We owned a successful art gallery – here’s how CX helped

We owned a successful art gallery – here’s how CX helped.

Owning an art gallery for seven years gave us many new experiences. Including the opportunity to socialize with Paloma Picasso, seen here teasing me for sucking in my gut for the photographer at an event.

We represented a dozen global Artists, hosted 28 exhibitions, launched an estate sale division and made close friends with not one but three Countesses.

All while running our main business – our Customer training & research company OmniTouch International.

Which meant that we were in a perfect position to use key lessons from our CX training in our art gallery business.

In this post I share a few of the lessons on how CX helped.

We began with qualitative research

We first used qualitative research to scan the existing marketplace.

Over several months, we visited every gallery in the city to understand how they presented themselves, what they offered and how they made us feel.

And we engaged several appropriately profiled Mystery Shoppers to do the same.

We used diary studies to capture what everyone was thinking and feeling about each visit.

Which was the same approach we had used with our Client Universal Studios when they engaged us to study visits to their theme park.

After synthesizing all the data from the gallery visits, words that popped out from the diary studies included ‘pompous’, ‘intimidating’ and ‘cold’.

There data and learnings identified a clear gap in the art gallery experience.

And an opportunity for us to transform that pompous gallery experience into one that delivered warmth, storytelling and learning.

We determined our product strategy

Product-wise, we focused on bringing the physical works of living mid to late career Western Artists into Singapore.

Artists we knew personally and had collected ourselves and who were based in places like California, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia.

Our gallery research had turned up gaps in this product range as well. Meaning that we had an opportunity to differentiate our product offerings as well.

Our guiding principle – Where Art & People Meet

Equipped with the results from our research and our strategic decisions about ‘who we were’ and what we wanted to put out in the world, we came up with the guiding principle “Where Art & People Meet”.

Which then led to the creation of our logo.

Each link in the chain represented a Stakeholder in the art journey.

Red for the Artist, Green for the Gallerists (us) and Blue for the Art Lovers.

Putting into visual form our desire to ‘connect’ Art Lovers with Artists and tell their stories.

Of course, we did fly in a few of our Artists so that they could share their own stories.

But that’s not always possible nor even desireable. Not every Artist is comfortable presenting in front of an audience. A couple of our Artists flatly told us that telling the story was our job not theirs.

So to gather those stories, we went and visited the Artists in their homes and studios.

Where we conducted interviews with them about their work – which included gathering some touching and at times hilarious stories about what inspired them. Or why they had made certain aesthetic choices.

Several even opened up some of their private collections for us to see. Or handed over sketchbooks to help document their process.

“Where Art & People Meet” became much more than a slogan or a logo for us.

This guiding principle led us to being the first gallery in Singapore to offer free Guest lectures by qualified experts on topics ranging from the history of Chinese porcelains through to how to look at a painting.

These learning events weren’t necessarily tied to the works we were showing at the time.

We discovered in talking to our Guests that there was significan interest to build confidence in understanding and ‘judging’ art in general. In a safe and welcoming environment.

One lecture on Impressionism, delivered by a local professor, attracted over 100 Guests – which completely packed our cozy shophouse.

And resulted in a few additional sales.

Shaping Customer expectations – here’s how CX helped

When we teach Customer Experience we talk about how the actual ‘management’ work of CX involves meeting & exceeding Customer expectations.

But sometimes it’s not possible to specifically meet or exceed an expectation.

It may be necessary to ‘shape’ an expectation when there’s not much you can do to change the underlying conditions or circumstances.

Here’s my art gallery example.

We ended up relocating to the red light district

When we first opened the gallery we were located in a shophouse in Singapore’s Chinatown District. When our lease ended there, we relocated all our businesses into a 1939 shophouse in the Geyland District.

Geylang is the home and center of Singapore’s red light district. So in the clean and green metropolis of Singapore, the area was something of an outlier.

While still clean and connected (Singapore isn’t that big), Geylang has a long and colorful history as a place of ‘loose morals’ and (now) legalized prostitution.

Historically, each of the small lanes or ‘lorongs’ that criss cross the area were known to cater to a particular adult proclivity.

You just had to know which number lorong went with which proclivity. You could find ___ at Lorong 29 or ___ at Lorong 42 for example. I’ll let you use your imagination here.

We loved the area and found it refreshingly real.

But with that said, many of our gallery Guests told us that in their entire lives they had never visited or spent time in Geylang. It just wasn’t a place where people went.

One Guest had brought her elderly mother along to one of our receptions. While we were chatting she told us that she had to do a lot of convincing to get her mother to come with her to Geylang.

Her mother had just grown up thinking of Geylang as a seedy no-go zone.

So we leaned into the heritage of our area

Rather than apologize for being in Geylang we decided to lean into it instead.

So in our marketing communications we’d highlight the colorful history of the area – even to the point of being titillating.

We’d include photos and suggestions on what folks could do either before or after visiting us. So that our Guests could make a full evening in the area.

Did we convince everyone? No.

But in the gallery business – like our training business – having repeat Guests at events really mattered for business success. It was a metric we tracked.

So we worked to turn a potential negative into something that would add to – and I daresay ‘spice up’ – our Guest’s experience.

Personas & Jobs to Be Done – here’s how CX helped

Without being needlessly controversional no one ‘needs’ art. It doesn’t solve an obvious problem.

It’s not a mobile plan, a hotel room or an insurance policy. It’s not a hospital stay, software or an auto repair shop.

So we focused less on functional needs and more on the social and emotional needs of the Job to Be Done in our qualitative research with potential Guests & Clients.

In the art world, there is an audience out there that speculates in art and wants some kind of guarantee that a certain work would go up by $X in value in Y time.

But we strategically decided not to specifically cater to this audience as we defined our ideal Customer. We much preferred when people had an emotional connection with a piece.

Guest Personas began to surface

Within six months of our launch a few Guest Personas begin to surface. Groups of Guests that exhibited clearly different behaviours and attitudes.

Here are two of those Personas and a brief overview of their profile:

Date Nighters: We noticed quite a few younger couples attending the gallery receptions. Many, upon chatting with them, were university students looking for a nice evening out. And we always served lovely German wines and snacks for all our Guests. And worked to make people feel welcomed and seen.

I don’t think we sold a single piece of art to any Date Nighters. But with that said we loved having them as they added to the mix of the crowd and asked so many interesting questions. And last but not least, the Date Nighters of today become the working adults & married couples of tomorrow.

Sophisticated Expatriates: This persona represented perhaps 50% of the Guests at our events and 90% of our sales.

Typically from Europe, Australia and the U.S. these folks had grown up with art and were used to collecting art for their homes and offices.

We counted five Ambassadors as Clients and began to be invited to ambassadorial events and functions – which allowed us to expand our contacts and our list.

You don’t just go out and slap predefined labels on groups of people and say you’ve done your Customer research.

Customer Experience begins with the Customer (as obvious as that sounds). So we allowed ourselves time to immerse ourselves in their world.

And allowed for the differences in their behaviours and attitudes to surface over time.

Unsolicited feedback – here’s how CX helped

When we teach Customer Research I like to say that a house has many windows. The more windows the house has the more light that comes in.

Giving you an illuminated picture of what Customers need and want from you.

Unsolicited feedback is one of those windows. And listening to and using unsolicited feedback well is a vital part of any healthy CX program.

Here are some examples of the endless stream of unsolicited feedback we received. Art is an emotional experience after all. And we loved receiving it.

“I don’t like paintings with faces…”

We never really did anything specific with that one but we honored the Guest that shared it and jotted that down in our CRM.

“You guys are in Asia. You should be offering more Asian art…”

This feedback was essentially a mismatch between a Customer expectation and the product range we chose to offer. There were already plenty of excellent Asian galleries to be found.

We were always very clear about the art we chose to offer and why we offered it. Which by default meant that we were clear about the art we chose not to offer. I think these kinds of choices are at the heart of business strategy.

We absolutely did not want to be all things to all people. We’d end up pleasing nobody, including ourselves.

Have you guys thought about providing estate sale items?

Hmmmm. Actually we hadn’t.

But after some further research – including meetings with our three Countesses who had entire houses they wanted to clear out – we opened an Estate Sale division to sell fine fine collectibles. Which turned out to be our most successful line of business.

At the end of the day, if you’re not listening to your Customers, you’re not learning.

https://www.omnitouchinternational.com/what-emily-in-paris-taught-me-about-cx/

In closing on how CX helped our art gallery

Of course our training and research business was going strong. Participants in workshop sessions would actually have their sessions inside the gallery itself.

Which I think made for a special experience for our Participants as well.

It was only when we decided to relocate to Europe that we essentially shuttered the physical gallery.

And I still share these stories about our art gallery in our various CX courses and talks. Because I think it’s important to make the connection between the ‘theory’ of CX and the ‘reality’ of CX. And how it helps businesses succeed.

Because I know for a fact – that it helped us do better.

Daniel Ord

[email protected] / www.omnitouchinternational.com