While there is bound to be a lot of resistance from the more traditionally minded, interweaving history, science and art exhibits into retail spaces may offer tremendous benefits, not to mention broadening the audience for a museum’s mission. How might curators and designers turn their attention to the products that inhabit the retail world? What is the potential value in embedding interpretation into the shopping experience? Retail spaces, after all, seem more and more to fit the description of what many museums claim to want for their visitors, highly interactive, hands-on environments where participants engage in self-motivated exploration. What is a retail space if not that?

 Business attempts to insert commercial products into every aspect of our lives. So why aren’t museums and other institutions with educational missions seeking ways to occupy commercial spaces? It is true that there is no way (within our given economic system) for non-profits to flood the retail world with their message like for-profits can. But the question is not about volume. It is about taking advantage of whatever opportunities can be found where people participate in one of our greatest national pastimes. Shoppers are already involved in a world of objects and specimens. These things may not be the Hope Diamond or the Mona Lisa, but the products surrounding shoppers are full of history and culture.

Consider a cup of coffee from your local coffee shop.

The paper cup and sleeve can tell us stories of the forests, the plastic lid can be traced back to dinosaurs and the coffee (lets imagine its Kenyan) speaks of Africa, not to mention the industries, processes and politics in it all getting here. The goal of many museums is to inform, engage and enlighten, helping us appreciate the world around us and to live with the world more harmoniously. So why not plant these efforts elsewhere? Not just through special programs or camps but right under our nose throughout our daily lives. 

Of course, critics are often skeptical of retailer’s motives, suspecting them of jumping on the bandwagon only to help their brand rather than making a true commitment to a cause. But, I believe these causes will not go away any time soon and that time will tell who is genuinely engaged in trying to make a difference. For those who want to be taken seriously, partnerships with museums could lend a great deal of credibility while offering a new audience to the museum’s mission.

 

The video below addresses how companies of the luxury industry are beginning to understand that the planet is a precious thing and in it’s best interest to protect. While this new attitude becomes part of their new brand identity it also helps them operationally. It goes without saying that such companies could become funding sources for museum exhibitions, but it’s not too difficult to imagine a hybrid form of retail space and exhibition space.

Learning From Shoppers

The flip side of looking at retail spaces as new ground for museum exhibitions is to consider the potentially important data being collected there about shopper’s behavior. Exhibit designers and developers might look more closely at what is known as “retail anthropology” to understand the behavior of shoppers, not only to better address them in retail environment with embedded content, but how to accommodate them as museum visitors. Clues to engaging people in interactive display spaces might be found by looking at studies done on shoppers. For example, researchers have discovered that shoppers can be divided into “hunters” and “gatherers”. Some shoppers will enter a store knowing exactly what they are looking for. They “hunt down” what they need and leave. Other shoppers tend to forage or gather. Even if these “gatherers” have a list of specific items to buy they will allow themselves to wander and look around for a bargain they hadn’t necessarily come for. Do these tendencies offer anything for exhibition designers and developers to think about when it comes to engaging their audience in museum exhibitions? Beyond the learning styles defined by Gardner, Kolb and others, it may be beneficial to consider tendencies for acquiring information as we might acquire products? How might exhibition experiences offer opportunities for the hunter or gatherer in us?

Gender also plays an important role in retail anthropology. While there is always grey area in distinguishing between female and male behaviors in response to their environment, might exhibition designers take specific spatial and organizational conditions into account when an exhibit’s subject matter is likely to be more appealing to women or men?

Dwell time is also an obsession of exhibition developers and designers, equating time spent in the exhibition with the level of engagement and the success of its offerings. Not surprisingly, numerous studies have been done to increase dwell time in stores and these should be compared to those made by exhibition evaluators.

Paco Underhill is a retail anthropologist specializing in shopper behavior and environmental psychology. In his book “Why We Buy” he describes the role of the senses, the importance of smell, taste and especially touch. Hands-on shoppers make better buyers. Museums may not be interested in selling objects (save the gift shop) but they want to engage the visitor. Educators understand the value of multi-sensory visitor participation. Gone are the days of strolling through a museum as a simple spectator. This is a relatively new development in both museums and retail environments. Until recently researchers didn’t understand the importance of how something felt to a consumer. In fact, our sense of touch in a retail setting has only begun to be seriously considered.

The study of touch in marketing is called “haptic research”. Joann Peck, Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Business is a leader in haptic research. She created a taxonomy of touch to help delineate the motivations behind touching things. Aside from picking up the object and turning the object over to observe it, there is the assessment of weight, temperature, texture and softness. Another aspect of touch, perhaps most important in its impact on marketing, is touching something for the pure experience itself. Moving your hand over a soft wool sweater, running your fingers over a laptop’s keypad, or over the surface of a cut crystal bowl. In 2008 the first conference devoted to sensory marketing took place at the University of Michigan. Understanding the role of touching objects in our decision making process is a relatively new field of research. It would seem likely that this information would be useful to exhibition designers and developers interested in bonding visitors with certain material experiences.

The real point in all of this is that much of the research about museum visitors is being derived from studying visitors in the museum. There is nothing wrong with that except what we learn is bound to be incomplete.  If we are to understand the way museum visitors behave with material elements we should take into account where most people come in contact with material goods, the expectations they develop there and the behaviors they displayed.

Consider this study done in 2010:

• 197 million adults visit a shopping center each month. They represent 94% of the adult population in the U.S.
• 75% of all Americans visit a mall at least once a month.
• Shopping malls have become the third most frequented location for Americans, after home and work.
• Shopping malls have become community centers for social and recreational activities.
• On average, shoppers visit 2.9 times per month and stay 1 hour and 17 minutes.

One doesn’t need to compare these findings to those of museum visits to realize that the average American spends far more time shopping than in museums. That’s what makes museums special. That’s also what makes understanding the shopper’s behavior so critical in understanding and designing for the museum visitor.

 

MWB, 2011