Encouraging more visitors to do more

Bristol Museums Success Story

The Challenge

Bristol Museums and Arts Galleries is one of the UK’s leading cultural service. It comprises six venues throughout Bristol, each with a different focus and designed to address a specific audience. The most contemporary of the venues is M-shed.

=mc consulting decisionscience team was asked to focus on M-shed and advise on how to increase sales in the museum shop, which should have been a key source of earned income. There were a number of challenges with this seemingly simple issue:

The building is laid out with the museum separating the café at one end from the shop at the other.
The café had a devoted customer cluster, and – with its own entrance – many saw it as simply a café and didn’t think to go further into the building.
While attractively laid out and full of interesting and affordable materials, the shop just didn’t get enough traffic.

What We Did

=mc went to M-shed and walked the building to explore how we could improve visitor traffic, dwell time, and purchases. We made a number of suggestions on the day and wrote a brief report highlighting some key nudges:

One was to create a loyalty card in the café that would drive business to the shop with the promise of a free gift that was waiting to be collected.
We suggested staff should normally present this card with the café receipt, and say to visitors that they should be sure to collect their modest free gift.
In the shop we arranged for offerings to be re-clustered under headings such as ‘a favourite gift’, ‘by local craftspeople’, and ‘perfect for birthdays’.
These nudge and priming prompts were presented on handwritten-style cards to reinforce the idea that an authority figure in the museum had endorsed them.
The electronic signage in the shop made it clear that any purchase profits went towards protecting precious assets in the museum or making them accessible.

While these were very modest initiatives, they reinforced one of the key principles underpinning decision science: small nudges or prompts can make a significant difference to performance.

The Impact

The result was an impressive upsurge in sales and visitor figures.

There were 18% more visitors to the shop compared to the equivalent month the previous year.
Sales on a key offering, a book by Banksy, increased by 300%.
The average transaction value more than doubled from £7.95 to £15.79.

The project leader, Zak Mensah, the inspirational Head of Transformation at Bristol City Council, was so pleased with the impact that he’s commissioned a wider project focusing on how to increase overall traffic and engagement across the whole museums cluster. This is currently underway.

Next Steps?

Have a similar challenge or want to explore a project?
Contact Bernard Ross, Director.
bernardross@mc.consulting
+44 7976 280314

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