Well, the point that we went through in the last session was the relationship between art orientation and market orientation: whether a cultural institution needs to refer to its intrinsic value of the work of art that is provided and shown to the public, or, on the other hand, if a cultural institution instead to refer and produce an appropriate offer according to the customers' needs, according to the market. We eventually arrived to the conclusion that this dualism is a dualism that is very difficult to solve and to co-exist with. There is a concept here, the concept of quality and mainly the concept of value that can help marketers to balance and to co-exist with this apparent dualism. In fact, the point that I want to bring your attention to is what is value and what is the quality of a product, in particular in a hedonic context. Customer value is a combination between benefits and sacrifices. To what extent is a consumer willing to execute some operation in order to obtain the benefits which the product represents? A purchase of a product and in particular a cultural product can provide benefits. What are the benefits that a product can provide to the consumer? We can talk about the functional benefits, we can talk about social benefits, psychological benefits, experiential benefits, and symbolic benefits. The more we move into the context of hedonic consumptions, so the more we move into contexts like this, so when you enter in a beautiful place like the Cenacolo painted by Leonardo 1494-1498, you cannot help but perceive a value that is not functional. People don't enter here because they have some functional reason to satisfy. People don't enter here because they have some functional reason to satisfy. We are now in examples of experiential values, psychological values, and social values. It means that people enter a situation, a room like this, not because they have a functional need to fulfill, but because they want to live an experience. In this case, we can find many examples of this kind of declination of value when we approach the cultural problem. For example, we can affirm by entering a room, a cultural context like this, we can also affirm our social identification. We may also want to tag them thanks to the tools that social communication makes available nowadays. We want to share it with the community and with all of our friends that we are here; we are tagging it here on Facebook, we are checking in on Foursquare in order to say that being here represents a social benefit for the consumer. The consumer here is saying to everybody else in the world that he or she's here. and was able to enter into contact with these works of art. Without any reference to the very essence of the product, the intrinsic value, the functional benefit, the functional value that The Last Supper can represent. Another element that we need to take into consideration is the social affirmations. So the idea of being involved in a context where there are barriers to enter in contact with. So in order to appreciate the works of art, you had to have the elements that allow you to understand what the work of art is saying, is conveying to you. And this is another kind of benefit that a cultural consumption can provide. There are other psychological benefits that an example like this can provide. In order to enter this room, you need to book it in advance, many times, months in advance. In other cases like the Vatican Museum that we saw, we need to queue physically outside the museum. And only few people at a time can enter into a refectory of The Last Supper. So it means that only an elite group of consumers, of people that are interested in the product are allowed to enter. And also this particular activity of being and feeling special, feeling detached from the general crowd is a psychological benefit that a cultural product can provide. Connected with this, we have many other examples. For example, the fashion system, you can have a customized product that affirms, in terms of benefits, a psychological benefit that is represented of being special. Being the only to then have the possibility to have and use a specific program. Anderson, starting from 1997, put a lot of effort in describing the importance of customer value. And how the company can deal with customer value in terms of providing the competitive advantage in the market. So we will know later on what is customer value preposition. We know that value is the combination of benefits and costs. We went through the list and the description of the five benefits: functional, social, psychological, experiential, and symbolic, but then what are the costs? Very often we only consider the costs as the the monetary cost, which is not enough to define the costs to purchase and consume a product. Let's take the example of The Last Supper again. What are the costs of entering here? There is a ticket to pay, there is the service premium price to pay for the booking system, so the extra money that you pay when you book online, but also there is the psychological cost of having the risk of logging into the website and hoping that there is a suitable slot available for you. When we talk about museums, when we talk about exhibitions of art, when we talk about theaters, the costs are not only the monetary ones, there are lot of costs that include not only functional aspects, reasoning aspects, but also emotional and experiential ones. Let's have a look at the painting itself. You need to know something in order to appreciate the essence of the painting. The more you know about the way Leonardo painted The Last Supper, the more in contact you enter with the work of art, the more you know about the historical place, the historical context of Leonardo and his fully more into the details, you enter in the relation with the work of art. Those are costs that are not monetary, you need to study to do that. You can decide to have this kind of relationship and immerse yourself with the art. You can also decide to have very superficial or emotional experience being inside here. But according to the different kinds of values that you want to obtain from the context with the work of art, there are relevant costs that you need to support. The last one that I want to mention is regarding the queue. We consider the fact that people that have the possibility to enter this room, feel special because they have the possibility to do that. But at the same time, having the possibility to do this experience is the result of a long process, in this case of booking online, and having the possibility to find the slot or in the Vatican Museum we mentioned before, staying in line under the sun for hours. This is another kind of cost and this kind of cost together with the monetary cost, put together the element of the ratio that together with the benefit combine and define what the value is. The value in hedonic consumption is absolutely essential for understanding the element of quality. Because there are many actors that are playing in the market of art and heritage. If we consider, for example, the art market, we have the galleries, we have the path rooms, we have the art fair and we have the collections for example, that are playing a role in defining what the quality is and what the value of the value work of art is. In context like this, we have the historian, the people that study the art history. We have the journalists that are observing the flow of tourism and the participation of the citizens in the area where the museum exists, there are the institutions, there are the sponsors, a lot of people are playing a role in defining what the quality of a work of art is, if it is worthwhile to enter it or not. But, we are talking about heritage management in this course, and together with quality we need to consider the other element that is essential which is the value. Value is nothing else but the combination of benefits and costs. Value is not the same as defining quality, value, and not quality, is the key element for a cultural institution and also for other companies to have a competitive advantage in its proposition among the competitors.
