, the reader, may have. Many of you have a background in the social sciences, rather than business. Marketing, as you all surely know, comes out of the discipline of "Business Administration." This will, hopefully, not taint what is to follow.

Marketing

Philip Kotler (1984:4) defines marketing as: "A social process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others." There are many concepts wrapped up in this definition that need to be developed separately. Needs and wants are two key marketing concepts. People need many things in order to live. Items such as air, food, and water are basic to human survival and are thus required. People also have strong preferences for other goods and services. Some embellish on basic needs, while others revolve around more abstract concepts such as recreation and education. Marketing does not create needs and wants; these pre-exist. Marketing acts to influence wants, by pointing out how a good or service may fulfill a desire.

The attraction that some people have to archaeology, archaeological sites, and artifacts relates to these basic desires. It may have something to do with the desire of human beings to understand themselves, and their origins, or it may have to do with an appreciation for art, as manifested in artifacts. Whatever the cause, there is no doubt that some people want to deal with "things archaeological."

Another marketing concept is the product. A product is a good or a service that satisfies the needs and wants of individuals. Actually, all goods really are vehicles for a service. For example, a car provides a transportation service, a hammer provides the service of driving a nail, and a refrigerator provides the service of food preservation. The marketer's job is to convey clearly to the consumer what service is being realized by the product so they can identify the desire to be fulfilled.

The discipline of archaeology provides a wide variety of services. For example, it answers questions about human origins and lifeways. It also is the vehicle that produces artifacts to be viewed, appreciated, and/or possessed. The product may be packaged in the form of a dig, a museum, a movie or, for some, a "tastefully" arranged wall-hanging of arrowheads.

Another set of related marketing concepts are value and satisfaction. Here, value is used as the relative rating of a product in providing for or satisfying one's need or want. The better a product does that, the more value it has. In an archaeological context, value may be ascribed on the basis of age, association with an historic figure, or monetary value. Satisfaction of the "archaeological desire" can be obtained by a range of options, from viewing or excavating a site or object to actual possession of a site or object.

The concepts of exchange and transaction are key economic and social concepts necessary to an understanding of marketing. People can obtain an item by producing it themselves, taking it from someone else, begging for it, or exchanging it for something they have (usually for money). The discipline of marketing implies the latter method. Exchange represents the transaction of obtaining a desired product by offering something of value in return, and having it accepted. This is a processual concept rather than a static one, and fits nicely within the range of social science theory.

Even the archaeological product is involved in the exchange of value and satisfaction. This may be as direct as a collector exchanging tens of thousands of dollars for an Anasazi pot, or as abstract as a museum exchanging knowledge for a donation or volunteer work.

The final concept of concern to us is that of market. "A market consists of all the potential customers sharing a particular need or want who might be willing and able to engage in an exchange to satisfy that need or want" (Kotler 1984:12). Whereas economists consider a market as including all buyers and sellers, a marketer sees it as encompassing the entire industry and the buyers. However, the term "market" may be used in a variety of other ways. A market may refer to a specific group of buyers, as well as the all inclusive system described in the definition above. Thus, one must be sure of the context of the word when inferring its meaning.

For archaeology, the market consists of those people who share the want or desire for "things archaeological" and are willing to enter into exchanges to satisfy those needs. By "things archaeological" I include the process of archaeological recovery of data, the knowledge obtained from this process, the recovered artifacts, and the storage and interpretive facilities (e.g. museums). The market involves all people with this want or desire. The fact that the activities of some of these people are detrimental to the archaeological resource is of no concern at this point in defining the market. It will have great importance later, however, when applying marketing techniques to the protection of the resource.

Defining the market brings us full circle back to marketing. In a crude sense, marketing is the anthropology of buying. Thus, it may be seen as a dynamic social process that can be observed, analyzed, and affected. The way one does this is referred to as marketing management.

Marketing Management

Marketing management ". . .consists of analyzing market opportunities, researching and selecting target markets, developing marketing strategies, planning marketing tactics, and implementing and controlling the marketing effort" (Kotler 1984:61). It is the process by which one delineates the market, understands it and, accordingly, develops and implements a plan to accomplish the organization's goals.

The Mission Statement

The first step in the process of marketing management is to develop a mission statement that clearly identifies the purpose of the organization or the effort about to be undertaken. This may sound easy enough, but the clear articulation of the mission statement can make all the difference between success, and failure. It is the mission statement that provides both direction, and a touchstone to determine if the product is doing what it is supposed to do. If the mission statement is too broad, it will not provide sufficient direction. If it is too narrow, it will choke off fruitful activities.

In the case of archaeological resource protection, the content of the mission statement will depend on the nature of the organization undertaking the effort, its philosophy, goal and the background of the people making up the organization. For one group this might be "To educate the public about the value of archaeology," for another "To physically protect archaeological sites under our management," for yet another "To deter pothunters from plundering sites." In all likelihood, a single organization will not be able to carry out the mission of "To protect all archaeological sites." Attempting such a broad mission would more than likely diffuse the effect of precious dollars. In any case, development of a mission statement is a key concept that forms the basis for decision making in the process outlined below.

Situational Analysis

The next step in marketing management is to conduct a situational analysis. This amounts to doing the necessary background research of the context within which one is trying to operate. The context, or environment can be broken into two areas: the macro- and micro-environments. The macro-environment concerns the world around us and how it impinges on the market of concern. It takes in aspects such as demographics, national and international economic trends, the physical environment, technology, politics, and society. The micro-environment looks at the infrastructure relating to your activity and/or organization. It would include the organizational structure, supply of resources, middlemen, consumers, competitors, and groups that are interested in and may affect the conduct of the organization's activities. Any marketing effort must understand and take into account these factors.

The archaeological environment is a complex one. At the macro-environmental level, an assessment must be made of the population at large and how demographic trends may relate to archaeological resources. For example, one effect of the "baby-boomer" phenomenon is the likelihood of increased travel by this group as they enter their prime income-producing years. This may lead to more visits to archaeological sites, resulting in more impacts upon them. Economics and politics are important to examine. If the economy is generally healthy, there is a great possibility of private and/or public support of archaeological projects. Politics is always of concern given the raft of Federal and State historic preservation laws that help or hinder protection of archaeological resources. Society and its attitudes toward archaeology also are important to gauge in this process, as it is key to knowing how far or how deep educational efforts might have to go.

An analysis of the micro-environment must look at the archaeological organization, whether it is a museum, university, or government agency. The structure of the organization may be a help or a hindrance to the effort under consideration. In the archaeological context, the supply of resources may take in a variety of forms including the availability of sites to excavate, the availability of money to excavate sites and preserve artifacts, the type and number of museum exhibits, and the number of dealers of artifacts. Consumers are also important to your analysis. How are consumers defined? Are they readers of archaeological reports, visitors to sites or museums, donors to your organization, or customers in a gift shop. Competitors in the archaeological context is an interesting idea that has received little thought. Certainly, there are competitors for visitors to museums, there are other archaeological projects that are competitors for funding, and there are even competitors for the recreational time of the people you want to visit a site or museum. It is a competitive world, even for archaeology.

These are examples of some of the items that should be included in a situational analysis of archaeological resources. In other words, the situational analysis must look at everything related to the resources and your organization. Only by seeing where you are, can you know where to go.

Researching and Selecting Target Markets

A crucial realization in researching and selecting a target market is that not everyone is interested in what your organization offers. Unfortunately, many archaeologists and historic preservationists have a tendency to assume that everyone is interested in archaeology and history. This simply is not true. Just as everyone is not interested in attending symphony concert performances or watching "Wall Street Week" on public television there is a limited market for "things archaeological."

A rule of thumb in marketing is the "80-20 rule." This common sense theorum dictates that 20% of the market, does 80% of the consuming. The rule leads to a concept called "target marketing." It dictates that marketing activities be directed to the 20%, rather than the 80%. This results in more effective use of dollars and other resources in marketing your product. It is a particularly practical approach to take in this era of limited public and private support for just about any activity. Attempts to reach 100% of the market with a single marketing campaign simply are not very effective in reaching the primary consumers.

The next step in marketing management is to define who your market is. You need to get an idea of the group of consumers in which you are interested. Is it all people who are interested in "things archaeological?" Is it only those people who visit archaeological sites? Is it the people who traffic in illegal artifacts? Is it the people who "pothunt" sites? In other words, what group do you seek to reach with your activity? Clearly defining your market is crucial to the rest of the marketing management process.

Once the group of consumers that you are interested in has been defined, you must determine what they look like. This means understanding them demographically, attitudinally, geographically, and behaviorally. It is also necessary to understand their perceptions about the product and the benefits they receive from its use. The point is to look at the consumer in great detail, both as individuals and as members of a society.

Part and parcel of understanding your market is estimating its size. This provides a dimension to the effort one must undertake to sell the product. Preliminary results from a recent representative survey of 15,000 United States households by Longwoods International, Inc. (1989, 1990) revealed that 50.3% of people who traveled during the past 12 months visited an historical site. This proportion provides some indication of the total market for "things archaeological."

Finally, you need to know how best to reach your market. This includes knowing which media they use the most, ie. television, radio, or print. What are their favorite programs in the broadcast media, or their favorite periodicals in the print media. Only by knowing this information can you place your message where it will do the most good (see Pokotylo this volume for a discussion of public attitudes about archaeology).

Once this research about your target market is completed, you will have the ability to segment your market. The "80-20 rule" applies to a market as much as it does to the universe of all consumers. That is, a few segments of your total market will do most of the consuming. There are a number of ways to segment a market. It can be done on the basis of demographics, such as age or income. It can be done on the basis of geography, such as zip code, state, county, city, or census districts. For purposes of archaeological resource protection, as in most endeavors, it may be best to segment the market on the basis of interest. This is the one sure way to reach the target group regardless of demographics or place of residence.

Based on the study of consumer's interests, you can begin to develop segments. Segmenting the target market is analogous to developing artifact typologies. They can also be derived in the same way. Marketers usually use a variety of statistical clustering techniques and/or factor analyses. Archaeologists should be very much at home in determining market segments. If the goal is to reach the pothunter, they can be studied and one can come to understand them. Chances are that much pothunting is of the casual sort and could be easily affected by an informational and educational campaign targeted to that group and directed at deterring their activities. The hard-core pothunter of your nightmares can also be addressed through such a research effort. If nothing else, the information gained through a survey would provide law enforcement officials with a profile of these people. Whoever you pick as your target market should relate to the mission statement for your activity/organization.

In all likelihood, the specific information for use in marketing archaeological resource protection is simply not available at this time. Original research must be done. Just as archaeologists conduct background research before beginning an archaeological survey, or excavating a site, market research must be obtained before the start of a protection effort. In the long run, it will save funds and ensure that the effort will be as successful as possible.

Developing a Marketing Plan and Strategy

Most organizations, especially bureaucratic ones, are familiar with the planning process. It is very much the same for marketing as it is for any other activity, for which one is used to planning. Development of a marketing plan and strategy are necessary steps to the successful realization of one's mission.

There are many ways to construct a plan, and I will not belabor that point here. The point is to make a plan, and be sure that it combines the knowledge gleaned from the situational analysis, and applies to the mission of the effort. As with all plans, it must contain a series of goals and objectives, with detailed action plans to make sure that each step of the plan is implemented. Subsequent to this, you will be able to estimate how much money will be needed to accomplish the plan.

There is one part of this process that is unique to marketing. This unique aspect is called the marketing mix. It often is confused with the totality of marketing. While it is not the whole, it is perhaps the heart of marketing management. The marketing mix consists of the 4 P's: product, price, place, and promotion. These are the variables over which marketers have control, and represents the means by which they realize their goals and objectives.

The product is a concept that we have touched upon earlier. It is the good or service that is being offered. Identifying the product is based on the answer to the question: "What is the buyer really buying" (Kotler 1984:463). As stated earlier, every product is really a service, even ones that seem to be rather tangible. When a consumer buys an automobile, he is really buying transportation, or in the case of a sports car, perhaps he is buying status or a youthful image. What the marketer does is to sell the benefits of the product, not its features. The core product must be converted into a tangible product which may have up to five characteristics: a level of quality, features, styling, a brand name, and packaging (Kotler 1984).

What does this have to do with archaeological protection? It has everything to do with developing a concerted marketing effort directed at creating change. The product concept can apply to "things archaeological." Of course the delineation of its characteristics would be different, depending on what the mission of the organization was. For instance, let us say that public education is the mission, and the goal is to make pothunters aware of the national value of archaeological resources as a means of deterring casual looting. The level of quality would relate to the great value of the archaeological resource to our society and the nation. Features would include the resource's physical nature and condition (e.g. is it above or below ground), does it contain burials, ceramics, or projectile points? Styling is quite obvious. It would relate to the many types of archaeological sites that exist (e.g. is it a rock shelter, a pueblo, or a big-game hunting kill sites?). A brand name used to evoke a specific place would be a well-known site such as Mesa Verde or Cahokia Mounds. Packaging relates to the presentation of the message (e.g. using broadcast media spots by famous people associated with archaeology, such as Harrison Ford). The point here is that the product must be thought through, and not assumed to be self-evident. It can be presented in a variety of ways, any one of which can send a different message which may appeal to, rather than, turn-off a targeted group.

Price is a variable that also is related to archaeological resource protection. What are you going to charge for your service? What is the price that the public would be willing to pay if these resources are allowed to perish. Of course, price also refers to what the public may pay through donations of time and money, or through appropriations to government agencies. In whatever format, pricing is something one must consider in this process. In determining the price, one must look at a variety of factors (Kotler 1984). What is the objective of the price? Is it for survival, or for profit? What is the demand for the product? Even in archaeological resources protection, there is a demand equation for this service. A high demand would enhance an already high intrinsic value. What are the costs involved in producing the product? This would include costs associated with excavations, museum storage, and interpretation, as well as the commercial value of artifacts. It would also include the cost of law enforcement or public service announcements. Understanding costs would help an organization to set a price.

Price can be determined by simply looking at actual costs, but they can also be determined by looking at the competition. In this day and age, many worthwhile causes look to the public for support in accomplishing their own goals. What kinds of donations are competitors getting? How are they assessing the value of their product for the public? Examining all these factors will help in setting the price variable, however one wants to use it in the cause of archaeological resource protection.

The concept of place refers to the distribution channels used to deliver the product to the consuming public. In the case of a service like archaeological protection, how is the service made available and accessible to the public? The distributional channel for an educational message could be the broadcast or print media. It might also be a network of community museums. In the case of law enforcement, distribution of that service is through the activities of the members of the law enforcement establishments.

Finally, there is the promotional variable. This amounts to getting the word out and actually communicating the benefits and features of your product to the targeted markets. Promotion is not a single activity, but a mix of four major tools: advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and personal selling (Kotler 1984). Advertising consists of paid announcements in a variety of media. Sales promotion consists of short term incentives to encourage the purchase of a product. Publicity concerns the placement of information about the product into the news media. Personal selling involves face-to-face interaction with groups or individuals for the purpose of selling the product.

All of these can be applied to the protection of archaeological resources. Other than law enforcement, most people think of advertising as the primary means of promoting their product. As you can see, there are other possibilities, many less costly. Publicity is free other than the time to prepare press releases, hold press conferences, or deal with the media. In some instances, use of a sales promotion may be more effective. In archaeology this may relate to letting people actually dig at a site. This would enable them to see the cost and effort in human terms that goes into the recovery of archaeological information. Personal selling in archaeology may amount to giving lectures in front of local avocational archaeology societies or even talking with collectors.

Now that you have developed your marketing mix and devised tactics to implement that strategy, you need to evaluate the whole process. It does not do much good to do all that work, and not be able to judge whether it was successful or not. This may seem like it might not be worth the time or expense, but it will be to the groups that supply the money for your projects. If you can clearly demonstrate improvement of the situation, they are more likely to continue providing funds for the effort. In addition, such an evaluation effort lets you know where to make improvements in the program. It provides the feedback mechanism so important to a dynamic system designed to achieve its goal.

Conclusion

The discipline of marketing is one way for an organization to approach the protection of archaeological resources. It provides a way of visualizing the issues and addressing them in a coherent and logical fashion. The effort to protect the world's archaeological resources takes every bit as much time and work to produce success, as it does to produce a successful archaeological research project. Marketing provides a method by which the protection effort, in whatever form, can be organized, implemented, and controlled. Its use will be well worth the endeavor.

References Cited

Kotler, P. (1984) Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, and Control. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

Longwoods International Inc. (1989, 1990) Travel USA (ongoing research on the travel behavior of U.S. citizens). Contact Dr. Bill Siegel, 2161 Yonge St., Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4S 3A6.

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