Internationalisation and marketing strategies for university museums

University museums play an important role in the university marketing strategy, which is increasingly concerned with internationalisation. However, the extent to which academic belonging has affected university museums’ communicative approach is not clear: scant attention has been paid to the identification of university museums’ intended audience at a global level, including international researchers, students, tourists and migrants. This research focused on six university museums as case studies from five European countries: text analysis of a corpus of web pages and semi-structured interviews with staff from the selected university museums were carried out to collect data regarding strategies for audience engagement. Text analysis indicated that university museums have started offering contents in English on their websites, which may ideally serve a broad range of online users. However, results from both text analysis and interviews suggested that university museums have a vague image of the intended audience that they aim to attract at an international level, as texts do not seem to be written for a specific audience and with an accurate marketing strategy. The relationship between museum and university was also explored during the interviews, revealing insights on academic belonging. This study hopes to shed light on the intended audience for university museums and on the communicative and marketing strategies adopted to engage with an international audience.