When I tell arts professionals that I am an experience designer in the arts and cultural sector I can see their eyebrows raise as if this were a strange way to describe an artist. When I tell them I’m not an artist but an audience expert, in that moment I know whether I ‘have them’ or not. It’s all in the eyebrows.
The predominant view in the arts and cultural sector is that the art is the product. If the art is good, and the customer service is satisfactory, and the footfall/income meets targets then all is well. Experience design and audience focus are either irrelevant or interesting in a curious kind of way, certainly not something to be embraced.
So why have I founded an experience design company in a sector that doesn’t know what experience design is, doesn’t feel it needs it and is largely resistant to it? Well, because someone has to, and it is sorely needed.
I am passionate about the value of the arts in enriching lives and communities, but contrary to dominant thinking, I do not believe the art is the product. What people are buying with their time, attention and money is their experience of the art. Experience therefore, and not art, is the product. The art is simply the remarkable vehicle.
Within the context of the Experience Economy, where the competition to achieve authentic-brand-expression-for-profit is recalibrating everyone’s experiential sensibilities, the arts is struggling to compete. Sad indeed when the arts offers the most genuine, life-enriching experiences of all. Our problems are many, but here are three for starters:
- a culture of entitlement; the belief that the audience should come because it’s good for them,
- a reliance on subsidy which deflects us from focussing on generational shifts and market forces,
- and a limited understanding of what an arts experience is - the output of the artist.
The arts/audience experience is not confined to what happens on stage or within the four gallery walls. This would reduce our arts institutions to mere receptacles for other people’s creativity that does us all a huge disservice.
So, how does it work?
Well, it’s a bit of a soup I call Strategic Value Creation; combining elements of design thinking, ethnography, service design, creative problem solving, visual thinking and customer experience management. Framed within a dynamic workshop-based programme, my role is ‘the expert facilitator’, guiding people through a structured process to effect organisational transformation. We map out the heart and soul of the brand, interrogate core purpose and conceptualise the results in terms of audience impacts. We also draw, prototype, brainstorm, journey map, visualise and test. We even play with miniature dolls and Snoopies. It’s important to make the process as creative and as engaging as possible to elicit the best possible thinking, and there is method to my madness. The specific objectives are:
- To shift organisational focus towards audience empathy and meaningful outcomes,
- To awaken people to the fact that brand values only mean something if they are experienced,
- To make audience experience professionally relevant for everyone working in the organisation,
- To effect a cultural shift from policing the brand guidelines to becoming the creative producers of the brand experience,
- To empower everyone (I work where possible with whole staff to address the demon ‘silo thinking’) to become an active agent equipped with the mind set and tools to make a meaningful contribution to the audience experience,
- To ensure that together, they craft the holistic audience experience with the same care, attention and skill as a potter at the wheel, or a choreographer, an artist, a theatre director,
- To produce an audience experience strategy that flows directly from brand and culminates in designed-for human impacts.
The metaphor I use to bring this alive for arts professionals is the orchestral concert. The musicians are their teams (wind, string, percussion etc). The musical score is the audience experience strategy. The interweaving melodies are the outputs from all the different departments in the organisation. The conductor is the head of audience experience (usually the senior marketing person), bridging both orchestra and audience. With an ear to the concert, the conductor combines a focus on each individual note whilst being attuned to the whole symphony, sweating every detail of the overall experience to ensure harmony.
Fortunately, in the two and a half years since launching The Experience Business, I’ve collaborated with a growing band of forward-thinking arts organisations on successful projects designed to shape brand expression, inform building design, heighten employee engagement, sharpen customer focus, design new service delivery platforms, optimise revenue and generally ensure their offer is fit for 21st Century audiences. There’s a long way to go yet, but it’s a promising start.