Museum Audience Insight

What Happens in Vegas May Not Stay in Vegas (if you are a smart marketer, that is)

Reach Advisors is pleased to welcome a new guest blogger, LeAnne Ruzzamenti, Director of Marketing Communications at the Crocker Art Museum.  We have long been impressed by LeAnne’s work at the Crocker, and are delighted to learn where she finds inspiration.  Thanks so much, LeAnne, for contributing to Museum Audience Insight!

A few days in Las Vegas had me inspired: what lessons can museums and marketers learn from the marketing and retail pros? Here were some of my impressions:

These people know how to get a message across. From the moment of departing the airplane, I couldn’t help but be taken in by the advertising that appeared everywhere: in baggage claim (posters, billboard, standing signs on my carousel), on the “subway” within the airport (ads wrapped around the standing doors), on the cabs (roof signs AND trunk signs), and then as we approached Vegas Blvd.: billboards everywhere (ones with video, that light up, change, boast really great creative), buses completed wrapped with beautiful ads (the cost of producing the wrap alone probably accounted for one-third of my museum’s advertising budget). Over stimulation for sure, but after all the goal for the casinos is to get you to come through their doors – to play slots, eat, and shop in their high-end shops, and every message is strongly leading you to that end. As a marketing maven, I couldn’t help be impressed. I was hooked into reading nearly every billboard, video, cab, and bus ad and trying to decide who had the most powerful messages and creative.

They deliver on brand promise. Vegas promises that if you come, you are guaranteed to have a great time and feel good even while you gamble your money and spend sums of money on items that you’d consider outrageously priced back home. They know their brand now, “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas,” and they hit it from every angle. Everything points to entertainment, and rest assured you will find the activities that energize, refresh, and entertain you.

Customer service is supreme. I was impressed when we walked 8 feet from the parking garage and were met by a hotel host who escorted us to the specific check-in line that we should join. After that I was harder to impress. A security officer stood outside the guest elevator doors and greeted us each time we went to our room, a presence for our safety, to feel as though we were “approved” to leave the casino floor and enter the guest room area, although they didn’t check keys or question us. Beautiful girls in matching suits wandered the casino floor and pool asking what we’d like to drink. Waiters, maître d’s, bus boys, sommeliers, all attended to our needs while dining.  Why the emphasis on customer service?  There are lots of options. I can easily walk across the street to another casino.

They sell in smart ways. While I snacked on nachos at a shopping mall, I heard a woman sell and upsell frozen daiquiris in such persistent ways, it made me want to recruit her to sell memberships at my museum’s front desk. We were offered opportunities to join frequent players’ clubs, spin wheels for free gifts, upgrade our show seats to premium location, shop during special hours, attend clubs with VIP status. They ask and sell and most of the offers were to customize our experience. 

So while taking all this in, I still wasn’t finding the direct ties to the museum field. After all, the Las Vegas Art Museum closed early this year and the Guggenheim at the Venetian closed nine months prior to that, closures that were blamed on Las Vegas abandoning the family and cultural tourist and not committing to greater cultural experiences. Then I happened by the Ferrari dealership in the Wynn Hotel where they charge $10 admission (most museums I frequent have admission rates at $10 or less) and this was a car dealership. It was then that I realized that there was much museums can learn from Vegas.

LeAnne Ruzzamenti is the Director of Marketing Communications for the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. 

Have any thoughts or comments?  Share them with us by clicking on "comments" below.  (If you are reading this from your e-mail subscription to the blog, please go to our blog's website to add a comment.)

Cultural Resource Center . . . Ticket Tuesday . . . and Don't You Think Macie Is the Cutest?

A quick roundup of some interesting things coming across our screens lately:

The Connecticut Humanities Council has pulled together a ton of resources in their online Heritage Resource Center.  From resources and links on audiences to leadership to finance, they have done a terrific job pulling together a lot of information, in one spot, and with annotations so you can better find what you are looking for.  I have already found it extremely helpful more than once. 

The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance just released a study called Research Into Action.  One of their key findings was that African Americans and Hispanics in Philadelphia were more culturally active than Caucasians.  Since many museums struggle to effectively reach minority audiences, and since the minority population is increasing dramatically in the US (see the "Museums and Society 2034" white paper we wrote for AAM's Center for the Future of Museums for more information on that), this finding is intriguing.  I am still reading the report thoroughly myself, so stay tuned as I dig through it.

Finally, I love the recent activity on COSI's Facebook page.  Yesterday, for Ticket Tuesday, they awarded a pair of tickets to the first person to answer a trivia question correctly.  And last week they invited fans to post photos of their cute pets on COSI's wall.  Cutest one gets a gift card to a pet supply store and free tickets.  On Facebook go to COSI Columbus' Dynamic Hands-On Science Center and check out the activity . . . and the pics.  (Macie Marie Wilkening is the black-and-white dog with the rawhide.  Obviously she is cutest!)

We'd love to hear if you have seen anything interesting coming across your screens, from resources to fun social networking activity.  Simply click on "comments" below (and if you are reading this from your e-mail subscription, go to our blog to comment).

- Susie

Intellectual Intimacy . . . Gone Virtual

I had a chance to chat with Terry Davis of the American Association for State and Local History at an event last week, and we were reflecting on their recent annual conference that also included a bold experiment to run an 'online conference' as well.  The online conference was designed to increase the number of museum staff members that could engage with the conference programming, even if they couldn't travel to Indianapolis.  By my rough calculations, more than a quarter of the AASLH conference 'attendance' was in the online conference rather than in person (and that's probably heavily underestimated since many of the online registrations included the participation of multiple staff members).

 

Having presented online, and in a regular conference session with Connecticut Landmarks and the Connecticut Humanities Council, I noted a few things:  The live session was a small audience, but had a very senior level of rather engaged attendees.  The online session had about five times more attendees, almost equally engaged.  It ended up as a really great way for AASLH to leverage the content prepared for the conference, extending the reach to a much broader audience.  (I'm really curious to see if the session reviews are any different for the online vs. the live presentation.)

 

Afterwards, we had a more casual online chat with the online producer and Greg Stevens, who runs AAM's online professional education, and talked about how the online experience can be far more engaging than one might expect.  For example, Greg and I realized that we had a strong rapport and working relationship even though we had only met through work on one of his online programs . . . never face-to-face until that moment.  Online isn't such a bad medium for building social glue compared to face-to-face, actually even making it easier to do that with more people.

 

But here's the big question this left me pondering:  It's clear that serious content can be delivered in an engaging manner online.  Could this be a tool that helps museums expand public access to their knowledge and expertise, while engaging a larger audience that is curious and hungry for the kind of stuff that museums are so well suited to provide?  Some universities are doing this as a means to re- engage alumni...with the end goal of supporting their development efforts.  What might this mean for museums? 

 

We'd love to hear any thoughts or questions!  Simply click on “comments” below (and if you are reading this from your e-mail subscription, go to our blog to comment).

- James

Is Art Really Asynchonous? What About Museums?

Recently, marketing guru Seth Godin posted this chart on his blog:

Godin explains how to read the chart:

Here are a dozen or so forms of communication, arranged on two axes.

On the horizontal, they rank from asynchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are separated in time--like a letter) and synchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are in real time proximity to each other--like a phone call).

Up and down, I've charted the quality of the medium. Quality in terms of density of information exchanged. The 140 characters in Twitter is about as low density as you can get other than a stop light. A movie, on the other hand, is loud and bright and two hours long and there's audience reaction and it is edited and designed to evoke a response.

To be clear, then: movies take a long time to make, but they're high impact. Twitter takes a second to do, but there's not a lot of info there. One on one coaching is high enough bandwidth that it can change your life and make you cry, in real time, and the Mona Lisa, while less bits per second than a TV show, has enough emotional bandwidth to matter, even if it's 400 years old.

(To read his entire blog post, click here.)

When I saw this, my initial reaction was to think that museums need to move themselves into that upper right quadrant.  But, is that the right place for a museum to move?  Is the role of a museum to provide transformative experiences for its audience (transformative in the sense that one’s beliefs or understanding or knowledge about the world is changed as a result of the visit)?  And, if a museum seeks to be a place for transformative experiences (for those who seek such experiences) how much of the experience needs to be directed by the museum and how much of it can people accomplish on their own through their interactions with the museum’s objects?  Godin places one type of museum object, art, in the lower left quadrant (and nowhere near my initial thought) - do you agree with that?

Where do you think museums should fall on the chart?  Does it vary by type of museum?  Or type of museum experience?  To share your thoughts click on “comments” below (and if you are reading this from your e-mail subscription, go to our blog to comment). 

- Sally

"Museum going as compulsive consumerism?"

Michael Kimmelman’s recent New York Times article, At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus, sparked some discussion at Reach Advisors. While the point of the article was interesting, even more interesting were the reader comments that followed. They raised again the questions of why people should visit museums, and what a museum’s role could (or should) be in today’s society.

 

Quotes pulled from the comments following the article:

 

• “And watching the young people, searching out a famous work, focusing the cell phone, clicking - without ever having even looked at the painting. Proof for the folks back home - been there, did that. Museum going as compulsive consumerism.”
• “The majority of the public only goes to museums because they think that somehow they are 'supposed' to, and beyond that, it affords some status to say that one has been to the Louvre, or wherever. Most museum goers do not engage with the art objects or pictures because they simply don't know anything about them, and don't make an effort to prepare to have a meaningful experience by informing themselves. The roots of this, in US culture especially, come from the notion that arts are merely a pleasure, a distraction, and not a necessity or something worthy of intensive study.”             
• “Museums are exhausting. If you think about it, they are a much more concentrated bombardment of images than what the social pundits like to lament we are inundated with in our everyday pop culture, because few of them are trivial, throwaway images, and most people go in believing that. Add to this that we are conditioned to think of museums as some kind of temples housing sacred relics requiring hushed reverence. It's intimidating. Let people have their own fun in the museums. Not everybody's into what you're into, and they're not necessarily the worse for it.”
• “…running from one painting to another as though each was a commodity having no personal connection to the viewer…”

 

Additionally, last week Linda Norris had a complementary blog post about what she observed visitors actually doing at one iconic art museum (including take photos of famous work as well). 

 

It seems that there is a feeling in some quarters that many members of the public, especially those visiting iconic art museums as a part of their role as a tourist, are missing the point of visiting a museum.  They are not really looking at art, famous or not-so-famous.  A Reach Advisors colleague wondered if this is this a view that is shared by any individuals in the museum field?  If yes, do they believe that the visitor is at fault for treating objects as ‘commodities’…or is the museum at fault for failing to connect with its audience?  Is there an intellectual snobbism rearing its head or is there an argument to be made that not all museums are intended to be enjoyed or appreciated by all audiences?

 

What do you think?  To share your thoughts and questions, click on “comments” below (and if you are reading this from your e-mail subscription, go to our blog to comment).