Blank Canvas: Can Contemporary Art be Marketed on the Internet

Abstract

This research project aims to investigate the extent to which the Internet is an effective medium for marketing contemporary art (i.e. selling art to retail customers).

The answer to this question is important for established gallery owners, online retailers and artists as it will help them to allocate their scarce marketing resources more effectively.

Given the exploratory nature of the research question, a qualitative methodology was adopted.
A wide variety of practitioners in the art business were interviewed, together with an academic authority on Internet marketing. Angehrn’s ICDT (Information, Communication Distribution, Transaction) model was used to guide the interviews, but questioning was deliberately open-ended to allow the key issues to emerge.

The key findings are that in the art market, the Internet is primarily used as an Information Space, often as a relatively simplistic “virtual shop window” or “electronic catalogue” that doesn’t take full advantage of the online medium.

Comparatively little use is made of the Internet as a Communication Space, the vast majority of websites do not allow site visitors to interact with the retailer or with other visitors.

Most current art products do not lend themselves to being physical transmitted over the Internet, so its use as a Distribution Space remains limited (although this may change in the future).

As a Transaction Space the Internet faces a number of barriers, both from a customer-perspective (lack of “touch and feel”) and a retailer-perspective (cost and complexity of online transactions). In the art market it is difficult to identify transactions that can be wholly “attributed” to the Internet, as sales often appear to be initiated or completed in the physical world.

The project concludes that the effectiveness of the Internet as an “online-only” retail channel for art is limited and its advantages over offline galleries are exaggerated in much press coverage. Indeed the UK’s two leading online art retailers have both opened physical premises during the course of this project, indicating a trend towards channel convergence rather than disintermediation.

Offline galleries do have a problem with their “accessibility” to potential customers and the Internet is helping to address this, particularly in the potential richness and reach of the medium. But galleries are also using offline methods to tackle this issue and are attempting to make their premises more attractive to customers.

The challenge for all art retailers is to leverage the unique potential of both the online and offline spaces in order to reach out more effectively to their target audience. There are no easy prescriptions to achieve this, particularly given the limited marketing budgets of most retailers, but the following recommendations are offered by:

imaginative use of gallery space and partnerships with appropriate non-art retailers to deliver a distinctive offline experience;

delivery of richer, deeper information over the Internet and exploration of the concept of online communities of interest for art;

tighter integration of the online and offline channels.

In seeking to implement the above, retailers can perhaps learn something from artists in the levels of creativity they bring to their work, whilst artists can learn something from retailers in running the business side of their activities. Both, however, must place the customer firmly at the centre of all their marketing thinking.

John Williams, 2002