1. Introduction
In order to ensure their survival and sustainability, museums are looking for innovative solutions and innovative strategies, as there is limited financial support from governments. In particular, during the COVID-19 pandemic, museum exhibitions and activities, like those of the Italian state museums [
1], are being moved from offline to online. The roles of museums are now in constant evolution, adopting greater social and marketing orientations depending on need, opportunity, and the degree to which collections offer scope for creative product interpretation. A museum is defined by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) as a ‘
non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment’ [
2]. The scholarly or curatorial role of a museum is core, with income generation a supporting or secondary consideration. Thus, there are ethical, social, and cultural tensions inherent in engagement with the market by trading goods for sale [
3]. For most of the 20th century, a museum was regarded as an institution that collects, preserves, researches, interprets, and displays social material culture [
4]. By the end of the 20th century, market-oriented ideology emphasized the importance of revenue generation and brought new expectations to museums [
5]. Coupled with the reduction of government funds, museums were under pressure like enterprises [
6]. In this context, museums began to generate revenue in a variety of ways, with cultural products being regarded as one of the important options for museums to generate revenue [
7]. By selling cultural products, a museum not only solves its non-profit funding issues to improve its current environment and operating conditions [
8] but also positions these products to convey its cultural and historical values to tourists [
9]. Current debates revolve around the idea of the museum as a “cultural shop” ([
5,
10,
11,
12]), a place where visitors come to enjoy, participate in, or consume a variety of educational and cultural products and merchandise.
Visitors arrive at virtual museums online and in person [
13] with a variety of motivations and expectations [
14]; this is as true of their engagement with the museum shop [
6] as with the exhibits on display. Tosun et al. [
15] point out that shopping is an important component of travel, and Timothy [
16] states that tourism and shopping have common linkages. However, there are continuing discussions around the meaning and purpose of trading museums, which are essentially repositories of shared heritage. Investigating public engagement with retail products involves considering aspects of a museum’s core function and identity as well as the usual dimensions involved in measuring customers’ perceptions and attitudes. Mottner and Ford [
7] investigated performance indicators for museum retail based on educational, interpretive, and quality criteria. In this research, the authors embrace the changing milieu of the museum in 2020 to understand the perceptions of customers in the environment of a museum, which can be considered to possess some of the dimensions of the cultural shop.
A National Audit Office [
17] report on the trading activities of the British nationally sponsored museums identifies key trading methods as including e-commerce, licensing, catering, retail, reproduction and photograph rights, mail order, and venue hire. In addition, museum funding can come from a variety of sources including donations and memberships, corporate sponsorship, and national and local government grants. One of the foremost examples in the UK, the Victoria and Albert Museum, has a total income base of £32.5m including admissions, trading, and donated objects. In 2017, the Palace Museum (aka the Forbidden City), one of China’s major tourism attractions and the leader among Chinese museums, had sales of cultural and creative products of CNY 1.5 billion [
18]. The number of consumers visiting the museum on Tmall.com, the largest business-to-consumer retail platform in Asia, reached 60 million and is already three times that of in person visitors [
19]. Up to August 28, 2018, among the top ten museums with the highest sales on Tmall, the Palace Museum’s cultural and creative store ranked first with CNY 242 million [
19], demonstrating the power of the digital platforms to expand cultural shopping experiences beyond museum walls. Thousands of museums in China are exploring how to entice people to buy their cultural and creative products, and in so doing to better serve tourists and local residents. Visitors tend to make purchase decisions based on the perceived value of the products or services provided by suppliers. Therefore, in order to stand out from their competitors, it is essential for museums to know how to highlight the perceived value of their products and services in appropriate and visible ways.
Why then do visitors buy the cultural and creative souvenirs sold by museums? What are the specific dimensions of consumers’ perceived value of cultural and creative products? What is the relationship between the dimensions of perceived value and purchase intentions? To answer these questions, this research proposed a perceived value construct suitable for the context of tourism-oriented museums and their cultural and creative products based on prior works in consumer behavior. The innovative, educational, and experiential values of museums’ cultural and creative goods and paid services are attracting greater attention. The components of consumers’ perceived value with respect to these products and services need to be the focus of more intensive research. This more granular analysis of perceived value towards museum cultural goods and services will increase knowledge and understanding of purchase intentions. Theoretically, a valuable contribution of this research was specifying the dimensions (educational, experience, innovation, price, quality, and social) of retail products for sale in museums.
2. The Palace Museum and Its Cultural and Creative Products
The Palace Museum was chosen as a case example since it is the most visited heritage tourism attraction in China and owns the most popular online stores in Asia with more than 10 million fans. It acts as a model whose initiatives tend to be imitated by hundreds of other heritage attractions in the country. Established in 1925, the current facility of the Palace Museum was built on the palaces of the Forbidden City and exhibits collections from the Ming and Qing Dynasties. A World Heritage Site since 1987, the Forbidden City was the official residence of Chinese Emperors from 1420 until 1911. As China’s supreme center of power for more than five centuries, it is an invaluable historical testament to Chinese civilization during the Ming and Qing dynasties, with its landscaped gardens and a huge complex of buildings housing furniture and works of art [
20].
2.1. History of the Forbidden City (Palace Museum)
The Forbidden City exhibits the interchange of human values throughout the history of Beijing, which was established according to the classic “three-tier city wall (imperial, inner, and outer)” layout system for a traditional Chinese capital. As almost all of the inner city and outer city of Beijing vanished during city reconstruction, the Forbidden City is well conserved and is a major geographical landmark of Beijing.
Due to its unique geographic location and strategic value, Beijing and its predecessors witnessed the historic stages of China. The origin of Beijing can be traced back to the city of Ji in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046 B.C.–771 B.C.). Since the middle of the Tang Dynasty (618–907), the ethnic groups beyond the Great Wall began to move southward one after another for more than eight centuries. In the end, Beijing replaced Chang’an as the political center of a unified China. Its capital history began with the rise of Liao Dynasty (907–1125). It was renamed Nanjing as the southern capital of the Liao Dynasty by the nomadic Khitan people expanding southward from beyond the Great Wall. During the Jin Dynasty (1115–1234), the city was expanded with reference to Bianliang, the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127) in Central China. It was renamed Zhongdu and made the formal capital of Jin Dynasty in 1153. As shown in
Figure 1, Kublai Khan built the city of Dadu near the detached palace in the northeastern suburbs of Zhongdu, which was destroyed by war. Dadu became the capital of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), when all of China was ruled for the first time. New aqueducts were built to introduce more water from mountain springs into Dadu. Benefitting from the abundant water supply, boats from the Grand Canal could be pulled into the city and the wharf was developed into the largest market within the capital. Wider lakes in the city also created a splendid landscape. In 1368, after the Ming army captured Dadu, the north city wall was moved 2.5 kilometers south for defense. In 1403, the Ming Dynasty decided to move its capital northward to Beijing and began to build city walls and palaces, preparing for its new capital. During this period, one of the most iconic historical buildings, the Forbidden City was built. The southern wall of the city was moved one kilometer to the south as well. After the middle of the Ming Dynasty, due to the increase of population and the need for defense, the outer city was built in 1553, and the Temple of Heaven and other buildings were included in the city (
Figure 1) [
21,
22]. Since then, the Forbidden City, as the core of the central axis extending 7.8 km, became one the most obvious symbols of Beijing.
2.2. Palace Museum Cultural and Creative Products
The Palace Museum has rich treasures of ancient objects, so that it is an important window for spreading Chinese culture. In 2018, the museum received over 17.5 million visitors [
23]. People born in the 1980s and 1990s are the main visitor groups to the Palace Museum [
23]. Meanwhile, online consumers of cultural and creative products are relatively younger, with more than half born in the 1990s, of which the highest proportion were born after 1995 [
19].
As early as 2008, cultural products were sold in the Palace Museum. However, due to their high prices and lack of innovativeness, the annual sales revenues were only about CNY 150 million until 2012 [
24]. From 2013, the Palace Museum began to transform itself and developed many popular cultural and creative products by integrating elements of cultural relics and traditional culture. The Palace Museum has become a super online celebrity through a series of digital marketing campaigns since 2014. Sales of cultural products in the Palace Museum increased from CNY 600 million in 2013 to CNY 1.5 billion in 2017 [
18]. A large part of the cultural and creative income of the Museum is used to organize public education activities. For example, more than 60,000 educational activities were held in 2018, including those held in overseas countries such as Malta, Singapore, Thailand, and Australia [
25].
At present, the Palace Museum’s cultural and creative products are sold both online and offline. In terms of online shopping, in addition to Palace Museum Taobao at taboao.com and The Palace Museum’s Flagship Store of Cultural and Creative Products (PMFSCCP) at tmall.com, there are also The Palace Museum’s Official Flagship Store selling tickets and The Palace Museum’s Publications selling publication works like calligraphy and paintings at tmall.com. In terms of brick and mortar stores, the Museum has many traditional gift shops, which are located both inside and outside the Museum. In February 2018, the Museum created a pop-up store, a new kind of short-term shop used by many famous fashion brands to attract their fans.
During the COVID-19 epidemic, from 25 January to 30 April 2020, the Palace Museum closed its on-site business and moved operations to online like many other cultural institutions. The museum used social media to carry out “cloud exhibitions”, “cloud lectures” and educational programs, e.g., “National treasures” which invited celebrities to participate. Online flagship stores’ business transactions were not interrupted. They continued to promote new cultural and creative products by the “Something new is coming in the Palace Museum” program via social media platforms and TV channels.
6. Conclusions and Discussion
Using a mixed-method approach, the research explored the components of consumers’ perceived value of museum cultural and creative products and their impact on purchase intentions. The interview data and the extant literature depict how the six dimensions (educational, experience, innovation, price, quality, and social) of perceived value are fostering the tourists’ intentions to buy cultural and creative products in museums. The results from the quantitative data collected from the tourists provided empirical evidence about the antecedents of purchase intentions in museums which was also reflected from the interviews of the museum expert providing cross-validation of each other. Perceived innovation and experiential values are found to have a positive influence on the purchase of museum cultural and creative products, while quality, price, social and educational values are not.
6.1. Theoretical Implications
The theoretical model proposed by this research specifies the dimensions (educational, experience, innovation, price, quality, and social) of retail products for sale in museums. The proposed model is derived from the extant studies (e.g., [
11,
45,
51,
54,
60]). The purpose of Sweeney and Soutar [
60]’s work was to measure and confirm consumers’ perceived quality, price, social, and emotional values for durable consumer goods. Although these researchers’ motivation was to understand and explain the important factors that influenced consumers’ intentions to buy durable consumer goods, the model has subsequently been applied in a wide range of fields. For this research, a multidimensional perceived value model was proposed and adapted to tourism-oriented museum cultural and creative products. Evidence for the direct effects of quality, price, social, and educational values on purchase intentions was, however, not provided. The reason might be the rather low perceptual level of the quality, social, and prices value the tourists had with museum cultural and creative products in a context of travelling rather than in normal daily life.
The data suggests that perceived innovation and experience values were the two factors driving consumers to purchase museum cultural and creative products. These results support what Booth and Powell [
11], Kotler [
51], Mottner and Ford [
7], Lin et al. [
45] and Tu, and Liu and Cui [
54] had already observed and implied—the intention to buy cultural and creative products in museums’ cultural shops is heavily impacted by the level of innovation and experience values they provide. Although, in general, educational value is important for museums ([
11,
51]), this research found that it was not a significant factor causing tourists to buy museum cultural and creative products. The reasons could be that consumers were not fully aware of the Palace Museum’s educational mission or the educational functions of products were not apparent at the time of purchase. For instance, some respondents mentioned that they wanted to buy products reflecting the wisdom of the planning of Beijing but could not find anything worth buying apart from some books. Therefore, the Palace Museum must adopt additional measures to transform the value of education into real consumption. In summary, this research confirms that the multiple perceived values of museum cultural and creative products affect purchase intentions in different ways. In general, innovation and experience values are powerful predictive indicators of purchase intentions.
6.2. Practical Implications
This research provides critical insights for practitioners and managers by providing the factors of purchase intentions of cultural and creative products in the museum context. Based on this research, practical strategies and approaches can be adopted by museum managers and marketers to enhance innovation and experience values in designing their cultural products.
Much more innovative forms of educational products should be developed and used to strengthen consumers’ experiential value, considering that consumers prefer experiential and innovative products. Regarding the content of innovative products, the value and meaning of the Forbidden City as a world heritage cultural site could be fully explored to the public. For instance, the museum could design a game that allows participants to play the roles of the emperor, capital planners, water system planners, or engineers to simulate the site selection and construction process of Dadu in the Yuan Dynasty. Games can be online or virtual, and the derivative peripheral products related to games can be sold both onsite and online.
Being a valuable and innovative way for consumer engagement [
82], information communication technologies can be applied by museums to promote visitor experiences ([
13,
83,
84,
85]). Specifically, the following measures can be taken. First, digital products with interactive experience features, such as mobile apps, can be developed based on panorama or VR technology so that visitors can experience the interactive feelings with cultural collections by touching and sliding their phone screens. Second, museums can launch Do-it-Yourself (DIY) programs based on their collections, both online and offline, which would enhance visitors’ appreciation of cultural relics. Third, museums should cooperate with schools and other educational institutions to carry out experiential courses, such as craft-making, role-playing, and scenario simulation. Through these interactive and immersive courses, participants can experience and acquire historical and cultural knowledge, and they may then purchase related products, such as handmade items.
In addition, digital platforms can support museums to provide innovative communication methods for visitors, e.g., customization, experimentation, collaborative creation, and gamification [
86]. Thus, museum fans and visitors in general should be encouraged to contribute their creative ideas for developing innovative products. For instance, organizing creative design competitions or social media topic activities are both good ways. Furthermore, museum product designers can obtain innovative design ideas of products through the following methods, which have already been used by the Palace Museum. First, the color, pattern, image, and language elements of cultural relics can be extracted and combined with daily articles to launch some practical and aesthetic products. For example, the caisson ceiling umbrella is an umbrella designed by extracting the color and pattern symbols of the Palace Museum’s caisson ceiling. The Chaozhu earphone is designed based on the bead string used in the formal dress worn by a minister at court in Qing dynasty. Third, hot topics and events can be used to launch derivative products. For example, the Palace Museum and Neiliansheng, a traditional shoe brand, jointly launched a customized pair of cloth shoes with a theme of the popular animated film “Dayu Haitang” when it was released in 2016 in China.
As in the case of the Palace Museum, the application of innovation and digital strategies to cultural and creative products can help cultural institutions survive in harsh environments. At the same time, for the long-term sustainable development of the institutions themselves, sustainable management tools, such as the decision-making management model can be applied to dynamically evaluate and intelligently manage innovative practice [
87].