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What is Immersive Storytelling (and Why Should You Do It)?

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Immersive storytelling will unlock the true potential of your museum or attraction. But what is it precisely? And how can it increase visitor satisfaction and attract new audiences?

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“Stepping forward, you feel a slight shiver of trepidation as your eyes struggle to penetrate the gloom. The first thing you sense is the noise – the distant howling of an Antarctic wind outside and, more loudly and worryingly, a series of ominous, sometimes downright alarming, creaks all round you.

You can feel the wooden planks of a ship’s deck under your feet and the smell of pitch fills your nose. As your eyes adjust, you realise the dim light is cast by oil lamps, gently flickering. Suddenly, the lamps sputter out and you’re pitched into utter darkness. Your breath quickens and your heart thuds loudly in your chest as, frantically, you wonder what will happen next.”

Those aren’t the first few lines of Patrick’s Cornwall’s latest naval blockbuster but the first few seconds of our Shackleton Immersive Cinema experience at the Fram Museum in Oslo. The experience of those first few moments demonstrates the power of immersive storytelling and highlights its two key aspects.

Shackleton Immersive Cinema at the Fram Museum, Oslo.

What is Immersive Storytelling (and Why Should You Do It)?

Firstly, this is all about placing your audience at the heart of the story. They’re there – in this case, stepping back 100 years into the gloomy hold of Shackleton’s Endurance as the life is slowly crushed out of it by the asphyxiating sea ice. They may be able to influence events, or they may be mere bystanders, but they’re going to experience the same events, the same emotions, as the people who were actually there.

Secondly, all of their senses are engaged. The distant howl of the Antarctic wind, the dim glow of the oil lamps, the feel of the wooden deck underfoot, the strong smell of pitch assailing their nostrils and snaking through their mouth on to their tongues.

So if that’s answered the question “what is immersion?”, what about the “why immersion?” query. Well, there are multiple reasons.

I’ve worked in marketing for over 20 years and the holy grail for marketers is word of mouth. That’s because people telling other people about your product or service is free. Of course, the theory’s the easy bit – in practice it’s much harder. But there are 2 key principals principles to generating word of mouth. The first is “unexpectedness“. The second is “emotion“.

It’s still the case that, the expectation of a museum experience involves lots of glass cases and lots of reading. Pitching people into the heart of an Antarctic ship as the sea ice squeezes it so hard it shoots out of the water, well, that’s unexpected – even in the most high profile of attractions.

Words can stir the emotions no doubt but nothing can top the emotional impact of being there – of seeing what those involved would have seen, hearing what they would have heard, feeling what they would have felt. Each emotion stimulated creates a little hook in the memory – making it more likely they’ll recall your story long after any written account would have been forgotten. The sheer impact of stirring all those emotions will mean they’ll be desperate to share their experience with their friends and family.

So immersion can help your stories live longer with your visitors, and compel them to tell their friends. Not bad. But I also think it can do more. It can not only can it bring you new visitors but, it can bring in a different type of visitor.

Two groups are key to audience development – they’re Out and Abouters and Explorer Families (as defined by our friends at the National Trust – you can read more about their audience segments here.)

For these two groups, museums and heritage attractions are just one of a number of leisure time options. They have the desire to learn but it’s balanced with the desire to have fun – either with their partner or with their kids (or both). The traditional museum experience holds limited appeal but the chance to have fun while adding to their knowledge – well, that’s very attractive. Immersive storytelling ticks all their boxes

But there’s one final reason for this approach, and it has nothing to do with your visitors. When I was young, I used to run around castles and yearn to be a knight – to experience the pomp and chivalry of the joust, or the adrenalin-pumping adventure of battle. I’m sure you had similar childhood fantasies, otherwise you wouldn’t be doing what you do.  With immersive storytelling, you can fulfill your own fantasies, and those of your visitors, even if they’ve been buried for decades. What could be more rewarding than that?

Immersive storytelling is groundbreaking, a little risky and may take you out of your comfort zone (although people like us are here to help.) But looking at your visitors ‘ wide-eyed stares of wonder and hearing their cries gasps of excitement makes all that effort worthwhile.

That’s why we do it, and why we think you should do it too.

The Museum & Heritage Attraction Guide to Immersive Tech: Binaural Sound

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We use a number of technologies and techniques to immerse visitors in our clients’ stories. Binaural sound is one of the simplest, but most effective.

Binaural sound is so immersive, your visitors will be agape.

Binaural sound is so immersive, your visitors will be agape.

I’m walking through the most English of English gardens – all manicured lawns and artistically sculpted hedges. What I’m hearing, though, isn’t quite so quintessentially English – it’s the distinctly tropical sound of humming cicadas. But despite the fact I know that this is clearly the ‘wrong soundtrack’, my brain is telling me that this distinctive hum must be coming from the garden around me. Such is the power of binaural sound.

Binaural sound is an immersive sound technology delivered via headphones. If you know how to use it properly, you can trick the user’s brain into hearing sounds all around them – to the left, right, behind, in front, above, at different distances and any combination of those directions!

I had the experience described above when testing our audio guide for the National Trust’s Hidcote Manor Garden. The audio brings the garden’s creator, Lawrence Johnston, back to life – binaurally – to take you on a tour of his garden and his life. One sequence takes the listener back to one of Johnston’s 1920s plant hunting expeditions on the South African veldt. My ears were telling me I was in Johnston’s beautiful arts and craft garden. My ears were telling me that I could hear cicadas. And, because of the nature of binaural, my brains was telling me that those cicadas must be in Johnston’s garden.

Our 'Walk with Lawrence Johnston' experience, created for Hidcote Manor Garden.

Binaural sound is so immersive, your visitors will be agape.

Binaural is so effective because, unlike stereo, it’s recorded in exactly the same way the brain hears. Think about how you hear a sound – a sound to your right will be heard by your right ear fractionally before your left ear, and the sound you hear in your left ear will be distorted a little by the fact that the sound is passing through your head en route. You only have two ears (a safe assumption I hope) so your brain can’t properly triangulate. Therefore, it has to work out from these fractional differences, and other contextual clues, exactly where the sound is coming from. If you understand how the brain works, you can ‘trick’ it into hearing sounds in all sorts of places.

For example, one of the common misconceptions about binaural is you can’t make the listener hear sounds in front of them. This is because your sight is a large part of your hearing (bear with me). The brain can’t locate a sound properly with only two sound sources, so your first instinct is to look for the thing that could be making that sound. Once the likely culprit is spotted – for example, a mobile phone when you can hear a ringing – your brain will allocate the sound to this object.

You can use this knowledge to make binaural even more effective if you understand the location your listener is standing in when they listen to it. In our ‘Walk with Lawrence Johnston’, the distant bleating of sheep on the soundtrack coincides with the listener overlooking a distant field of sheep. When I was testing the experience, I couldn’t tell if the bleating was ‘real’ or was part of the soundtrack. Certainly my brain was telling me it must be coming from the sheep – and I was ‘hearing’ that sound coming from a field slap bang in front of me.

Another clue your brain looks for is context. If, by experience, the brain knows a sound comes from a certain place, then this element in a binaural soundtrack will be heard in this place. So the sound of a plane will be heard high above your head, the close yapping of little dogs will be heard down low by your feet, the tweeting of birds will be heard in any tree that is in vision.

The final thing to note about binaural is to do with the nature of sound vs. visuals in our sense hierarchy. Dinah and I have found many virtual reality experiences disappointing partly because we’re so visually dominant, our brains often ‘see through’ the trickery. Because sound is a ‘secondary sense’, it’s easier to fool the brain. We like to say that sound is ‘hardwired’ into the imagination – get it right and it really can be transportative. It’s one of the reasons that binaural sound is so effective. When I first heard those cicadas, my brain said ‘wrong’ but after a matter of seconds it had switched back to focusing on what I was seeing, rather than what I was hearing, and the cicadas became the ‘actual’ soundtrack to the garden.

How can you use binaural sound? Well, you can use it to transport your visitors to wherever and whenever you fancy. We’ve used it to transport listeners from a 21st century shopping centre to a 19th century factory floor, back 300 years in a Methodist chapel to eavesdrop in on the conversations of two of the movement’s founding fathers, and to pitch them into the midst of a medieval battle. But the possibilities are endless.

Imagine for a few moments how binaural sound could enhance a visit to a castle. Other senses are stimulated – visitors can see the walls, towers, moat and courtyard, smell the distinct damp limey odour of the interiors and touch the cold stone walls. Binaural sound – the babble of the tradesman in courtyard, the crackling fire and bawdy banter of the great hall, the low moans from the dungeons – would be all that you’d need to transport your visitors back 1000 years.

Or what about creating a binaural audio tour of one of your experts taking visitors around your gallery? Not only would the commentary be natural – a stark contrast to the stilted scripted audio guides that curse many attractions – but the binaural would make the listener feel they were actually part of that group and that the expert was with them, guiding them around and sharing his knowledge in ‘real time’. How much richer an experience for your visitors would that be?

Whetted your appetite to try some binaural for yourself? Well, fish out your headphones and try one of the sample below and let us know what you think via the comments below.

And if you’d like to know how binaural, or any of the other immersive techniques we’ve described in this blog, could enhance your museum, gallery or attraction, just drop us a line.

Elevator Pitches, and What They’ve Got to Do with Museums

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Looking to improve your visitor experience? Here’s how elevator pitches can help your museum to succeed.

Elevator pitches hold the key to unlocking the full potential of your museum or attraction.

Elevator pitches hold the key to unlocking the full potential of your museum or attraction.

 

I’m totally convinced that an elevator pitch is the key to unlocking the full potential of your museum of attraction. How can I be so sure? I’ve seen the power of them in the commercial world. Oh, and your peers are increasingly starting to use them too.

For those not familiar with an elevator pitch, it’s the idea that to explain a concept successfully, you should be able to do it to someone in a lift (sorry to my US readers for straying into UK vernacular) between floors i.e. it needs to be short, sweet and simple.

Twenty years in the marketing industry has given me plenty of experience of the power of elevator pitches but in marketing we buff them up and call them ‘brand essences’ – an explanation of the purpose of a brand in just a few words.

Why do marketers spend so much time (and often money) trying to get their brand essence right? Because if gives their brand a clear focus and direction. A brand essence will inform a brand’s design, its promotion, its packaging, its distribution and its pricing. If every aspect of a brand is consistent with its brand essence, consumers will know what they’re buying and can easily and succinctly tell their friends why they should buy it too. And other stakeholders – like staff – can use that essence as a filter to make sure they make the right decisions to keep that brand consistent.

What has this got to do with museums and heritage attractions? I think elevator pitches would help give them a focus which would improve their overall visitor experience. In fact, some already are.

A few years back, I went to an excellent talk at the Visitor Attraction Conference given by the then Director of Gardens for the RHS, James Rudoni. He explained that the RHS’s ‘brand essence’ was ‘Horticultural Excellence.’ Demonstrating this, and helping visitors to achieve this, was the core theme behind everything the RHS did – from the experience in the gardens to what they sold in the shop.

I know too that the National Trust has an initiative called ‘Spirit of Place’ – an attempt to encapsulate the core appeal of an attraction in just a few words. Once expressed, the ‘Spirit of Place’ is used to inform everything – from the way that attraction is promoted, to the visitor experience to the merchandise that’s sold in the gift shop.

Some museums and attractions I’ve been to lack this focus . I’m not sure why I’d go there and even when I’ve been there, I’m not sure I can explain to others why they should go. Crafting an elevator pitch gives you focus. It may mean things moving from the active collection to the archive that don’t fit in to the core experience, but if that means telling a simpler, more coherent story to your visitors, I think it’s worth it. Let me give you an example

A few years back I went to the Royal Air Force Museum in North London. What do you expect when you go to the Royal Air Force Museum – a museum which tells the story of the Royal Air Force, right? Except, it didn’t.

The first part of the museum, and frankly the most jaw dropping gallery in terms of exhibits, told the story of the early pioneers of flight before the RAF was even founded. And many of the exhibits after this gallery, interesting though they were, had everything to do with the innovations in flight, and nothing to do with the RAF.

royal-air-force-museum

If the custodians of that museum went through the same exercise in the manner that commercial marketers do, I’m sure they’d come up with an elevator pitch/brand essence/spirit of place (or whatever you want to call it) more like ‘innovations in flight’ and maybe even re-name their museum ‘The Museum of Flight.’ Then the name, the collection and the story the collection is used to illustrate are all aligned. I know why I should be going, what I get when I arrive is consistent with that expectation and I can tell my friends and family what I learnt and why they should go there.

Elevator pitches/brand essences aren’t easy. Explaining the purpose of something in just a short sentence of phrase is challenging – remember Mark Twain ‘I would have written you a short letter but I didn’t have the time’? But I would encourage you to try. Get it right, and it opens up a Pandora’s box of opportunities and new thinking which will get the footfall rolling and the tills ringing.

How to Keep All of Your Museum Visitors Happy, All of the Time (Well, Almost)

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The key to visitor satisfaction is understanding your visitors and what they want from a day out. A little audience segmentation is handy here, courtesy of our friends at the National Trust.

A robust segmentation model is the key to understanding your visitors.

A robust segmentation model is the key to understanding your visitors.

Dinah and I spend a lot of our time hanging around museums talking to their visitors to see how happy they are.

Specifically, we’re talking to people who have just experienced one of our interactive exhibits, audio guides or games to find out what they think. And although most are positive, there are some who don’t definitely don’t like what we’ve done.

The first experience we launched was our mobile phone audio tour for Gloucester Cathedral. During the first few week’s we’d loiter just behind the official Cathedral Welcomers, ready to pounce on any likely mobile phone wielding visitor to tell them about the tour. We got plenty to try and most absolutely loved it. But some didn’t like it at all. And it was nothing to do with the concept of using their mobile phone in a Cathedral – it was all to do with how we’d delivered the content.

We’d told the stories of seven people and events commemorated in the Cathedral. Visitors could listen to the stories by dialling a number on their phone. The stories were a mix of mini documentaries, docu-dramas and full-blown dramas.

The positive comments we got included words like ‘powerful’, ‘entertaining’ and ‘moving’. The negative comments we got included phrases like ‘too long’ and ‘get to the facts.’ It was then that the different motivations of visitors to the Cathedral become obvious.

Some clearly had come to the Cathedral on a mission to fact find. They actively wanted to add to their knowledge, had certain facts they wanted to learn and wanted those facts delivered in the most concise and easy to digest manner possible.

Others were less committed to coming to the Cathedral – it was leisure time rather than learning time. They didn’t have a specific agenda and were more open to be entertained and engaged by our stories. They weren’t looking for any specific facts, and so therefore weren’t irritated when the facts were delivered by storytelling rather than straightforward interpretation. Most of the families visiting fitted into these category.

We kept these two segments – the ‘fact seeker’ and the ‘entertainment seeker’ – at the forefront of our thinking when designing future experiences. And it was gratifying to find that, a year or so later when we did some work for the National Trust, that our ‘anecdotally observed’ segments had some basis in empirical fact.

About 5 years ago, the National Trust set about coming up with a new way of segmenting their visitors, largely based on psychographics (personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles) rather than the traditional age and demographics.

They came up with 7 segments, described as thus:

Out and About

Spontaneous people who prefer chance encounters to making firm plans and love to share their experiences with friends.

Young Experience Seekers

People who are open to challenge, in a physical or horizon-broadening sense They make and take opportunities in their journey of personal discovery.

Curious Minds

Active thinkers, always questioning and making connections between the things they learn. They have a wide range of interests and take positive steps to create a continual flow of intellectual stimuli in their lives.

Live Life to the Full

Self-driven intellectuals, confident of their own preferences and opinions and highly independent in their planning and decision making; these people are always on the go.

Explorer Families

Families that actively learn together, the adults will get as much out of their experience as the children. To fit in the interests of all family members planning, sharing and negotiation are essential.

Kids First Families

Families who put the needs of the children first and look for a fun environment where children are stimulated and adults can relax; they’re looking for a guaranteed good time.

Home and Family

Broad groups of friends and family who gather together for special occasions. They seek passive enjoyment of an experience to suit all tastes and ages.

Before your mind starts boggling at the thought of creating interpretation for all these different groups, you should know that the 3 most important groups for most National Trust attractions (and therefore probably most museums and attractions in general) are Out and About, Curious Minds and Explorer Families.

For us, it was a ‘eureka’ moment as the Out and About-ers combined with the Explorer Families felt aligned with our ‘entertainment seeker’ group. And the Curious Minds had much in common with our ‘fact seeker’ group. And our experience at the National Trust’s Hidcote Manor Garden backed that up, where Out and About-ers and Explorer Families loved our dramatised audio experience A Walk with Lawrence Johnston, whereas the Curious Minds wanted the history of the garden (and the names of the plants) delivered to them in a more straightforward and concise way.

Hidcote_Leaflets

So what’s the lesson to keeping all of your visitors happy, all of the time? You need to find a way to deliver the relevant facts concisely for the Curious Minds and you need to entertaining ways to engage Out and About-ers and Explorer Families in your story.

How do you do that? By applying a little journalistic practice and a little psychological theory. But more of that soon.