Museums, let’s start to talk about a good brand experience.
All these experience-based “museums” are pretty new but they totally changed what people can call a museum in less than two years.
They are based on the brand experience rather than the content. They offer beautiful sets perfect for Snapchat and Instagram lovers, amusement and laughing to their visitors and great visuals for journalists. Following new rules and a new definition of museums, they invaded the museum landscape very fast — is it good or bad? I am not here to talk about that but what we can learn from them, and more especially the Museum of Ice Cream.
The concept is not original and brands or museums entered the game years ago already, but the recipe Maryellis Bunn, the founder of the Museum of Ice Cream, puts inside her product made it explosive! As a quick reminder, the second edition of the Museum of Ice Cream San Francisco sold out in 18 minutes and welcomed 600 000 visitors in 6 months with an entrance at 38$ and up to 125$ on the secondary market😵- and she is about to open the 4th space. Also, good to know that Maryellis Bunn turned this pinkish universe into a golden plate of a million dollars.
These places don’t work with curators (or not as we understand them in museums), they work with visual/set/experience designers. They don’t exhibit collections or objects, they offer visually attractive and immersive experiences — the kind of one-time-in-a-life moment that you should take a picture of and share on your social accounts.
A trend that is not ready to stop.
Since the opening of the first Museum of Ice Cream in summer 2016 in New York we saw a string of other museums of this type open in the United States: the CADO about avocados, the Egg House, the Happy Place, the Color Factory(that recently created an installation for the Cooper Hewitt), Candytopia, and the last ones that everyone looks forward to are the Museum of Pizza and the Museum of Candy. But we also see some European memes with the Sweet Art Museum in Lisbon and the British Museum of Food in London. In the same vein but more artistic, poetic or historical, Paris La Villette organized the first monographic exhibition in France of the internationally well-known group of multimedia and digital artists from Japan TeamLab and Culturespaces opened its new only multimedia space “L’Atelier des Lumières” with a first immersive exhibition about Klimt. The Arts Decorative Museum in Paris even transformed last year its main hall into a giant ball pit.
Immersive and large-scale artworks always had a big success on visitors starting with all the installations of Yayoi Kusama, the art of Olafur Eliasson or James Turrell, the Rain Room since 2012, the suspended tunnel made of Scotch tape designed by the Berlin collective Numen at the Palais de Tokyo in 2014 or the exhibition Wonder for the reopening of the Smithsonian Renwick Gallery, just to name a few. But there is something more than just a catchy set-design in the Museum of Ice Cream…
#1 They pop up, close and re-pop.
The opening of a new ̶s̶h̶o̶p̶ museum is an event itself where people are fighting to get a ticket, are ready to buy it overpriced on the secondary market, are talking about it with their friends and creating the buzz. Each time, the experience is different and unique, but more important, it’s only for some happy few. Scarcity is a trick inspired by the fashion and retail industries to create some hype and the Museum Scarcity works exactly the same. Temporary exhibitions and touring ones are already using the same technique creating the same kind of madness. Remember the Alexander McQueen show presented at the Victoria and Albert Museum for only 21 weeks?
But I would say the difference is in the differences.
Each Museum of Ice Cream is unique. Of course, visitors will find what makes the museum so Instagramable but new rooms and installations are tailor-made according to the city and the venue itself, highlighting what makes it unique in order to better connect with the locals and make the fan’s experience always new.
Also, after two years of popping up in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami, the MOIC just launched its own permanent shop in New York. This offers a true continuity of the museum experience but for free with paid tasting rooms, its own range of ice-cream and soon its touring ice-cream truck using fully the commercial potential of their product and not leaving the visitor hungry after its visit.
→ Make it pop-up but make it unique.
#2 This is above all a human experience.
We might think that the Museum of Ice Cream is pretty plain and boring when we are on the other side of the phone but the thing is that the museum offers really unique experiences pushing you to interact with the people around and get out of your habits. Experiencing the queue could be painful at the Museum of Ice Cream, so as soon as you enter you receive a very warm welcome from one of the brand ambassadors who make you feel like you are already starting the experience with his large smile and colorful trendy outfit. In this place, you eat ice-creams (of course!), but you also speak with an helium-voice after having to eat a sugar-ballon, you eat some chocolate, you swim, you engage with art installations and interactive screens, you trip on candies, you swing on an ice-cream scooper, and for each of this step a member of the team interacts with you!
What makes the difference with any other space or museum is the care they put into hiring their team. The MOIC team is as important as the set-designs, and I would say, even more! Each employee is young and cheerful, wearing Millennial Pink and Gen Z Yellow outfits, ready to dance and make you laugh and the most important: they are everywhere during your experience. By putting so much attention on the team, the Museum of Ice Cream creates a powerful bonding experience on top of the visual experience making you feel unique in a unique moment.
→ Unique moments with unique people.
#3 It gives what people need today.
People want to feel human again, they want to feel good, to connect and interact with the others. In the MOIC, visitors are constantly invited to touch, listen, taste, smell, dance, laugh loud and have fun. In this sensory-driven museum, visitors are not asked to act like they understood or learned anything, it’s a place to let go and switch off.
We are a generation that welcomes happiness with open arms and it’s exactly what the Museum of Ice Cream offers. In an interview for WIRED Magazine, Maryellis Bunn enhanced the value of human interaction within each other and the installations. She said she wants to make people happy and inspires the imagination and creativity. For her, MOIC means before all Movement of Imagination and Creativity.
→ Forbid prohibition.
#4 Intelligent partnership from the beginning.
Of course, if you read the interviews you will think that the Museum of Ice Cream was such a perfectly-built product that the success came naturally. We are not living in Wonderland and behind each victory, there is some precious fairy-help. From 2016, the Museum of Ice Cream started to work with the strategic partnership firm VentureFuels which matched the museum with Tinder. Fred Schonenber, the founder of the company, explains: “Tinder got publicity by sponsoring an exhibit that matched people up with their favorite flavor. And the Museum of Ice Cream not only got a big sponsor, it got lots of media coverage. The waiting list for tickets topped out at 100,000.” (source). The second big partnership was with Century FoxThink and Son of Zorn and took one entire room of the museum.
To be brief, think about your museum like a startup, be strategic and follow the nature of your institution instead of trying to act or be something else.
And from there, traces of strategic partnerships started to be everywhere in the Museum of Ice Cream. For instance, visitors received an ice-cream at the entrance branded Magnum or other sweets companies, Dove gave chocolate bars with the hope of getting the golden ticket, American Express to access tickets that have been sold out, etc. The last collaboration is with Target, the second-largest department store in the United States where a range of kid clothes adopting the joyful atmosphere of the Museum of Ice Cream is now distributed, on top of a new range of seven ice cream flavors.
→ Sell your brand but to a friend.
#5 The retail experience can also be human.
“The shop is the last room of the exhibition” — this is what so many museums try to do today without always achieving it. But the Museum of Ice Cream made it. The room follows the color tones of the museum and the kitschy furniture. They created their own range of exclusive products following the museum’s colors, iconic visuals and young and joyful culture in order to create the perfect “museum merchandising”. But what makes the difference in this shop is the customer service, the human experience you get and what retailers call “experiential retail”. Trina Chan, Head of Retail of the Museum of Ice Cream, explains “The staff is encouraged to have meaningful conversations with customers, rather than just a quick sale. […] We want to hear about each person’s experience — what their favorite rooms were, which treats tasted the best, and of course gather any points that we need to improve on”.
Like when the visitor ate that ice-cream or was biting into the ballon before, he will continue to touch, try and then buy what is around him. The buying process is thus very natural and simple.
→ Let your staff become friend with the visitors.
I hope this article made you see the Museum of Ice Cream in a new way and that you found inspiration to change some things in your own museum :)
(and if you want to talk about the legitimacy of these museums to take the name ‘museum’, find out if they are a good or bad thing for the museum community, how long they will last, etc. — let’s talk about it over an ice cream 😄)
This is a discussion paper prepared for a panel to be held during Museum Connections 2019 next 16/17 January in Paris.
