About twenty years ago, Dr. John Falk and Dr. Lynn Dierking did a body of research on why people visit museums and other informal learning institutions. It’s fascinating and valuable stuff, and if you get a chance to read their work, you really should. They discovered that, broadly speaking, people have a handful of different …
Read more “Understanding Audiences: The Downside of “Falk Types””
As an interpretive planner and visitor experience advisor, I’m a big believer in evidence-based decision making. When I start a new project, the first thing I ask for is data: visitor surveys, gate revenue statistics, comment cards… anything I can get my hands on. Recently I started an exhibit planning project where my client knows …
Visitor experience is 70% art and 30% science. When I was a young park interpreter, we rarely had access to audience research. In fact, I don’t much recall anyone talking about it: if you were in the heritage tourism sector, you simply did your work (exhibits, activities, orientation, amenities) as best you could, based on what …
Positioning Statements: Simple, Not Easy Sometimes, life takes you in odd and unexpected directions. If you’d told me twenty years ago that I was going to be spending my days helping heritage sites do market research and audience segmentation, I probably would have cut myself. It really isn’t something that comes naturally to me. Target marketing …
Welcome to the first in my Dear Don series, in which I do my best to answer questions from my readers about interpretation and visitor experience. (And if I don’t have the answers, I’ll be featuring wise experts who can help.) Dear Don: I attended your webinar on target audiences and have a question: We offer …
What benefits are they seeking when they travel to an attraction like yours? This article is part of a series, Understanding Our Audiences, on market segmentation for interpretive planners and other visitor experience professionals. You should probably start at the beginning, here. Here are some things you probably need to know about your visitors in order …
The point of market segmentation is not to make visitors unwelcome; it is the opposite. This article is part of a series, Understanding Our Audiences, on market segmentation for interpretive planners and other visitor experience professionals. You should probably start at the beginning, here. Managers and boards of directors are sometimes reluctant to focus their …
How do you know if a given audience segment has potential for you? This article is part of a series, Understanding Our Audiences, for interpretive planners and other visitor experience professionals. Here is the beginning of the series. Every so often, someone in your organization will say, “Hey, we should really be serving Market X!” …
Values are the most important criterion of all. This is the fourth instalment in an ongoing discussion on social science for interpretive planners and visitor experience professionals. Part one is here. The last few years have seen a real shift among market researchers away from simple demographics toward psychographics: identifying segments of society by their identity-based social …
It’s all about the fun of discovery I just spent seven months living in a floating seniors’ facility. It was a blast. Well, to be technically correct, it was a cruise ship and I was a guest presenter. Each cruise lasted about 14 nights, and before we sailed, I would look at the demographic breakdown of …