Experiential marketing for value creation in cultural heritage management.

Since the beginning of economic thought, there has been a widespread belief that culture is an important resource for society, but unable to sustain itself and generate profit. This belief is generally accompanied by the idea that governments should largely contribute to the costs necessary for the production of cultural activities because of the key role they play in meeting some of the deepest needs of the community. In fact, many authors recognize that cultural resources are able, even in strictly economic terms, to make an impact on the territory that goes far beyond the direct revenue for cultural industries, as they can give a significant contribution to increase the level of attractiveness, creativity and social capital of a territory, supporting local development processes in the medium and long term. Therefore, culture can produce main indirect and induced economic benefits not only to specialized organizations, such as museums, bookshops or art galleries, but also to a wide range of related industries, from tourism to handmade goods, thus Experiental marketing for value creation in cultural heritage management becoming a valuable source of creativity and innovation for many other local businesses. The condition to allow such a widespread process of value creation is that culture is not considered just as a "heritage", but as an asset to be invested in order to produce memorable experiences for tourists and residents. Only if the experiences related to the fruition of cultural resources are rich and intense, the virtuous circle of value creation may be enacted at all the different levels of economic impact, as visitors, residents and local industries will find a good response to their needs and the potential of cultural heritage will be fully exploited. This is the reason why the findings of experiential marketing studies can be very useful to support cultural heritage management, in order to contribute to the economic sustainability of many activities in this field. This work presents a conceptual framework to address this issue by tracing a model of "cultural experience", which aims to offer a contribution to the analysis of the dynamics that affect the process of fruition of cultural heritage, in order to develop an innovative and experiential method for the design and evaluation of cultural activities. This model builds on the experience of the consumer orientation studies (Resciniti, 2004) and is based on the results of previous research, which has also been tested with several case studies with reference to socio-cultural events (Resciniti, Maggiore, 2009).