Inside The Marketing Strategy Of The Louvre, The World's Most Visited Museum.

Paul TalbotContributor

GETTY IMAGES

With more than ten million visitors last year, a 25% increase from 2017, why would the Louvre need a marketing strategy?

For the past 18 years, the world’s most visited museum has been getting a hand with marketing projects from Accenture Interactive and the Accenture Foundation.

I recently asked Claude Chaffiotte, managing director for Accenture Interactive in France and Benelux, to illuminate some of the work that’s being done.

Paul Talbot: Where does marketing fit into the strategic plan you’ve been working on for The Louvre?

Claude Chaffiotte: The Louvre aims to create meaningful experiences for visitors before, during, and after their visit.

To meet this goal, Accenture Interactive is helping the museum to better understand its visitors, including the scientists and researcher community, in order to offer a more qualitative experience and create relevant digital services.

As a key sponsor of the digital transformation, the CMO of the Louvre plays a pivotal role, leading many initiatives such as brand positioning tailored to the different channels, graphic design chart, and internal and external communications.

Talbot: One of the objectives is ‘(to) enrich the visitor experience before, during and after their visit to the Louvre.’ Could you provide a few examples of how digital resources might be used to achieve this?

Chaffiotte: In 2015, we enriched the visitor experience of the ‘Petite Galerie,’ a permanent exhibition space in the heart of the museum, by developing a website and mobile app using augmented reality.

For instance, the deteriorated ‘Dancers of Delphi’ sculpture was ‘restored’ using augmented reality, enabling visitors to see this masterpiece in its original state.

In 2019, we are initiating the revamp of the Louvre website and adding AI-based ‘conversational functionalities’ to help visitors prepare ahead of their visits.  This will allow Louvre agents to free up their time to focus on added-value services.  

We also implemented a digital tool for the agents that allows them to track daily incidents and solve them in real-time.

Talbot: How much physical capacity does the Louvre have for visitor growth and how can digital innovations address some of these challenges?

Chaffiotte: The Louvre had more than 10 million visitors last year, a historical record, despite being located among the protests of the yellow vest movement.  The trend for 2019 seems to point to another record year, specifically with the long-awaited Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition to celebrate the 500th anniversary of his death.

With record visits in 2018 and anticipated in 2019, the Louvre had to rethink how to best direct the flow of visitors.

Digital innovations will help solve these issues by improving yield management, optimizing visitor traffic, and providing online access to exhibitions.  New innovations will also enable an improved experience for the Louvre agents, allowing them to provide enhanced services to visitors.

Talbot: What innovations do you foresee taking place with the marketing of museums over the next few years?

Chaffiotte: Innovations to attract new visitors and to increase the loyalty of existing ones, using digital to:

• Facilitate the access to all art collections of the Louvre, including art pieces that are not exhibited in the museum.
• Better target specific visitors (e.g. people under 35, regular visitors, people who never visited the museum, etc.).
• Innovations to better amplify the art collections, particularly art pieces that are not exhibited, and art knowledge.  The Louvre owns around 620,000 art pieces, but only 35,000 are exhibited.  The digitization of art pieces will allow the general public, academics, scientists, and researchers to access the entirety of the museum’s collection. 

Talbot: Any other insights you’d like to share?

Chaffiotte: Working together for 18 years now, we share the same vision: art is innovation and innovation is art.  We also share the same goal of revamping the museum to place the visitors, employees, professionals, and researchers at the center of this strategic initiative and to make the experience for each visitor as unique as the museum itself.

Paris's 10 Best Small Museums

An hour in Paris is enough time to get a glimpse of the Mona Lisa (once you've elbowed your way through the crowds at the Louvre)—or, better yet, you could spend that time exploring one of the city's under-the-radar small museums. Here are ten of the best.

Musée Carnavalet

A mammoth’s molar; the chair in which Volatire died; Robespierre’s shaving dish. The collection of the Musée Carnavalet (the first municipal museum in Paris) documents the history of the city in the eclectic and eccentric way a museum about Paris should: through its everyday objects (there's a gallery filled entirely with street signs) and historical curiosities (hello, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s inkwell). Bonus: it’s right in the center of the Marais (around the corner from Carven; opposite a Petit Bateau), and therefore a perfect place to break from an afternoon of shopping.

©Antoine Dumont

Pagoda Paris

You can’t miss this bright red pagoda in the eighth arrondissement: it’s six stories tall and flanked by two classic Haussmann apartment blocks. The building is the former home of Ching Tsai Loo, a renowned collector of Chinese and Asian art and artifacts who converted it to a museum in 1925. The pagoda's galleries still contain much of Loo’s original collection of terra-cotta figurines, jade carvings, and porcelain. But the real attraction is the interiors, which are lavish with Shanxi lacquered panels, beautiful hardwood floors, and glass art deco ceilings.

©Jacopo Brancati

Musée Nissim de Camondo

A short walk from the Paris Pagoda is the Musée Nissim de Camondo, a time capsule of life in Belle Époque Paris. The mansion was commissioned by a wealthy banker, Moïse de Camondo, as a setting to show off his collection of 18th-century furniture and objets d’art. This is the place to see rare Sèvres porcelain, intricate Savonniere carpets (some of which were originally woven for the galleries of the Louvre), and all the gilded furniture you could ever wish for.

Musée Nissim de Camondo

Musée National Gustave Moreau

The Musée National Gustave Moreau is the definition of an eccentric artist's museum, containing the personal apartment of the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, his strange collection of souvenirs, and the galleries of artwork he arranged on the upper floors of his private home. The walls, hung floor-to-ceiling with melodramatic mythological canvases, are a fantastic shade of plummy pink.

©RMN-GP/Stéphane Maréchalle

Maison La Roche

This is a mecca for architecture nerds worldwide—above all for fans of French-Swiss design legend Le Corbusier, who designed this listed house in 1923, along with the adjoining Maison Jeannaret. Today it houses the Fondation Le Corbusier, which owns 8,000 original drawings, plans, and paintings by the architect, as well as the building's original furniture.

©FLC-ARS/OMG 2014

Musée Zadkine

The former home of the Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine (1890-1967) is now a jewel box of a museum filled with the artist’s work. Walking in, through a lush garden punctuated by large Cubist stone and metal figures, feels like chancing upon forgotten treasure. Plus, it’s just a short stroll from the Jardin de Luxembourg.

Musée Zadkine

Musée Cognacq-Jay

Another beautiful mansion hidden in the Marais, the Musée Cognacq-Jay is home to the private collection of Ernest Cognacq and his wife Marie-Louise Jaÿ—the founders of La Samaritaine (once the largest and most glamorous of Paris's department stores). A stroll around the twenty Louis XV and XVI rooms offers paintings by Rembrandt, Canaleto, and Reynolds, as well as cases of jewelry and sterling silver snuffboxes.

©Didier Messina

Musée Bourdelle

The Musée Bourdelle is one of the few remaining examples of the artists’ studios that filled the Montparnasse area of Paris at the turn of the last century. Arranged throughout its darkly atmospheric interiors are close to 500 works by the monumental sculptor Antoine Bourdelle—a pupil of Auguste Rodin and a mentor to Alberto Giacometti—as well as works by Ingres, Delacroix, and Rodin himself. The artist’s studio is still arranged as it was during his lifetime, complete with intriguing details like a full set of Samurai armor and scraps of medieval architecture.





Musée de Cluny

The Musée de Cluny (or the National Museum of the Middle Ages) isn't exactly small—it occupies a walled medieval townhouse so large it looks more like a castle—but it is lesser visited. The current exhibition, "Les Animaux Font le Mur" (through January 5), displays spooky stuffed specimens of the animals featured in the museum's famous Lady and the Unicorn tapestries.

©MNHN-Stéphane Jounot




Musée Jacquemart-André

Edouard André, a banking heir, and Nélie Jacquemart, a well-known painter, filled their mansion on the Boulevard Haussmann with art from their travels to Rome, Cairo, Istanbul, and the Far East. After André died, Jacquemart continued to add to the couple’s shared collection, amassing galleries filled with Italian Renaissance art, which she then bequeathed to the Institut de France. The couple’s private apartments are also on view, as is their celebrated winter garden, a grand marble courtyard filled with an enviable collection of exotic potted plants.

©C. Recoura

Contributed by Alice Newell-Hanson, an assistant editor at Condé Nast Traveler.

Follow us on Twitter: @TraveloreReport