By Brad Jashinsky
The most successful attractions in the industry can create moments that become lifetime memories for guests. What’s the special alchemy for turning memorable moments into lifetime memories? Prolific business writers Chip and Dan Heath explore this question in their new book, The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact.This article combines research with my real-world examples of attractions.
Elevation
One of the main methods the writers recommend for crafting these types of moments is called elevation. Elevation refers to experiences that rise above the routine to make us feel engaged, joyful, or motivated. Elevation is a natural component for attractions to lean into. Picture a heart monitor and imagine the jagged line on the screen as your customer’s journey throughout the day at your attraction. How can you take your guest’s natural peaks and elevate those highlights even more? Attractions can enhance elevation and create more memorable moments by doing three things: boosting sensory appeal, raising the stakes, and breaking the script.
Boost the Sensory Appeal
The sensory appeal involves engaging as many of the senses as possible to make lasting memories of your guests’ experience. Visually, some examples include colorful landscaping or over-the-top scenic pieces that capture guests’ attention. In addition to memory-making, successful visual appeal translates into more photos taken at your attraction and shared through social media.
Another way to visually boost sensory appeal is to encourage your guests to dress up in costume. During the recent “Peanuts” Celebration at Knott’s Berry Farm, our team created “Charlie Brown Day.” Guests were encouraged to dress up as the lovable blockhead from the Peanuts comic strip to win prizes and set a world record for the most Charlie Browns gathered in one photo for Charlie Brown Day. Throughout the park, hundreds of people dressed in Charlie Brown’s trademark yellow tee-shirt with the jagged black stripe. The event boosted sensory appeal for guests that weren’t participating or even aware of the promotion in a cost-effective way.
Don’t forget about the other four main senses—hearing, touch, taste, and smell. The key is ensuring your attraction is activating these senses in unique ways. Custom soundtracks can become iconically tied to attractions. Disney has perfected tying music to attractions, fireworks shows, parades, and different “lands” in its parks. Just the first few notes of a song from a beloved attraction transport guests back to that moment in their life.
Haunted houses have used scent machines for years in creative ways to boost the realism and impact of certain scenes. Blackout mazes in the haunt industry have tapped into the sense of touch using different materials for walls to invoke a variety of fears.
The growth of high-quality food at theme parks continues to elevate the taste experience by creating uniquely delicious dishes not found anywhere else. The Boysenberry Festival at Knott’s Berry Farm boosts sensory appeal through taste, smell, and sight. Guests line up to taste the chef specials and then to post selfies. The most successful attractions in the industry don’t focus on boosting only one sense but try to activate all five as much as possible to achieve maximum sensory appeal.
Raise the Stakes
Another method to achieve elevation is by raising the stakes for guests at your attractions. This method has been employed since the attraction industry’s beginnings in festivals and fairs well over a century ago. Competitiveness is a strong emotion to capitalize on to help the raise the stakes. From the earliest midway games to today’s 4-D interactive scoring rides, competition drives emotions and creates memorable moments. The scoring component of attractions such as “Toy Story Mania” at Disney’s California Adventure and “Voyage to the Iron Reef” at Knott’s Berry Farm helps to continue the conversation among guests after the experience is over and is a big part of the motivation at both attractions for guests to repeat these rides.
The vast majority of story-driven rides and attractions seize upon the successful trope of “and then things went wrong” to amp up the stakes and create an adrenaline surge in guests. “Jurassic Park: The Ride” at Universal Studios starts off as a leisurely boat ride showcasing friendly herbivore dinosaurs in a safe, zoo-like environment… until the ride “malfunctions.” The Stakes rise as guests hurtle down the wrong path into a habitat full of carnivorous dinosaurs before coming face-to-face with a massive T-Rex followed by an 85-foot-drop finale.
There are some other ways to raise the stakes. Most successful escape rooms combine storytelling with competitiveness and a ticking clock to raise the stakes to an even higher level. Haunted houses seize on different fears to increase blood pressure and elevate the emotional stakes of the experience. Seasonal events help raise the stakes by creating a fear of missing out on a limited-time offering, which motivates people to get off the couch and into the attraction.
Alternatively, lengthening the timeframe of seasonal attractions enhances the guest attendance. Both Cedar Fair and Six Flags chains have expanded seasonal event offerings in recent years with great success. From multi-million-dollar attractions to pop-up events, there are a variety of ways to raise the stakes no matter your attraction’s size, budget, or theme.
Break the Script
There’s a lot of potential at attractions for breaking the script. Take the normal rhythm of what guests expect from your attraction’s culture and then do something that surprises them to elevate it. “Holiday World” in Santa Claus, Indiana is famous for providing free sunscreen, soda, and parking to every guest. The park has built a brand around breaking the script that many in the industry employ. The interactive summer experience, “Ghost Town Alive!” at Knott’s Berry Farm, breaks the script by bringing over 25 characters to life to tell an immersive story that guests can become a part of. Most live entertainment is a passive experience, yet Ghost Town Alive! breaks the script by involving guests and having them play starring roles. Haunted houses and attractions with various “choose your adventure”-type paths have employed a similar technique of breaking guests’ expectations of what an attraction experience can be.
Big ideas are great, but there are also small things—like giving out a free birthday button—that can go a long way in creating a memorable moment and elevating that experience. So, it doesn’t have to be some huge, grand gesture all the time. You can balance it out with smaller moments, which can become more scalable at a bigger attraction. It’s all about the concept of reducing negative variance and increasing positive variance. There needs to be that balance of breaking the script but not becoming part of the script; break the script all the time, and guests expect the breaking!
Making these moments genuine is key, and that’s why employees are so important in this process. Employees make so many of these moments when given the freedom to do so; they can turn a frown upside down by something as simple as noticing when a kid drops his ice cream cone and rushing over to give him a new one. That’s a memorable moment because it’s unexpected. Empower your employees by providing them with the ability to create these little moments without needing permission from management.
The Business Case
Research suggests that organizations dramatically under-invest in building peaks, choosing instead to fill potholes. “Forrester’s researchers built a model of customer financial value and found that an airline customer who gives a 7 out of 10 rating to an airline spends an average of $2,200 on air travel throughout the year, whereas a customer who gives a 4 rating spends an average of only $800. The study shows that, if you can elevate a positive guest experience, you earn about nine times more revenue than if you only eliminate the negatives.” Guests who have exceptional experiences spend more on the brand.
The attractions industry can realize this same effect by converting happy day guests or first-time season pass-holders into long-term season pass-holders. Over the years, these returning season pass-holders generate significant revenue and become the attraction’s best brand ambassadors. For many regional theme parks, 50% or more of their attendees are season pass-holders.
One example mentioned in The Power of Moments is Southwest Airlines. The analytics groups for the company calculated that if they could double the number of customers who heard a funny on-board announcement, that would result in more than $140 million in additional revenue per year. Southwest empowered its flight attendants to be more creative and funny by not requiring them to follow the usual script.
Memorable Moments Create Lifetime Memories and Nostalgia
How do you create nostalgia? You start by building memorable moments that become lifetime memories down the line. These investments in your experience pay dividends later on. If you do it well—if you’re able to build those connections and memorable moments—kids will remember these when they’re 13, 15, 20, 30… And, when they have kids of their own, those memorable moments will lead them back to your attraction.
Key Takeaways:
- Elevation refers to experiences that rise above the routine to make us feel engaged, joyful, or motivated.
- Sensory appeal involves engaging as many of the senses as possible in a way which is uncommon to make lasting memories of your guests’ experience.
- The attraction industry’s beginnings in festivals and fairs well over a century ago has roots in Raising The Stakes. Competitiveness, fear, thrills, and surprise are great emotions to capitalize on to help the raise the stakes.
- To break the script, take the normal rhythm of what guests expect from your attraction’s culture and then do something that surprises them to elevate it.
- Making these moments genuine is key, and that’s why employees are so important in this process. Employees make so many of these moments when given the freedom to do so.
Quiz Yourself:
- Like three key ways to create memorable moments.
- Write out you guest’s typical day and mark the high and low points (heartbeat). Can the high points be enhanced? Can you give an employee discretion to improve a single high point for one guest each day?
- Examine photos guests post of your attraction and list what visual elements commonly appear; can you enhance the elements which appear most often?
- List one example of how your attraction taps into each of the 5 senses; examine gaps in the senses. Discuss one way to boost the sensory appeal of each of the five senses in your (or any) event or attraction.
- Explain which feelings contribute to raising the emotional stakes for guests?
- How can employees help create memorable moments? What makes it easier for them to do so?
About The Author
Brad Jashinsky
Brad Jashinsky has over 10 years of experience at the intersection of entertainment, marketing and technology. He is currently the Digital Marketing Manager for Knott’s Berry Farm.
