Corporate museums lie somewhere in between the academic world of museums and the business world of companies. They also serve as organizations that help companies manage many aspects of their operations, including public relations, branding, advertising, and human resources. This article series will explore corporate museums, their roles and functions, and the opportunities they present, all with the help of PR professionals.
Tadashi Inokuchi
PR Consulting Dentsu Inc.
Back in the Spotlight: The Value of Corporate Museums
– Consolidating Corporate Passion and Creating New Points of Contact with Society –
Back in the Spotlight as a Venue for Internal and External Communication of Companies’ Founding Spirit and Purpose Today
In this series, we looked at 33 corporate museums, and even for us, people who have supported the public relations work of companies over the course of many years, going around these museums has enabled us to see the passion that went into founding the companies and to view the changes their business activities have undergone in a new light. It has given us a sense of gratitude that these companies exist and made us fall in love with them all over again.
Corporate museums also form a point of contact with customers of B2B companies (Photo courtesy of Yanmar Museum)
The corporate information that enters our consciousness on a daily basis is extremely fragmented. Our awareness of the information that is pitched at us, be it a description of an on-sale product in an ad or other such medium or a company talking about the activities that are its bread and butter, is fleeting at best, if we notice it at all.
This mainly applies to B2C companies who still have points of contact in the form of TV commercials and the like, but when it comes to B2B companies, there are fewer points of contact. However, once a visitor enters a corporate museum, they end up spending a few hours looking around and examining what the company has done in the past and what it is going to work on in the future.
There are also some museums that provide an experience with elements of entertainment. The more exhibits that you see, the more interested you get, stopping here and there and walking at a gradually decreasing pace. In contrast to the way people look at exhibits in an art museum, in the process of examining the background of a single company and the extent to which it has contributed to the development of society, visitors may find themselves in a state akin to being engrossed in reading the biography of a great person. The sense of immersion felt is the same as when watching a documentary on the way of life of a company.
While there are probably some companies who had excess funds during the years of Japan’s bubble economy and ended up choosing to build corporate museums as white elephant projects, the original purpose of many of the corporate museums we have looked at in this series is to embody a corporate philosophy. Many of them were established as part of a company’s 50-year, 100-year, or other anniversary. The aim of this is not only to promote the company externally, and a lot of emphasis actually seems to have been placed on sharing the company’s own guiding principles internally to parties including the company’s employees.
Aiming to create a point of contact with a broad spectrum of stakeholders, some companies have enriched and expanded content and incorporated experiential elements, and their museums have become venues for encounters between the company and the general public that produce experiential value across a broad section of society. These museums are places where people memorize things through learning, playing, and experiencing, and for companies, they are once again in the spotlight as a new kind of media for connecting with the general public.
Mikimoto Pearl Island welcomes Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco to its museum。Greeting members of royal families from around the world is part of the museum’s public diplomacy (Photo courtesy of Mikimoto Pearl Island)
In actual fact, over the past few years some companies like Itoen have established new museums while Duskin and Kansai Electric Power among others have refurbished their existing museums. The roles that they play these days are wide ranging, and in addition to the aforementioned venue for conveying passion from the company’s side, they extend to “public diplomacy” through having value as an industrial tourism resource with links to the local community, being utilized as a venue for employee training, and also a place to receive important visitors from overseas.
The museums have different targets and techniques in their individual goals, and the roles they play are diverse. For instance, global companies might invite employees from overseas branches to their museum and share the company’s corporate philosophy with them, or may serve to convey and foster understanding of a company’s approach to business among the employees of a business partner in a supply chain. While digitalization became widespread and took root in all aspects of life throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, facilities that provide content in a real space are now being recognized again for the significance and value of this.
Corporate Museum Objectives
Corporate museums are called the ultimate form of owned media. While official websites and other such information sources are generally used when it comes to gathering corporate information, most museums are located on the grounds of a corporate head office or factory, or adjacent to a laboratory, meaning that those gathering information get to go right to the heart of the company.
By visiting a museum, members of the public can not only obtain information and have experiences in the museum, but also get a feeling for the presence and significance of a company in the region in which it is situated, including the area around the museum. In the case of museums established in the area that a company was founded in, for example, the museum provides an opportunity to find out exactly what the personality of the company is by learning about why the company was established where it was and what kind of role it now plays as a corporate citizen.
Shimadzu Foundation Memorial Museum is certified as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property by the central government and Heritage of Industrial Modernization by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in Japan (Photo courtesy of Shimadzu Corporation)
We in the communications industry often undertake activities that create contact with information across a wide area by disseminating the information through the news media and other media. Whereas advertising and publicity techniques convey a message broadly and thinly to reach as big an audience as possible, corporate museums are great at spreading a message more deeply to a narrower audience. But why has this approach of aiming to gain long-term fans for a company by conveying a deeper message to a narrower range of people to produce a resonance with the company started to gain attention again? Here we consider this while classifying the types of objectives that corporate museums fulfill.
Even if the objective is the same, the fact that each corporate museum has its own varied functions is also a point of interest. While naturally some places take their own multi-layered approaches, below is a simple classification of objectives for reference purposes.
Some corporate museums dispatch staff to universities and other institutions to give lectures (photo courtesy of Printing Museum)
Some people may enjoy using this kind of grouping to get an idea of the characteristics of each museum and compare the differences of each place at an individual level, and a good idea might be to select museums to visit along the lines of interest in content and the kind of ideas for enjoying it that have been incorporated. Corporate museums are surprisingly diverse when it comes to such ideas, and it seems that the value in their existence is once again increasing as a point of contact that enables companies to teach visitors about the thought and culture behind their business.
The Museum Act and Corporate Museum Management
Interest in corporate museums is growing across a broad audience of late, and it appears that they have started to take root as a new leisure activity for people including inbound visitors to Japan.
The Museum Act was revised in April 2022, but as things stand, the number of registered museums is incredibly small, and the number of museum-equivalent facilities stands at five times the number of registered museums. A representative from TOTO Museum, which is classified as a museum-equivalent facility, says “When you become a registered museum you have to provide regular reports on museum operation to the prefectural government’s ordinance-designated city boards of education, and depending on the result of the report, you may be told to produce a report, implement recommendations, or other such things by the Designated City Education Committee. Our museum is a corporate museum that is run by a private company, and while we currently have no intentions to become a registered museum, we believe that we need to keep investigating how we can ensure a balance of independence and public nature.”
Mizkan Museum (nicknamed “MIM”), established in Aichi Prefecture’s Handa City – the birthplace of the company – and which is working on efforts to link up with local activities, said to the media in 2023 that it had no plans to jump on the revisions to the Museum Act and promote itself as a tourist destination. But with regards to the museum’s operational stance whereby the decision was made to charge an entrance fee instead of being a free service provided by the company, the museum’s director Yoshihisa Nimi had the following to say.
“While it is important to promote the museum broadly in order to attract people to the area, since they are making the effort to come and visit, we want our visitors to be people who are interested in us. If this museum was part of a tour package, then you’d have some visitors who aren’t interested and they would likely be bored. The former incarnation of this place, Su-no-Sato (lit. “Vinegar Village”), was free to enter, but we made the conscious decision to charge an entrance fee for MIM, as those who are interested will pay to come and visit us. And in terms of those who work here, we decided that we needed to have an entrance fee to ensure professional awareness is maintained.”
Despite there being an entrance fee, questionnaires reveal a high level of satisfaction, with many visitors responding that they would definitely recommend it to someone. “We have many repeat visitors who are on their third visit, and I think that word-of-mouth communication from such people brings us other visitors. In order to get repeat visitors, we need to be digitally equipped, and we intend to constantly update the content on display, even if we don’t change the hardware side of things. We also want to work with local schools on mechanisms for things such as on-site classes in combination with visits to the museum. We are actually just gradually starting work on curriculum development, including, for example, activities like having the company included as a topic for a research project where students visit the museum to undertake further research, and then present it in the classroom.”
Looking at this museum through the prism of the objective classifications for corporate museums above, it fulfills its role as a corporate citizen and provides an educational venue for local children through working with local government and is also used as an opportunity to heighten the company’s own awareness and improve its actions through contact with visitors. It is apparent that the museum functions organically as an entity with a multi-layered role.
Museums as an Immersive Space for Understanding a Corporate Personality
Mr. Yoshiharu Fukuhara, the late president of Shiseido who led the establishment of Shiseido Corporate Museum, said in his book Boku no Fukusen Jinsei (“My Twin-track Life” – published by Iwanami Shoten, Publishers) that “whereas people have personal virtues, companies have corporate virtues.” Having visited several corporate museums, we too occasionally reflect on them as places that give one a feeling for the corporate virtues of each company. The corporate museum is not a stand-alone entity but rather, seems to give a firm sense of the social significance of the company behind it and its personality as a corporate citizen.
The fact that visitors get a sense of the corporate personality that could be referred to as the company’s corporate virtues may well be down to the deeply immersive experience on offer in the unique space that constitutes a corporate museum.
While the word immersive is a buzzword in the field of marketing and branding, what is often referred to by global companies as immersive training is being implemented for the people who will be involved in the company’s activities henceforth.
This involves getting people to understand the corporate philosophy and learn how to behave in a way befitting of the company through group sessions. Naturally, it isn’t intended to stop people from giving different opinions and get them just to copy what they see; the aim of it is to have participants experience the culture of a company. Instead of slowly getting a feel for it and getting used to it at a leisurely pace, diving straight in at the deep end of the culture for a short period leads to swifter communication. Through this, it becomes possible to proactively give opinions without any unnecessary hesitation. Therefore, in these terms, visiting a corporate museum, or rather, experiencing a corporate museum, immerses one in corporate culture.
It is not often that a company actually has the opportunity to provide such an immersive environment. While so-called entertainment facilities and VR game environments use digital technology and tools to create a sense of immersion, corporate museums do not rely exclusively on such technology and gimmicks to create a sense of immersion.
The facts on display in the museums are conveyed as a brand story, and the passion of the company accumulates in the minds of the public. Even if it is a static space with a series of panel displays, there is a story within that allows visitors to experience the immersive experience ahead. When passionate explanations and hospitality from guides are added to the mix, the resonance is even stronger. If the experience is like being engrossed in reading the biography of a great person or watching a documentary on the life of a company as mentioned at the beginning, engagement with the company through its story will be extremely high.
Corporate museums with entertainment elements have always attracted attention, but even those that do not have such elements play a role in corporate communication and are also achieving steady results. While it is hard to see an overall trend when looking at individual facilities, if you look at the characteristics of corporate museums that are run with varied and diverse objectives, then it is possible to see a trend.
Just after we started this series, a range of information on corporate museums started to appear in various places, and I honestly felt that this was a trend that had suddenly emerged.
Many corporate museums also offer virtual museums (photo courtesy of Vacuum Bottle & Air Pot Pavilion)
However, the initial cost of a facility as a building is inevitably high, so first, companies with existing museums should take a fresh look at them and reconfirm their objectives and develop content in line with these objectives as part of their communication strategy.
If a company does not have its own facilities for a museum, a section of their building can be renovated as a museum. Or, for a short period of time, they could create a pop-up museum to display the company’s history, philosophy, and vision for the future, and for communication activities that include internal communication.
Once the content is in place, things could initially get started online. This means that you do not have to have a physical entity in the form of a museum, but to engage employees and fans by ensuring that there is a firm foundation of the company’s philosophy contained therein.
The case studies of each company herein were put together and written by experienced PR professionals who are self-proclaimed fans of each museum, and insights from PR professionals are presented throughout.
We encourage readers who are in charge of corporate public relations to read these case studies and to go and visit museums as it will help you to grow your ideas about the kind of stories your company can weave and disseminate. The journey will be one that you can enjoy not only as part of your job, but also as a fan of museums.