Want to save your museum? You need to become something else
Why looking only at the strategies of other cultural institutions won't take you far
I'm a huge TV series fan.
You know Arrow?
A billionaire playboy, Oliver Queen, presumed dead by everyone after a shipwreck, returns to Starling City after five years spent on a deserted island, rekindles his relationships and decides to fight wealthy criminals as a hooded vigilante, following a list left to him by his father.
It's always been one of my favorites for:
- its ability to tell the human side of the story better than most, a part that in many superheroes tends to feel far too thin and pushed to the margins.
- the mission of the hero, which takes on even more meaning by the end of the final season: "For five years, I was stranded on an island with only one goal: 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".
Now let me tell you why that last line, "I must become someone else", became a mantra for me.
It happened after another "encounter".
What Jay Abraham taught me
Once I finished university I could easily have looked for an internship, like many of my former classmates, in a museum or institution, but I walked out of my thesis defense with two questions in my head:
How could I actually help museums while staying inside a world governed by professors, academics, administrators, who treated words written thirty years earlier as gospel, in reference to a world that was evolving rapidly?
How could I fight the purists who believed that teaching Art History mattered more than planning, promoting, and managing the very museum where that art was displayed?
I then started approaching different subjects, never touched on or only barely covered during my academic courses, ranging from business to marketing, from sales to technology.
Along this path, between one book and one conference and another, I came across Jay Abraham, one of the highest-paid consultants in the world, known for developing direct-response marketing strategies, the man behind Anthony Robbins' fortune.
One of his lines in particular stuck with me:
The secret isn't to ignore the competition, or to look at it in order to copy it.
The real secret is to look at the competition in order to become aware of being completely different.
At that moment I understood that to help a museum, I couldn't work from inside that kind of ecosystem and copy what other museums were doing.
This paradigm shift helped me find the courage to leave the world of culture.
The birth of the Amuse Method
My goal was just one. To give the world of culture the chance to stay competitive in a market that was changing radically.
So in 2015 I started structuring what would later become the Amuse Method®:
- drawing inspiration from other sectors, completely different from the one I was in, and from companies with nothing to do with the world of culture;
- trying to understand which models really worked;
- carefully defining the audience, educating the visitor;
- looking at businesses like Amazon, Netflix, Disney, Uber, Starbucks, … ;
- studying the most revolutionary and disparate marketing principles.
Now it's up to you.
You have two paths ahead of you:
- you can keep doing the same things you're doing now, copying institutions that are doing certain things badly, and hoping to survive.
- you can try to learn management and marketing principles that, at the moment, haven't been applied in many museums but that I described in the book Ogni Maledetto Museo.
I hope and wish that you'll take the second path, seeing as you're reading this article.
