**MARKETING ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESOURCE PROTECTION**

Harvey M. Shields

**Introduction**

Marketing archaeological resource protection may appear confusing to
archaeologists and historic preservationists, who generally receive
little or no training in business administration. The two most
definitely relate, in that marketing can provide a unique and,
hopefully, more successful way of organizing and implementing a
concerted archaeological resource protection program. To better
understand this relationship, think of marketing as an alternate
paradigm by which one can observe, analyze, and affect a dynamic social
process. Before proceeding any further, I must digress for a moment in
order to overcome any prejudices that you, the reader, may have. Many of
you have a background in the social sciences, rather than business.
Marketing, as you all surely know, comes out of the discipline of
\"Business Administration.\" This will, hopefully, not taint what is to
follow.

**Marketing**

Philip Kotler (1984:4) defines marketing as: \"A social process by which
individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating
and exchanging products and value with others.\" There are many concepts
wrapped up in this definition that need to be developed separately.
Needs and wants are two key marketing concepts. People need many things
in order to live. Items such as air, food, and water are basic to human
survival and are thus required. People also have strong preferences for
other goods and services. Some embellish on basic needs, while others
revolve around more abstract concepts such as recreation and education.
Marketing does not create needs and wants; these pre‑exist. Marketing
acts to influence wants, by pointing out how a good or service may
fulfill a desire.

The attraction that some people have to archaeology, archaeological
sites, and artifacts relates to these basic desires. It may have
something to do with the desire of human beings to understand
themselves, and their origins, or it may have to do with an appreciation
for art, as manifested in artifacts. Whatever the cause, there is no
doubt that some people want to deal with \"things archaeological.\"

Another marketing concept is the product. A product is a good or a
service that satisfies the needs and wants of individuals. Actually, all
goods really are vehicles for a service. For example, a car provides a
transportation service, a hammer provides the service of driving a nail,
and a refrigerator provides the service of food preservation. The
marketer\'s job is to convey clearly to the consumer what service is
being realized by the product so they can identify the desire to be
fulfilled.

The discipline of archaeology provides a wide variety of services. For
example, it answers questions about human origins and lifeways. It also
is the vehicle that produces artifacts to be viewed, appreciated, and/or
possessed. The product may be packaged in the form of a dig, a museum, a
movie or, for some, a \"tastefully\" arranged wall‑hanging of
arrowheads.

Another set of related marketing concepts are value and satisfaction.
Here, value is used as the relative rating of a product in providing for
or satisfying one\'s need or want. The better a product does that, the
more value it has. In an archaeological context, value may be ascribed
on the basis of age, association with an historic figure, or monetary
value. Satisfaction of the \"archaeological desire\" can be obtained by
a range of options, from viewing or excavating a site or object to
actual possession of a site or object.

The concepts of exchange and transaction are key economic and social
concepts necessary to an understanding of marketing. People can obtain
an item by producing it themselves, taking it from someone else, begging
for it, or exchanging it for something they have (usually for money).
The discipline of marketing implies the latter method. Exchange
represents the transaction of obtaining a desired product by offering
something of value in return, and having it accepted. This is a
processual concept rather than a static one, and fits nicely within the
range of social science theory.

Even the archaeological product is involved in the exchange of value and
satisfaction. This may be as direct as a collector exchanging tens of
thousands of dollars for an Anasazi pot, or as abstract as a museum
exchanging knowledge for a donation or volunteer work.

The final concept of concern to us is that of market. \"A market
consists of all the potential customers sharing a particular need or
want who might be willing and able to engage in an exchange to satisfy
that need or want\" (Kotler 1984:12). Whereas economists consider a
market as including all buyers and sellers, a marketer sees it as
encompassing the entire industry and the buyers. However, the term
\"market\" may be used in a variety of other ways. A market may refer to
a specific group of buyers, as well as the all inclusive system
described in the definition above. Thus, one must be sure of the context
of the word when inferring its meaning.

For archaeology, the market consists of those people who share the want
or desire for \"things archaeological\" and are willing to enter into
exchanges to satisfy those needs. By \"things archaeological\" I include
the process of archaeological recovery of data, the knowledge obtained
from this process, the recovered artifacts, and the storage and
interpretive facilities (e.g. museums). The market involves all people
with this want or desire. The fact that the activities of some of these
people are detrimental to the archaeological resource is of no concern
at this point in defining the market. It will have great importance
later, however, when applying marketing techniques to the protection of
the resource.

Defining the market brings us full circle back to marketing. In a crude
sense, marketing is the anthropology of buying. Thus, it may be seen as
a dynamic social process that can be observed, analyzed, and affected.
The way one does this is referred to as marketing management.

**Marketing Management**

Marketing management \". . .consists of analyzing market opportunities,
researching and selecting target markets, developing marketing
strategies, planning marketing tactics, and implementing and controlling
the marketing effort\" (Kotler 1984:61). It is the process by which one
delineates the market, understands it and, accordingly, develops and
implements a plan to accomplish the organization\'s goals.

**The Mission Statement**

The first step in the process of marketing management is to develop a
mission statement that clearly identifies the purpose of the
organization or the effort about to be undertaken. This may sound easy
enough, but the clear articulation of the mission statement can make all
the difference between success, and failure. It is the mission statement
that provides both direction, and a touchstone to determine if the
product is doing what it is supposed to do. If the mission statement is
too broad, it will not provide sufficient direction. If it is too
narrow, it will choke off fruitful activities.

In the case of archaeological resource protection, the content of the
mission statement will depend on the nature of the organization
undertaking the effort, its philosophy, goal and the background of the
people making up the organization. For one group this might be \"To
educate the public about the value of archaeology,\" for another \"To
physically protect archaeological sites under our management,\" for yet
another \"To deter pothunters from plundering sites.\" In all
likelihood, a single organization will not be able to carry out the
mission of \"To protect all archaeological sites.\" Attempting such a
broad mission would more than likely diffuse the effect of precious
dollars. In any case, development of a mission statement is a key
concept that forms the basis for decision making in the process outlined
below.

**Situational Analysis**

The next step in marketing management is to conduct a situational
analysis. This amounts to doing the necessary background research of the
context within which one is trying to operate. The context, or
environment can be broken into two areas: the macro‑ and
micro‑environments. The macro‑environment concerns the world around us
and how it impinges on the market of concern. It takes in aspects such
as demographics, national and international economic trends, the
physical environment, technology, politics, and society. The
micro‑environment looks at the infrastructure relating to your activity
and/or organization. It would include the organizational structure,
supply of resources, middlemen, consumers, competitors, and groups that
are interested in and may affect the conduct of the organization\'s
activities. Any marketing effort must understand and take into account
these factors.

The archaeological environment is a complex one. At the
macro‑environmental level, an assessment must be made of the population
at large and how demographic trends may relate to archaeological
resources. For example, one effect of the \"baby‑boomer\" phenomenon is
the likelihood of increased travel by this group as they enter their
prime income‑producing years. This may lead to more visits to
archaeological sites, resulting in more impacts upon them. Economics and
politics are important to examine. If the economy is generally healthy,
there is a great possibility of private and/or public support of
archaeological projects. Politics is always of concern given the raft of
Federal and State historic preservation laws that help or hinder
protection of archaeological resources. Society and its attitudes toward
archaeology also are important to gauge in this process, as it is key to
knowing how far or how deep educational efforts might have to go.

An analysis of the micro‑environment must look at the archaeological
organization, whether it is a museum, university, or government agency.
The structure of the organization may be a help or a hindrance to the
effort under consideration. In the archaeological context, the supply of
resources may take in a variety of forms including the availability of
sites to excavate, the availability of money to excavate sites and
preserve artifacts, the type and number of museum exhibits, and the
number of dealers of artifacts. Consumers are also important to your
analysis. How are consumers defined? Are they readers of archaeological
reports, visitors to sites or museums, donors to your organization, or
customers in a gift shop. Competitors in the archaeological context is
an interesting idea that has received little thought. Certainly, there
are competitors for visitors to museums, there are other archaeological
projects that are competitors for funding, and there are even
competitors for the recreational time of the people you want to visit a
site or museum. It is a competitive world, even for archaeology.

These are examples of some of the items that should be included in a
situational analysis of archaeological resources. In other words, the
situational analysis must look at everything related to the resources
and your organization. Only by seeing where you are, can you know where
to go.

**Researching and Selecting Target Markets**

A crucial realization in researching and selecting a target market is
that not everyone is interested in what your organization offers.
Unfortunately, many archaeologists and historic preservationists have a
tendency to assume that everyone is interested in archaeology and
history. This simply is not true. Just as everyone is not interested in
attending symphony concert performances or watching \"Wall Street Week\"
on public television there is a limited market for \"things
archaeological.\"

A rule of thumb in marketing is the \"80‑20 rule.\" This common sense
theorum dictates that 20% of the market, does 80% of the consuming. The
rule leads to a concept called \"target marketing.\" It dictates that
marketing activities be directed to the 20%, rather than the 80%. This
results in more effective use of dollars and other resources in
marketing your product. It is a particularly practical approach to take
in this era of limited public and private support for just about any
activity. Attempts to reach 100% of the market with a single marketing
campaign simply are not very effective in reaching the primary
consumers.

The next step in marketing management is to define who your market is.
You need to get an idea of the group of consumers in which you are
interested. Is it all people who are interested in \"things
archaeological?\" Is it only those people who visit archaeological
sites? Is it the people who traffic in illegal artifacts? Is it the
people who \"pothunt\" sites? In other words, what group do you seek to
reach with your activity? Clearly defining your market is crucial to the
rest of the marketing management process.

Once the group of consumers that you are interested in has been defined,
you must determine what they look like. This means understanding them
demographically, attitudinally, geographically, and behaviorally. It is
also necessary to understand their perceptions about the product and the
benefits they receive from its use. The point is to look at the consumer
in great detail, both as individuals and as members of a society.

Part and parcel of understanding your market is estimating its size.
This provides a dimension to the effort one must undertake to sell the
product. Preliminary results from a recent representative survey of
15,000 United States households by Longwoods International, Inc. (1989,
1990) revealed that 50.3% of people who traveled during the past 12
months visited an historical site. This proportion provides some
indication of the total market for \"things archaeological.\"

Finally, you need to know how best to reach your market. This includes
knowing which media they use the most, ie. television, radio, or print.
What are their favorite programs in the broadcast media, or their
favorite periodicals in the print media. Only by knowing this
information can you place your message where it will do the most good
(see Pokotylo this volume for a discussion of public attitudes about
archaeology).

Once this research about your target market is completed, you will have
the ability to segment your market. The \"80‑20 rule\" applies to a
market as much as it does to the universe of all consumers. That is, a
few segments of your total market will do most of the consuming. There
are a number of ways to segment a market. It can be done on the basis of
demographics, such as age or income. It can be done on the basis of
geography, such as zip code, state, county, city, or census districts.
For purposes of archaeological resource protection, as in most
endeavors, it may be best to segment the market on the basis of
interest. This is the one sure way to reach the target group regardless
of demographics or place of residence.

Based on the study of consumer\'s interests, you can begin to develop
segments. Segmenting the target market is analogous to developing
artifact typologies. They can also be derived in the same way. Marketers
usually use a variety of statistical clustering techniques and/or factor
analyses. Archaeologists should be very much at home in determining
market segments. If the goal is to reach the pothunter, they can be
studied and one can come to understand them. Chances are that much
pothunting is of the casual sort and could be easily affected by an
informational and educational campaign targeted to that group and
directed at deterring their activities. The hard‑core pothunter of your
nightmares can also be addressed through such a research effort. If
nothing else, the information gained through a survey would provide law
enforcement officials with a profile of these people. Whoever you pick
as your target market should relate to the mission statement for your
activity/organization.

In all likelihood, the specific information for use in marketing
archaeological resource protection is simply not available at this time.
Original research must be done. Just as archaeologists conduct
background research before beginning an archaeological survey, or
excavating a site, market research must be obtained before the start of
a protection effort. In the long run, it will save funds and ensure that
the effort will be as successful as possible.

**Developing a Marketing Plan and Strategy**

Most organizations, especially bureaucratic ones, are familiar with the
planning process. It is very much the same for marketing as it is for
any other activity, for which one is used to planning. Development of a
marketing plan and strategy are necessary steps to the successful
realization of one\'s mission.

There are many ways to construct a plan, and I will not belabor that
point here. The point is to make a plan, and be sure that it combines
the knowledge gleaned from the situational analysis, and applies to the
mission of the effort. As with all plans, it must contain a series of
goals and objectives, with detailed action plans to make sure that each
step of the plan is implemented. Subsequent to this, you will be able to
estimate how much money will be needed to accomplish the plan.

There is one part of this process that is unique to marketing. This
unique aspect is called the marketing mix. It often is confused with the
totality of marketing. While it is not the whole, it is perhaps the
heart of marketing management. The marketing mix consists of the 4 P\'s:
product, price, place, and promotion. These are the variables over which
marketers have control, and represents the means by which they realize
their goals and objectives.

The product is a concept that we have touched upon earlier. It is the
good or service that is being offered. Identifying the product is based
on the answer to the question: \"What is the buyer really buying\"
(Kotler 1984:463). As stated earlier, every product is really a service,
even ones that seem to be rather tangible. When a consumer buys an
automobile, he is really buying transportation, or in the case of a
sports car, perhaps he is buying status or a youthful image. What the
marketer does is to sell the benefits of the product, not its features.
The core product must be converted into a tangible product which may
have up to five characteristics: a level of quality, features, styling,
a brand name, and packaging (Kotler 1984).

What does this have to do with archaeological protection? It has
everything to do with developing a concerted marketing effort directed
at creating change. The product concept can apply to \"things
archaeological.\" Of course the delineation of its characteristics would
be different, depending on what the mission of the organization was. For
instance, let us say that public education is the mission, and the goal
is to make pothunters aware of the national value of archaeological
resources as a means of deterring casual looting. The level of quality
would relate to the great value of the archaeological resource to our
society and the nation. Features would include the resource\'s physical
nature and condition (e.g. is it above or below ground), does it contain
burials, ceramics, or projectile points? Styling is quite obvious. It
would relate to the many types of archaeological sites that exist (e.g.
is it a rock shelter, a pueblo, or a big‑game hunting kill sites?). A
brand name used to evoke a specific place would be a well‑known site
such as Mesa Verde or Cahokia Mounds. Packaging relates to the
presentation of the message (e.g. using broadcast media spots by famous
people associated with archaeology, such as Harrison Ford). The point
here is that the product must be thought through, and not assumed to be
self‑evident. It can be presented in a variety of ways, any one of which
can send a different message which may appeal to, rather than, turn‑off
a targeted group.

Price is a variable that also is related to archaeological resource
protection. What are you going to charge for your service? What is the
price that the public would be willing to pay if these resources are
allowed to perish. Of course, price also refers to what the public may
pay through donations of time and money, or through appropriations to
government agencies. In whatever format, pricing is something one must
consider in this process. In determining the price, one must look at a
variety of factors (Kotler 1984). What is the objective of the price? Is
it for survival, or for profit? What is the demand for the product? Even
in archaeological resources protection, there is a demand equation for
this service. A high demand would enhance an already high intrinsic
value. What are the costs involved in producing the product? This would
include costs associated with excavations, museum storage, and
interpretation, as well as the commercial value of artifacts. It would
also include the cost of law enforcement or public service
announcements. Understanding costs would help an organization to set a
price.

Price can be determined by simply looking at actual costs, but they can
also be determined by looking at the competition. In this day and age,
many worthwhile causes look to the public for support in accomplishing
their own goals. What kinds of donations are competitors getting? How
are they assessing the value of their product for the public? Examining
all these factors will help in setting the price variable, however one
wants to use it in the cause of archaeological resource protection.

The concept of place refers to the distribution channels used to deliver
the product to the consuming public. In the case of a service like
archaeological protection, how is the service made available and
accessible to the public? The distributional channel for an educational
message could be the broadcast or print media. It might also be a
network of community museums. In the case of law enforcement,
distribution of that service is through the activities of the members of
the law enforcement establishments.

Finally, there is the promotional variable. This amounts to getting the
word out and actually communicating the benefits and features of your
product to the targeted markets. Promotion is not a single activity, but
a mix of four major tools: advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and
personal selling (Kotler 1984). Advertising consists of paid
announcements in a variety of media. Sales promotion consists of short
term incentives to encourage the purchase of a product. Publicity
concerns the placement of information about the product into the news
media. Personal selling involves face‑to‑face interaction with groups or
individuals for the purpose of selling the product.

All of these can be applied to the protection of archaeological
resources. Other than law enforcement, most people think of advertising
as the primary means of promoting their product. As you can see, there
are other possibilities, many less costly. Publicity is free other than
the time to prepare press releases, hold press conferences, or deal with
the media. In some instances, use of a sales promotion may be more
effective. In archaeology this may relate to letting people actually dig
at a site. This would enable them to see the cost and effort in human
terms that goes into the recovery of archaeological information.
Personal selling in archaeology may amount to giving lectures in front
of local avocational archaeology societies or even talking with
collectors.

Now that you have developed your marketing mix and devised tactics to
implement that strategy, you need to evaluate the whole process. It does
not do much good to do all that work, and not be able to judge whether
it was successful or not. This may seem like it might not be worth the
time or expense, but it will be to the groups that supply the money for
your projects. If you can clearly demonstrate improvement of the
situation, they are more likely to continue providing funds for the
effort. In addition, such an evaluation effort lets you know where to
make improvements in the program. It provides the feedback mechanism so
important to a dynamic system designed to achieve its goal.

**Conclusion**

The discipline of marketing is one way for an organization to approach
the protection of archaeological resources. It provides a way of
visualizing the issues and addressing them in a coherent and logical
fashion. The effort to protect the world\'s archaeological resources
takes every bit as much time and work to produce success, as it does to
produce a successful archaeological research project. Marketing provides
a method by which the protection effort, in whatever form, can be
organized, implemented, and controlled. Its use will be well worth the
endeavor.

**References Cited**

Kotler, P. (1984) Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, and Control.
Prentice‑Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

Longwoods International Inc. (1989, 1990) Travel USA (ongoing research
on the travel behavior of U.S. citizens). Contact Dr. Bill Siegel, 2161
Yonge St., Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4S 3A6.