Arts-Marketing and Marketing Strategy Development: Modelling the Marketing Activities of Visual Artists across their Career

The purpose of this paper is to explore the parallel relationship that exists between traditional marketing's Product Life Cycle (PLC) and the notion of a 'career trajectory' (as it applies to visual artists) and to introduce a Visual Artists Career Trajectory (VACT) model. The VACT model uses the PLC framework to investigate a facet of the contemporary art market that up until now has received a paucity of academic attention. This investigation also introduces the concept of 'enduring maturity' in the 'post-career' stage of an artist's career that might be useful in informing the traditional PLC to make it more powerful in predicting/suggesting strategies for products as they progress through the 'Late maturity' and 'Decline' stages of their life-cycle.