Do you want to save your museum? You have to become something else

Because looking only at the strategies of other cultural institutions won’t get you far

I am a huge fan of TV series.

You know Arrow?

Billionaire playboy, Oliver Queen, whom everyone believes died in a shipwreck, returns to Starling City after five years spent on a desert island, rekindles his relationships and decides to fight wealthy criminals as a hooded vigilante, following a list left to him by his father.

It has always been one of my favorites for:

• the ability to tell at its best that human part that in many superheroes seems to be all too stunted and left on the margins.
• the mission of the hero, which takes on even more value at the end of the last season: “For five years, I was stranded on an island with only one goal: to survive. Now I will fulfill my father’s dying wish to use the list of names he left me and bring down those who are poisoning my city. To do this, I must become someone else.”

Let me now tell you why the last sentence. “I must become something else” has become a mantra for me.

It happened as a result of another “encounter.”

Jay Abraham’s teaching

Once I finished college I could very well have sought an internship like many of my former colleagues, in a museum or institution, but I came out of my thesis discussion with two questions in my mind:

“How could I effectively help museums by being within a world ruled by professors, academics, administrators, who were making gospel of words written 30 years earlier in reference to a rapidly evolving world?”

“How could I fight the hardliners according to whom teaching Art History in recent years came before planning, promoting and managing a museum where the same art was on display?”

I then began to approach different subjects, never touched or only slightly during academic courses, which ranged from business to marketing, from sales to technology.

Along this path, between a book and a conference, I came across the following. Jay Abraham, one of the highest paid consultants in the world, known for developing strategies for direct response marketing, the architect of Anthony Robbins’ fortune.

One sentence of his in particular has stuck in my mind:

“The secret is not to ignore the competition or watch them to copy.

The real secret is to look at the competition to have the knowledge that we are completely different.”

At that moment I realized that to help a museum I could not work from within that kind of ecosystem and copy the activities of other museums.

This paradigm shift helped me to take courage and leave the world of culture.

The birth of the Amuse Method

My goal was one. To give the world of culture a chance to remain competitive in a market that was changing dramatically.

I thus began to structure in 2015 what would later become the Amuse® Method:

• taking cues from other industries, completely different from the one I was in and from companies completely unrelated to the cultural world;
• trying to figure out which models were really working;
• Carefully defining the audience, educating the visitor;
• looking at businesses such as Amazon, Netflix, Disney, Uber, Starbucks, … ;
• studying the most revolutionary and disparate marketing principles.

Now it’s up to you.

You have two roads ahead:

• you can continue doing the same things you are doing now, copying the realities that are doing certain things badly and hoping to survive.
• you can try to learn principles of management and marketing that are not currently being applied in many museums but that I have chronicled in the book Every Damn Museum.

I hope and wish that you will take the latter path, since you are reading this article.