How to Make Anticipation Work For Your Museum

Thursday, April 27, 2017 1:00 PM by Taylor Studios in Design and Planning


We know that variety can help keep visitors engaged. Can the sheer anticipation of variety do the same?

Recent research by a group of marketing professors might provide some insight. In a 2016 study conducted by Julio Sevilla, Jiao Zhang, and Barbara E. Kahn, test subjects were given either a series of candies to eat, or a series of music clips to listen to.

In both “domains of consumption,” they found that people were willing to endure more of the same for longer when they were made to believe that something different was coming next. Published in the Journal of Marketing Research, the study concludes that variety can “not only reduce satiation when physically incorporated into a present experience,… but may also delay the occurrence of satiation when people anticipate consuming it in the future.”

This seems intuitively relevant to the museum world’s notion of “object satiation”—a key contributor to the phenomenon known as “museum fatigue.” Dr. Steve Bitgood, who has written extensively on the subject, describes as object satiation as “boredom associated with monotonous stimulation.”

The idea is that too much uninterrupted anything could make for a tiresome display, whether it’s case after case of fossil reproductions, hundreds of visually similar pottery artifacts, or a series of interpretive graphic panels, identical but for their blocks of text.

rifles

Enthusiasts might love this, but average visitors may find it repetitive.

Bitgood has also previously written that “Variation in viewing experiences and taking breaks are likely to minimize satiation.”

These new marketing research findings seem to support that notion, and further suggest that it’s not just the experience of variety that keeps visitors engaged, but the expectation of it. (As social science research correspondent Shankar Vedantam put it when discussing the study’s findings on NPR’s Morning Edition, “In your mind…satiation is not just about what youve done, but about what you think youre going to do.” Listen to the full broadcast report here.)

Although these findings come from outside the museum industry, they are nonetheless interesting food for thought. How do you provide your visitors with variety?

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