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Since I am working as a museum marketeer I always wonder why do people visit a museum? Why do people desire to go to a building and view different kind of objects? I don’t claim to have the total and complete answer to this question but I will try to shed a light on the motives and desires of museum visitors.

In one of my other posts I discussed what factors a Museum should consider to get the most revenues out of their entrance fees/admissions. This post about pricing policy is viewed from the supply side of the museum. But where there is supply there is also a demand. So what determines the demand for museums?(in random order)

1. The cost of visiting a museum, this contains

• Entrance fee
• Opportunity cost of time: when you have high income time is expensive. The time you are visiting a museum you could have worked and earned a lot more money. With a lower income time is less expensive.
• The price of alternative leisure activities
• Other costs of visiting like transport costs, parking costs.

2. Level of education/intelligence; the average level of education is generally higher in Art Museum, this level drops with History museums, and Science museums have the broadest appeal.

3. Contents of the exhibition (art matters). I have also written a post about that. But what a museum has on display matters for the demand.

4. The design of the building. Maybe not a major factor in considering the demand.

5. The provision of services like catering, museum shop, customer friendliness, hygiene.

6. Marketing & Communication efforts.

7. Satisfying visits in the past

But this list doesn’t really cut it for me. If the Mona Lisa was displayed in a barn, with unfriendly staff, for 30 dollars and little communication would people stay away? Some will but a lot will still want to see the real thing. It is a good list to consider when trying to make an estimate of the demand for museums. Or to optimize your marketing organization. But this list is more or less an observation of the behavior of the museum visitor.

I want try too look inside the head of the museum visitor…What drives him, why is his desire big enough to get out of his chair and wonder around objects of art. In a great book I have read ‘on desire‘ by William B. Irvine, he points out there are instrumental desires and hedonic desires. An instrumental desire is a desire someone fulfills to get to a hedonic desire. For example I want to drive my car to the Louvre to see the Mona lisa. The ‘driving of my car’ is an instrumental desire to get to my hedonic desire ’seeing the Mona Lisa’. Mr. Irvine states that Instrumental desires are desired for the sake of something else. Hedonic desires are desired because I want to feel good or avoid feeling bad. So people visit a museum to feel good or avoid feeling bad.

What kind of psychological factors can trigger this feelings of good or avoiding bad. I have a theory about that. I distinguish two type of feelings: Personal museum feelings and Social museum feelings. Personal museum feelings are feelings you can experience without other people. To experience ‘Social museum feelings’ other people have to be involved. The museum visitor has a hedonic desire to experience at least a part of these feelings.

There are various different personal museum feelings:

• Entertainment feelings, being entertained feels good, you feel joy and fun.
• Educational feelings, understanding how things work, solving a puzzle, raises your self esteem.
• Aesthetical feelings, the awe of seeing a great object of art, is uplifting, it stretches the imagination, it crosses a mental boundary. A colleague of mine said that Great arts gives him consolation. The beauty of the artwork makes live worth living despite all the troubles there are in the world.

There are also various social museum feelings:

• Sharing feelings, Sharing the personal museum feelings with each other. A shared feeling deepens the experience of the feeling. Seeing the same beautiful work of art, and sharing that feeling enhances the aesthetical feelings.
• Superior feelings, visiting a museum to impress people or feeling superior towards other people. Someone who has these kind of feelings may think “hmmmm, what a great painting of Willem de Kooning in his late period, I like it but my stupid friends probably won’t appreciate it”.
• Inferior feelings, you go because your friends visited that exhibition and if you don’t go you can not join in the conversation.
• Lethargic feelings, others decide for you to go, like in a school trip.
• Landmark feelings, you must have seen ‘the venus de Milo‘ en the ‘Mona Lisa’ when you visit the Louvre in Paris or “this exhibition is a once in a life time event”.

What is the marketing use off all those feelings described above? Actually I use the three “personal museum feelings” in my communication strategy. Must we sell the exhibition like an aesthetical one or a more entertaining one. The social museum feelings are more difficult. This is because not all of them are positive feelings. But promoting the an exhibition as a ‘once in a lifetime event’ helps raising attendance or promoting a visit to the museum as shared experience probably also lifts up the image of the museum.

A colleague of mine once told me that, at school, his children had to pretend they were running a museum. The end result of their assignment was….regulatory signs with things that were not allowed.

I was thinking of this story while I was on a short holiday in Brugge (Bruges) Belgium. I visited there the Groeninge museum. This nice small museum has some art works from from great Belgian artists ranging from the 15th century (f.e. Jan van Eyck) to the 20th century (like Rene Margritte).

Upon entering the museum I stumbled upon all the things that are not allowed in this museum. See the picture below.

In a certain way most of these signs really offend me. It is like they think that I don’t know how to behave in a museum.

So what’s not allowed, starting top left:

• Smoking
• Mobile Phones (I think they mean calling with a mobile phone, not the phone itself)
• Photography
• Dogs (and other livestock I presume)
• Backpacks
• Suitcases?
• Icecreams? (probably food)
• Cups? (probably drinking)
• Umbrella’s

To top it of this museum have a guards in uniform watching over the different galleries. Welcome to the museum Police state. A very hospitable environment.

To be honest I know there are people who really don’t know how to behave. But are signs the way to let people behave themselves? In one of my favorite books “the design of everyday things” the writer Donald Norman explains what bad design is. One of the main features of bad design is explaining in words or symbols what you can or can not do. Good designs speaks for itself, it is intuitive.

An example from another branch is Traffic Engineering. This article in Wired explains why dutch Traffic Engineer Hans Monderman hates traffic signs.

“Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn’t done his job. “The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there’s a problem with a road, they always try to add something,” Monderman says. “To my mind, it’s much better to remove things.”"

How should this work for a museum? Should we remove all the signs and trust people that they will behave themselves? I am not a designer but why not start to remove all the signs and see what happens? Will the crowd go wild and start smoking and walking their dogs in the galleries? I don’t think so.

But how about those annoying backpacks…or suitcases? Maybe when you enter the museum you should pass a cloakroom where museum hosts will kindly ask you if you don’t want to leave your stuff at this guarded cloakroom for your convenience.

If someone really has the guts to talk on a Mobile phone when it is totally silent you can just ask him to talk quietly or stop calling at all. If you have a noisy museum (kids running etc) does it matter that someone is calling?

Photography…I can write a whole post about it. But I really don’t see why you don’t want people to take pictures of your museum or collection. Most of the time pictures enhance the memory of visitors. The nice experience they had being in your museum can be relived more vividly by watching the pictures. They can share the pictures with your friends on Flickr or other social websites. These are all good things for your museum.

Food/Drinking…Tricky one, I don’t have a nice solution yet to prevent that. But maybe some waste bins at the entrance with a sign (yes a sign) “drop your food here”. There are probably better design solutions.

I think that some smart design choices can make the experience of visiting a museum a lot more pleasant.

One tip: To prevent discussion with antisocial visitors print on the entrance ticket in the smallest font possible that you have house rules which can be viewed upon request.

NB: Does anybody know the right English word for Gallery Guard/usher/sentry (suppoost in Dutch)?

In one of my previous posts I talked about ‘art matters‘. I explained that the content of the exhibition is one of the factors to consider when setting the admittance price. Actually the three examples I used can be determined as blockbusters. It were ‘King Tut’, ‘Bodies the exhibition” and ‘Rembrandt Caravaggio’. What at least two of those three exhibitions have in common is star appeal: King Tut and Rembrandt & Caravaggio.

At the Tropenmuseum we had two exhibitions at the same time that had a big amount of star appeal. We had an exhibition about beads called ‘Beauty and the Bead’ and an exhibition about Che Guevara called ‘Che, a commercial revolution’. At first sight beads don’t have any star appeal (when first hearing about the exhibition it sounded rather boring to me…I instantly got an image of grey ladies making awful beaded necklaces). But what gave them star appeal were the garments with beads that were worn by recent stars. The exhibition had garments worn by such celebrities as Diana Ross, Madonna, Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe.

I probably don’t have to explain the star appeal of Che Guevara. It is one of the most famous icons/symbols about revolution in the world. The exhibition about Che Guevara generated a lot of free publicity. When the exhibition opened almost all the press writing about arts in the Netherlands had an article about it. The year 2007 when those two exhibitions were on display Tropenmuseum had a record attendance. It was the best attendance in the last 10 years.

I am always amazed about how these kinds of things work. Why do people want to see clothes of a celebrity? I once had lecture about this subject. The professor told us that one of the main reasons people want to be near a star (groupies/fans) or for example cherish an autograph is that a bit of that stardom becomes a part of their identity. I can show my ‘Johan Cruyff’ autograph to my friends and a part of me becomes Johan Cruyff. Mainly also because my European friends will respond in an enthusiastic way: “You are so Cool, you have an autograph of Johan Cruyff”. Telling you I have seen a dress worn by Marilyn Monroe…makes me Marilyn Monroe.

It can also work the opposite way. A rather famous example is ‘the man with the golden helmet’ by Rembrandt van Rijn. I saw a documentary once (I forget the name of it) which showed how in sixties and seventies this painting was the centerpiece of the Gemäldegalerie In Berlin. Like the ‘Mona Lisa’ is for the Louvre or the ‘Night Watch’ for the Rijksmuseum. It even had a separate room where people could watch and admire it. In 1985 it was discovered that the painting was not by Rembrandt. Immediately the painting lost all its (star) appeal. And now it is hanging sadly in the corner of museum. Did the painting at all change? No it didn’t but yes it did. I had lost its meaning, its emotional attachment. In this Time article from 1985 you can read how shocked this columnist was.

So having an exhibition with some or all of the artifacts who can be linked to a star appeal makes it probably more successful. You can go for a household brand like Rembrandt or Picasso or for some lesser gods. But are Museums also capable of making stars?

I have not researched that thoroughly but my Intuitions says they probably can. Of course this depends also a bit of the star power of the Museum itself. If the MoMA would decide to make an exhibition of some obscure but modestly talented painter I think his star will rise (sky) high. But even for a less famous museum this is a possible. A museum is supposed to be the one with knowledge about GREAT ART and BAD ART. Most of the people who visit a museum are not art historians. They are just plain museum consumers who want to be surprised. So if a museum can present them with a talented artists and also let the whole world know he is the hottest artist in Town maybe the museum can pull it of.

I have finished this books several days ago. This book is not about self improvement or personal development (that is what I first thought when I saw the title). This book is about designing choice environments where people make the choices that are best for them, others or society. First they explain that people have two cognitive systems: The reflective system and the automatic system. or planners and doers or Econs and Humans. The planner in me says tomorrow evening I will go to the Gym, when tomorrow evening arrives the doer in me sits on the couch watching television because that’s more convenient. The Econs in me is truly rational and makes choices that are best for him (like opting in in an pension plan), the human in me keeps forgetting about that pension plan for whatever reason.

The writers of this book call themselves libertarian paternalist. This means they think people should have as many choices as possible and be free to choice between the different options. But they think the design of the choice environment should be designed in a way most beneficial to the one who makes the choice. They start the book with the example of school cafeteria where depending on the arrangement of the display of the food some food would sell better then others. Think of putting deserts at the beginning of the line or at the end.

Is this a useful book for marketing director of a museum? First of all let me say that I enjoyed the book. It has nice examples and lets you think about choice architecture. And of course in exhibits visitors make constant choices about what they want to see, read, touch etc. But this book is not really about choices in a physical environment but more about choices in an administrative environment (like pensions, organ donations, investing). So for a marketing professional it is nice to read, for marketing museum professional I would not recommend it.

Links:
The authors website

Nudge, at Amazon.com