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Ch2_pt17

Page history last edited by Nina Simon 14 years, 2 months ago

Evolving Relationships over Multiple Visits

 

    Let's say our friend George is motivated to come back to the museum. He received an email that was pertinent to his personal interest and decided to return.  So now the question is: how can the museum recognize and be responsive to George's growing interest? The big second date has arrived, but unfortunately, the museum treats George no differently given their supposedly growing relationship.  In most cases, even members get the impersonal touch at the front desk.

    This is terrible.  Sure, lots of experience economy businesses, like movie theaters or mini-golf courses, work this way, but those institutions are transactional, not transformational. How can we expect to form deep relationships with visitors in which they share their deepest interests if we can't even remember their names or the last time they came around? There is no such thing as a town square for faceless individuals. When you are treated like a "regular," that connotes special value. Regulars see themselves as part of a community of people who have an ongoing relationship with the institution.

    There are some very simple things cultural institutions can do to promote ongoing relationships with visitors who come repeatedly. First, cashier's desk computer systems should provide data on the last time a person (or a credit card) has visited the institution. This happens when I go to my gym. Why can't it happen at the museum? At the least, cashiers should be able to see that the person or credit card has visited previously and should be able to smile and say, "welcome back." You don't need a computer system for this--even a punch card, like those offered at coffee shops--can indicate repeat use and encourage staff to engage. We’re all familiar with the most basic version of the punch card, ubiquitous in coffee shops, in which you can slowly accumulate stamps or hole-punches and receive a free drink after six or eight or ten purchases. There are virtual versions, such as the REI co-op system, in which members of the co-op receive 10% back on all REI purchases available in store credit or cash at the end of the year. There’s even a theater that offers a play with forking paths (such that you can’t see the whole show on one occasion) and a diminishing ticket price for each subsequent visit.

    I’ve often wondered why I’ve never seen a museum with a punch card system. Even at the most basic level, punch cards do a couple of important things:

   1. They establish an expectation that you might visit multiple times.

   2. They allow staff to see, with no complex technology, that you have visited previously.

Presumably, a membership does these things as well. But many large museum membership database systems are dismal at tracking members’ or visitors’ repeat attendance. While the visitor is “growing their relationship” with the institution over several visits, the museum plays the amnesiac, treating each visitor like it’s the first time. And where the databases fall short, punch cards thrive. Seeing that a person’s card has been punched several times allows front-line staff to engage in conversation about what they liked on previous visits, what’s new, and what they might particularly enjoy.

    But a simple punch card is not enough. Like national parks, people visit museums infrequently enough that the punch card does not incentivize repeat use. If you get coffee every day, and there’s a place that offers you a free cup for every ten you buy, then you can get free coffee every couple of weeks. Museums don’t work that way. I suspect that most people (with the exception of rabid young families at children’s and science museums) would lose a museum punch card before making it to visit number ten.

    Here are some clever innovations on the punch card system that may work better in the context of venues that experience infrequent use:

    1.    Menchies, a frozen yogurt shop in Los Angeles, offers a punch card with a free yogurt after you’ve purchased seven. When my dad entered as a first-time customer and bought a yogurt, he was given a punch card with six punches already completed—functionally, a two-for-one coupon for his next visit. Not only did this bring him back to Menchies, it was probably more effective than a coupon would have been in priming him to take a new punch card and presumably continue frequenting the shop. Some museums have been experimenting with sending students home from school trips with a free ticket for a followup visit with the family; maybe starting them with a punch card would be a more effective way to connect them to the institution.

    2.    Tina, We Salute You, a hip coffee shop in London, makes their punch cards a social in-venue experience. Rather than carrying a card, patrons are invited to write their names on the wall and draw a star for every coffee consumed. Purchase ten and you receive a free coffee—and a new color to continue advancing your stars. This creates a feeling of community and entices new visitors to the shop to add their own name and get involved. There’s a game-like “keeping up with the Joneses” aspect where people feel motivated to get more stars, to have a more adorned name, etc. because their participation is being publicly showcased. Instead of the loyalty reward being a private transaction, people get to celebrate with the store and with other patrons. Again, this could be a lovely way, particularly for small institutions, to encourage visitors to think of themselves as part of the cultural community of the place and to desire a “level up” in their nameplate on the wall. It’s like a low-budget, dynamic donor wall.

    3.    The Winking Lizard Tavern is an Ohio-based chain of thirteen restaurants that puts on a yearly “world beer tour,” featuring over 150 international beers. People can join the tour with a ten dollar entrance fee, which grants them a color guidebook of all the beers, a punch card for the beers they’ve tried, and an online beer-tasting tracking system. When a person tries fifty beers, she gets a gift, and at one hundred, she receives the “world tour jacket” featuring the names of the year’s beers. This is functionally a membership, including email newsletter and special events, but it is driven by the idea that you will keep purchasing new (and different) beers. It’s a brilliant way for each entry, each purchase, to enhance the value of the punch card rather than making people wait entirely until the end. You could easily imagine a similar system for a cultural venue to incentivize visiting different institutions, exhibits, or trying new experiences across the institution (educational programs, lectures, performances, discussions, etc.).

    Punch cards and incentive schemes aren’t just about getting people in the door. They’re also a way to establish a deeper connection with regulars and to reward people for whom the museum is a significant part of their lives. As more museums have moved towards offering “value memberships” that are essentially discounts on admission, membership renewal relies largely on repeat visits. If the member doesn’t come several times, she won’t renew. So when it comes to members, this possibility of a growing relationship via repeat visits becomes an imperative.

    While incentivizing members to visit frequently is important, it also speaks to the deficiencies of the “value membership” model. Successfully converting people to become members requires a personalized entry point, but motivating renewal or more dedicated engagement requires sustained personal relationships. Most museum membership programs do not do this effectively. Members are not greeted by name or connected personally to staff or other members. They may receive a series of impersonal mass communications, invitations to events, and discounts. But they are unlikely to be socially, ideologically, or actively connected to the institution the way a church member or book club member would be. I am a member of a temple, and as such am deeply entwined personally with other members and responsible for helping set the program for the institution. My mother-in-law is a member of Weight Watchers, and she gets fined if she doesn't show up to meetings to share her own personal successes and failures with her fellow members. I am a member of a political party, and I am expected to support my candidate with time, money, and my vote. I'm also a member of lots of museums, and I am rarely addressed by name, asked to take responsibility for anything, or invited to initiate a project based on my interests relative to the institution. For many museums, I am just a destination for their e-newsletters. In most cases, I joined to support the institution and connect to it, but instead, I'm just a person with a discount and a button. 

    Museum memberships are big business. Over the last twenty years, the museum industry has moved towards greater reliance on gate sales, due to rising commercialism and diminishing government support. And the result, in part, is the invention of a new, successful product: the membership as discount. Membership effectively packages the museum experience--in some cities, a group of local museum experiences--into something repeatable at low cost. The majority of museum members are "value members" who join museums for the cost savings on visits. They do a calculation, realize that a membership is "worth it" if they visit two or three times in a year, and spring for the membership. What's wrong with value members? Members are theoretically your institution’s best customers—the people who are most motivated to engage with your experiences. But by treating members as people after a discount, you effectively denigrate the value of the institution, rather than increasing the value commensurate with these super-visitors’ demonstrated interest.

    Consider the largest vendor of value memberships: fitness centers. Gym memberships, like museum memberships, are often bought based on future intentions rather than current activities. If you are not someone who works out, you assume that buying a gym membership will motivate you to attend. But the gym experience, like the museum experience, doesn't welcome you into a social, supportive environment that rewards your membership. It just offers services and equipment, to be used or ignored. And the reality is that 9 out of 10 gym memberships are abandoned. The financial incentive to use the services of the gym are not great enough to overcome personal obstacles to use.

    The same argument may be made of value members at museums. Value memberships are bought based on a calculated intention to return, not a realistic assessment of museum use or emotional connection to the institution. Membership does not a frequent visitor make. Most membership purchases are made before entry (at point of sale) rather than after a visit. This means that people assess the "value" of membership based on the cost of admission, not the quality of the visit. In general, people who join a museum on their first visit are much less likely to renew than those who join after one or more visits (and relatedly, people are much less likely to renew if they are first-time members than if they have already been members for a year or more). It's the difference between buying a subsidized perk for something already in your life and something you intend to, but do not currently, do.

    So the first problem with value members is churn rate; like delinquent gym members, museum members who find at the end of the year to have under-visited do not renew. But the other problem with value members is that they are hard to cultivate into volunteers, more active participants, or higher-level donors. They didn't join to support the institution and are unlikely to respond to calls to do so. The membership is an individual purchase, not an investment in their organization.

    What does value membership have to do with personalization? By treating membership as an impersonal discount program, museums are missing the opportunity to connect with the visitors with whom there is the most potential for a personal, sustaining relationship. Value members join with the intention to visit more than once--they pay up front for the privilege of that intention! From the minute a person joins (likely in the context of a visit), the museum has 365 days to convince the person to come back and have a good enough second or third experience to justify renewal. When venues don't succeed at this, it means they have failed to create a connection with that visitor. The museum has failed to convince that person that the institution provides experiences that are responsive and valuable to her needs. Finding ways to personalize the continued experience of a member (or any multi-visit guest) can deepen the relationship between institution and individual, which benefits both parties. This isn't just about renewing memberships or inspiring multiple visits; it's about promoting deeper engagement with visitors in ways appropriate to their intellectual and creative development and interests.

    Members are people who have moved beyond the discount and the punch card by making a down payment on future museum experiences. If you’re paying $50 or $100 for the privilege to be part of the museum community, the staff should be able to address you by name. Being addressed by name is really important. Have you ever had a serious relationship with someone without knowing their name? Of course not. We use the idea "he didn't even know her name" to talk about throwaway interactions. A member deserves better. And while greeting members and museum regulars by name may sound like a Herculean endeavor, it should just be a start. Ideally, a personalization system would remember far more than your name. It would recall what you've done before at the museum and recommend new things that might be of value to you.     

    Particularly at children's and science museums, there are many visitors who use the museum as an extension of their other family learning activities and environments. And yet while their children's progress in online educational game environments is often tracked and provides feedback to parents, no such feedback exists for museum visits. Exhibit designers spend hundreds of hours developing content that is developmentally appropriate for different kinds of learners, but that information is not used to enhance and amplify the learning value of the museum experience. There are many children's museums that provide label text at adult eye-height encouraging parents to observe and learn from their children's approach to play. Why can't the museum automate some of this observation and provide recommendations that can help families "grow with" the museum? If the Winking Lizard Tavern can do it for beer, why can't we do it for children's education?

    One of the most powerful (and creepy) versions of this kind of personalized feedback is exemplified by Harrah's casinos. Harrah’s is one of the four largest casino companies in the gaming industry. Harrah’s uses “Total Rewards" loyalty cards to deeply engage gamers as part of the casino's "community," and by doing so, induce people to play longer and spend more money. The loyalty cards function like bank cards; users swipe them at the slot machines to play, and the cards register wins and losses. Players get points that can be redeemed for meals and hotel discounts, but the real power of the Total Rewards system is in data tracking that is functionally invisible to guests. Harrah's knows what games you play, what times you like to play, when you like to eat and what you like to eat. The cards are integrated not just across the games but across the entire set of Harrah's casinos, hotels, and resorts, and the company adjusts its level of customer service to your dynamic, growing relationship with the casino. If you tend to book vacations in April, you'll receive an email with hotel discounts in February or March. Since the loyalty system was launched in the mid-1990s, Harrah's has doubled its share of guests' gaming budgets. It's no coincidence that their system is considered a standout "customer relationship" system as opposed to a rewards card. "The prevailing wisdom in this business is that the attractiveness of a property drives customers," says Gary Loveman, Harrah's COO. "Our approach is different. We stimulate demand by knowing our customers."

    Harrah's knows its customers so well that it can even respond to the real-time emotional roller coaster of gambling. The casino maintains real-time data on the actions of every card-holder as they play - dollars in, dollars out, time spent at specific machines - and uses the data to determine individuals’ financial “pain point” – i.e. how much money they are willing to spend before leaving the casino. The casino uses that pain point to stage strategic interventions during real-time play. When a player comes close to her limit, a staff member on the casino floor receives an alert from a dispatcher, greets the player, and offers her a free meal, a drink, or a bonus gift of money added to the loyalty card. By mitigating the bad experience of losing with a gift, Harrah’s extends people beyond their pain points and they stay and play longer. And by combining the action players already do (inserting money) with the desired new action (identifying themselves), the loyalty cards create a deeper relationship with no additional action by users. In fact, the players prefer to play with the loyalty cards because they receive perks for doing so. Players get an easier way to play and receive rewards, and the casino gets unique, trackable data on every player in the room.

    As evil as it may seem, Harrah's loyalty program is an elegant example of a responsive member relationship. This need not be a creepy "Big Brother"esque endeavor that empties visitors' wallets (though some cultural institutions wouldn't mind such a maneuver). Imagine a member card that visitors can swipe each time they visit the museum. When people join the museum, there could be several challenges available to them, based on their age, their interests, and previous time spent at the institution. Swiping the card triggers something to happen in the member's life outside the museum - a postcard sent home, an email, an online reward - which waits for the visitor to come home and reminds them to return. You could, for example, use a member loyalty program as a kind of game in which visitors receive rewards and encouragement for trying new things at the museum and attaining mastery of certain skills or knowledge.

    For individual visitors, this kind of system could serve as a kind of Nike+, connecting the physical experience to online, tracked progress that provides personal and socially contextualized fulfillment of personal identity goals. In family or school groups, this type of system is potentially valuable to parents and teachers, who will better understand how the museum can assist in their educational goals, kids, for whom feedback can be a powerful game mechanic that encourages mastery and continued development, and the institution, which can position itself as a useful partner in family or class development. Right now, many families report that they "age out" of particular types of informal learning institution--children's museums, zoos, science museums--after two or three years of very active use. A science museum is (in most cases) no less compelling a science learning place for a fifteen year-old than for a ten year-old, but each of these visitors requires a different set of experiences. If museums pursued loyalty systems as extensive as those employed by Harrah's and the like, they can grow with visitors instead of visitors growing "out" of them.

 

 

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Comments (3)

hadrasaurus said

at 6:31 am on Nov 6, 2009

"relatedly" Again?

hadrasaurus said

at 6:48 am on Nov 6, 2009

Great ideas and examples.

How would you get all the students on a class trip or other group to swipe their cards at each exhibit or desired place? A group as small as six or eight people could cause a traffic jam in the museum and some members of the group might just skip it (swiping the cards) after the first four or five in the group swiped their cards and the first few had moved on to the net exhibit.

This requires some fairly high tech equipment and interfaces. How would this be sensitively handled at historic sites or religious sites?

Sarah Barton said

at 6:14 pm on Dec 2, 2009

What is it that keeps loyalty-type programs from growing in museums? General arrogance that people will come if they want to? That museums should not be so 'commercial'? What is the particular prejudice or feature? What is it that needs to shift? SB

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