Open, user and smart innovation in cultural firms

Cultural products keep lots of people to travel across countries. In some cases, they are by far the most relevant added value of a country and the factors enabling them to compete with the others. Other countries’ competitiveness does not appear proportional to the amount of cultural resources of which they are endowed. For each area, it is important to find innovative ways to promote and distribute cultural products in order to carry out a strong and sustainable tie with the cultural heritage and the tourism sector. Cultural resources are a potential that needs to be managed in a strategic and organizational view to become a substantial attractive factor (that are resources able to attract demand towards the destination). This transformation takes place when an art or cultural product is managed in order to evaluate its critical factors that allow promoting and emphasizing its value on the market. These critical factors have to be able to maximize the overall experience of a tourist and to make it remarkable. Technological and environmental disrupts are due to the hypercompetitive context (quick and intense changes in demand, huge variety of targets, abrupt and radical technological changes – D’Aveni, 1994) and so all firms, including cultural firms, have to take it into account in order to gain successful performance. In particular, technological and multimedia innovation stresses the importance of the experience for the customer and highlights the role of experiential marketing in identifying customers’ needs and desires through a one-to-one relationship that creates value for both the firm and the customer. For cultural firms, the concept of experience is even more important because of the nature of the product they offer: cultural products are intangible, people do not buy them but the experience of seeing, touching, feeling and living them during the visit. For this reason, cultural firms have to be able to enrich the overall experience the customer lives. Innovation has a crucial role in facilitate this process because it can be applied both at the induced (that’s the phase when the customer has to be convinced/induced to choose some specific offers) and the organic level of marketing (that refers to the phase in which services are actually provided). So, the aim of this chapter is to deeply explain the role of experience and innovation in a marketing approach for cultural firms in order to promote and distribute value through an interactive relationship with customers.