Abstract:

Tuscany has civilization: its artistic archeological been of the centres of the Etruscan objects - the to visitors in heritage (a large amount of findings) is now offered different contexts, such as museums (the steady exposition setting), archeological sites, or especially devised expositions. Different uses are made of these objects (i.e. the archeological findings) by different users: archeologists with specific professional interests, art historians, people with a general interest for art, visitors with little or no knowledge of the subject, etc. It is a known fact that the success of any exhibition depends on the organizers' knowledge of the visitors, and systematic information acquisition regarding their profiles, behaviour patters, reactions and judgements is a generally recognized necessity. The common approach tends to identify the users of a single case and compare the results with those of other similar experiences: e.g. comparing visitor profiles in expositions belonging to the same program, or in different periods of a given year in a single museum, or data derived from visitors of two or more museums to the same geographical area. The results of three user surveys commissioned by the Tuscany regional government limited to the same geographical area (the province of Grosseto), in which: - the "object" is unvaried (archeological findings) - the way it is offered varies (museums, archeological sites, exhibitions) have revealed interesting differences in visitor profiles. This paper discusses the results of a comparative analysis that has revealed a strong dependence between the way the object is offered and visitor profiles: in other terms, different packaging results in different products - a marketing law that seems to apply in the world of cultural diffusion just as well as in that of consumer goods. A successful campaign will require that different "products" be purposely designed to meet the demand of each specific group of archeology consumers.