And the next mini-post.
I remember being in some sort of branding workshop a couple of years ago, where the facilitator asked us to do a kind of elevator pitch for our organisations – sum our our aims, what we do, our selling point, as succinctly as possible.
Someone started talking about how their organisation put on the biggest events, the most events, was the busiest, the most world-renowned etc. The facilitator responded, saying that it made the organisation sound rather arrogant. Size and scale are not in themselves interesting. Which is why I think this campaign for the National Maritime Organisation is so misguided. It really gives me no reason to visit. The museum is bigger. So what? Why would that make me want to go?
As I’ve said before, when you advertise on the tube you’re advertising to a very broad cross section of people – it’s mass media. Most of them are not going to be aware of your (cultural) product, so you have to assume very little knowledge. So if they weren’t already interested in visiting the National Maritime Museum then this poster is not going to persuade them at all. Why would I want to go to a bigger version of something that I haven’t been persuaded to visit yet?
They could have spent the space telling us about how much more exciting the museum is now, what the new galleries are about etc. But no, they got caught up in their ego and concentrated on size.
Of course, there are lessons here for classical music too…
