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How to attract and seduce an increasingly demanding tourist.
68%
A number that should mean everything to you. What?
I’ll tell you about it in this article, reporting on what transpired last September 10 when we initiated, together with the Veneto Region, the free workshop “A Museum in Connection” aimed at journalists and all those working in the tourism-cultural sector.
This appointment at the South Lagoon Museum of Chioggia, part of the European project “Innocultour,” funded by the Interreg Italy-Croatia Program 2014-2020 to develop innovation and promotion of the cultural heritage of the Adriatic, was aimed at illustrating the new opportunities for “slow” tourism in Chioggia and Rovigo, and then to preview the digital solution inside the museum.
On this occasion, I tried not to talk about all the topics I hear lately at every conference I attend, such as:
- the modern tourist inquires online;
- B2B and B2C are obsolete, and now we are talking about H2H – human to human;
- social is key and digital is the future;
- tourism today must be experiential, customized and sustainable;
- one must return to an intimate experience and be the protagonist of one’s own vacation.
The future according to Oscar of Montigny
I then focused on what I had heard during the last TedX in Cortina: a few words from Oscar di Montigny, creator and popularizer of the Spherism Movement in which he combines business and management with philosophy, art and science:
“It’s a crazy time to be alive, it’s a unique time. There has never been one like it, except maybe when man learned how to handle fire.”
A time of virtually limitless possibilities: speech recognition, automation, robotics, processor power, data management, resource sharing … more and more development will engage in every direction and dimension, and one by one we will achieve great goals at impressive speeds.
The question, then, is not “whether a vision will become reality,” because the answer is simple: yes, it will happen.
Customer First or Technology First?
The idea of social and digital, then, is as if it has already passed: the world is going so fast that we should not dwell so much on the tool as on an actual approach that we want to bring.
An approach that can be of two kinds:
- customer first, espoused by Jeff Bezos creator of Amazon: it has an obsessive focus on customer needs and “working backwards” (working backwards) to figure out how to innovate to best meet those needs;
- technology first, followed by Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO: he believes he knows where the market is going (working ahead), knowing what customers need and what they will want
What then is the correct approach? The one that is more customer-centered or technology-centered?
There is no right choice, especially in the museum field.
Figure out how to structure your guest’s visit when they arrive at your museum: you can’t expect to create the perfect experience when they’re already inside, but you have to be able to act on them before and after the visit, which are the most important parts (and that’s exactly what I talk about in the book Every Damn Museum).
The five tips to ensure a perfect visiting experience
What do you have to do now?
- analyze and differentiate yourself from your competitors, define the purchase path of your guests and build a unique proposition;
- automate as many things as possible; create an automatic contact collection and follow-up system of emails, articles, posts, promotions, …
- sell again: keep offering products or services to people who have already visited your museum;
- continue to improve, constantly compare yourself with others, ask for feedback from colleagues and visitors;
- be manic: Be obsessed with word of mouth to the point that it becomes the key KPI for measuring customer satisfaction.
“Yes, but I don’t have time to handle the customer on site, let alone create an experience before and after the visit.”
I will answer you with just one fact: 68 percent of buying decisions are made even before you buy. This alone should spur you to change your mindset and approach.