Cultural Consumption in a Post-pandemic world: Managing arts marketing challenges through potential creative destruction catalysed by COVID-19

Murphy, T ORCID: 0009-0006-7888-6368 (2025) Cultural Consumption in a Post-pandemic world: Managing arts marketing challenges through potential creative destruction catalysed by COVID-19. Doctoral thesis, Liverpool John Moores University.

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Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis catalysed a unique moment in time, forcing museums worldwide to make a singular strategic decision: how to communicate cultural value in digital-only domains. This study investigates how museums reconfigured their marketing and communication strategies to adapt to changed figurations in response to and emerging from the global health pandemic. It examines factors that shaped such adaptation, as well as challenges and opportunities revealed in the process of those adaptations, to explore how the shift from physical to digital-only domains permanently reshaped institutional strategic direction. Employing a sequential mixed methods approach, guided by pragmatist, design-based research principles, the study captures layered insights into how museums navigated the digital shift during exogenous crisis. Combining quantitative and qualitative data, data collection and analysis unfolded in three distinct, but interrelated stages: social media data which lays empirical foundation for the identification of objective, observable, and temporal patterns pre-, during, and post-COVID-19; a survey of museum professionals to explore how patterns were operationalised within strategic decision-making processes across institutional contexts; and semi-structured interviews to elucidate deeper strategic motivations and institutional logics behind the communication of digital cultural value.

Grounding the empirical datasets into the synthesised theoretical framework via its iterative and triangulated approach revealed and developed five institutional typologies with varying degrees of sub-capabilities which were simultaneously shaped by and actively shaping levels of capability, adaptability, and strategic direction during and emerging from the exogenous crisis. The study culminated in the development of a conceptual framework that enables cultural institutions to more effectively identify, understand, and leverage such sub-capabilities necessary for communicating digital cultural value sustainably and equitably. In an already precarious sector bound by ongoing uncertainty, and increasing calls for innovation, the conceptual framework enables museums to articulate and operationalise internal capabilities across strategic management, cultural policy, and organisational domains. The study advances academic discourse by synthesising existing theoretical constructs to reveal how the unique, exogenous crisis of COVID-19 exposed structural inertia whilst simultaneously catalysing transformational change. In doing so, it extends dynamic capabilities theory to the cultural sector and repositions digital arts marketing as a strategic function within institutional transformation.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Digital Marketing; Digital Transformation; Arts Management; Innovation; Museum
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HF Commerce > HF5001 Business > HF5410 Marketing. Distribution of Products N Fine Arts > NX Arts in general
Divisions:	Business and Management (from Sep 19)
Date of acceptance:	16 September 2025
Date Deposited:	16 Oct 2025 12:19
Last Modified:	16 Oct 2025 12:19
DOI or ID number:	10.24377/LJMU.t.00027336
Supervisors:	Fillis, I, Brown, J, Jones, G and Lehman, K
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/27336

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