Money is important to museums. They need to keep the lights on and pay their staff. They need to sell tickets and merchandise. They need to win grants and funding. But their core purpose has nothing to do with money—it is always about inspiring, educating, or connecting with people.
In order to give visitors the best possible experience (and to keep them coming back) museums have to make a special effort to engage them in learning and appreciating, increasingly in novel ways. By doing this successfully, museums also succeed in securing enough money to keep going.
What if businesses looked at things through the same lens? What if companies truly built products or services in order to delight and improve the lives of customers… and the money was a secondary, but natural, part of that success?
Should museums be run like for-profit businesses?
For all that museums are right-brain centers of cultural and artistic brilliance, the most successful operate remarkably like for-profit business. They have operating budgets, time constraints, logistical barriers, the need to work to both short and long-term timelines, etc.
And perhaps most importantly, they need to create exhibits that visitors will actually want to see; that they’ll enjoy enough to tell their friends about. That they’ll review positively and encourage others to visit. In order to manage this, museums are increasingly told to act more like for-profit businesses.
When it comes to creating authentic and immersive experiences, however, museums are the leaders. Museums have been optimizing the art of visitor engagement for a long time—certainly longer than most businesses have been focusing on CX.
We tend to think of museums as somehow effortless. Take natural history museums. With all of those fossils and historical records and stories and the evolutionary biology and taxidermy… well of course it’s fascinating and engaging. But behind the scenes, the planning and strategy that goes into optimizing the visitor experience is vast.
So let’s turn the question around. Let’s consider what for-profit businesses can learn from museums—in particular, about the art and science of customer experience.
Personas
When most people think of museums, they think about historical, artistic, and occasionally scientific exhibits. But the variety of museums extends far beyond this. There are museum concepts which, for most of us, wouldn’t hold any appeal at all.
Planet Word takes a novel approach to encouraging learning and appreciating; the Disgusting Food Museum in Malmö would be torture for many people—and yet, it is incredibly popular.
At the heart of this sits the idea that every exhibit is built for only some people. Museums use their experience and knowledge (especially of past exhibits) to determine which types of people are most likely to visit. They try to understand the common traits of those people: what do they look for in a museum? What would catch their imagination? How can I align my great ideas with their specific personality?
In other words, they work with personas.
And we’re constantly encouraging for-profit businesses to do the same thing. Exhibition designers don’t just throw together creative or informative ideas, slap them on walls or stands and then charge $10 for admission. Businesses don’t just create any old products and expect everyone to run out and buy them.
In both cases, it’s necessary to understand the types of people who would appreciate your product or exhibit, then design everything with them in mind. It’s no coincidence that it’s often the most niche and unusual museums which are the most successful—because they understand their audience and create the perfect environment for them.
Stories
Museum exhibits are not random collections of displays and pieces. Every display—whether it’s classical art, a scientific experiment, a handful of words, a stuffed animal or anything else—is part of a cohesive, compelling narrative.
This narrative guides visitors from one display to the next, building its impression and telling them what the designer wants them to hear. While the exhibits might still be interesting if viewed in a random order, or only partially, they wouldn’t capture visitors the same way or convey their message as powerfully.
It’s the same in business: storytelling, in one way or another, has become a cornerstone of modern customer experience. When a prospect lands on your website, for example, you don’t just shout “buy my products” at them. Instead, you try to sell them with your brand’s stories—whether it’s how your products are made, or why they’re different, or the many wonderful ways they’ve helped other customers, or buying your software somehow saves trees in Costa Rica.
Storytelling helps museum visitors connect with the exhibits and understand the ideas within them. It makes us think and feel and question and learn—and it’s the exact same recipe for businesses, too.
Immersion
Let’s start with the business side this time, thinking about prospective customers and marketing. For many businesses, the classic channels still work. You can attract and delight clients without using technology. You might have a physical store, or a mail drop, or go door-to-door, or run your entire business over the phone.
The reality is that using new technology without a careful strategy (or adequate experience) is worse than doing nothing. But done right, and with careful consideration, you can create experiences which put your company in a different stratosphere to the competition.
Consider IKEA, the ubiquitous furniture maker. Its AR shopping app lets customers put store items directly into their rooms, right there on their smartphone. It is an incredibly helpful feature and a perfect example of leveraging technology to create amazing, purchase-encouraging experiences!
This is another lesson businesses could well be taking from museums. Most groundbreaking is the use of AR and VR to create immersive experiences. The Knight Foundation awarded nearly $750,000 in funding to US five museums, all of which have ambitious projects in mind—all focused on immersive, technology-powered experiences.
The American Museum of Natural History in NYC is embarking on an open source “science visualization” project, while The Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia is creating a walk-through virtual reality museum.
Museums have always created immersive experiences and it’s no surprise that they’re pioneering the use of AR and VR too. There is a world of possibilities here for businesses, far beyond the IKEA interior design app.
Attention
Museums and businesses both suffer from skim readership. As much as it’s every museum’s dream, very few visitors are reading every title and label in the exhibit. Instead, they’re pausing when something catches their eye, scanning the text and then, for a smaller percentage of visitors, engaging fully in that one display.
One of a museum’s goals is to make individual displays as eye-catching as possible, since that increases the odds of visitors engaging with, and benefiting from, the exhibit.
There are a near-countless number of ways museums can attract your attention with their exhibits. They can use printed images, plinths, pedestals, projections, screens, bold fonts, vibrant labels, interactive content, wall hangings, object mounts, audio, footage, special lighting…
You get the idea. Once museums align the goals of the exhibit with their personas, they can figure out the most effective ways to catch their ideal visitor’s attention.
It’s the same in business, especially at the lead-generation stage. There are no unique businesses anymore. Your job is to find a way to stand out in a sea of other, very similar offers. Just like in museums, how you do that will depend on your specific campaign and product offerings and the characteristics of your target audience.
Conclusion
As you would expect, the most successful museums pull together all of these factors (and more) make the best possible visitor experience. But it’s important to remember that every great museum also depends on brilliant content.
It’s all good and well curating a marvelous and targeted visitor experience… but if your exhibit (whether it’s artistic, scientific, educational, historical, or something else) is fundamentally poor, then it won’t succeed.
If you’re going to invest time, energy and resources into crafting the perfect CX in business, just make sure you’ve got a product or service that your captive audience actually wants!
Ready to better understand your customers in order to curate an even better customer experience? Find out how Sogolytics can help!
