Designing the Guest’s experience is what Walt Disney’s Imagineers came to call “the art of the show,” a term that applies to what the Imagineers did at every level, from the broadest conceptual outlines to the smallest details, encompassing visual storytelling, characters, and the use of color.
Today is eighth and concluding session of Summer Term II of the 2013 GsD program with Applied Guestology 201, a review of some of the leading organizations who deliver exemplary Guest Experiences with application to ChurchWorld.
As I conclude this brief look at Applied Guestology 201, it’s only fitting to come full circle to where we started: Walt Disney and the worlds he created.
The Imagineers design intention is always to give satisfaction to the guest.
John Hench, Imagineering genius and Disney team member for 60+ years
Walt Disney realized that a visit to an amusement park could be like a theatrical experience – in a word, a show. Walt saw that the Guests’ sense of progressing through a narrative, of living out a story told visually, could link together the great variety of attractions he envisioned for his new kind of park. While traveling through their stories, Guests would encounter, and even interact with, their favorite Disney characters, and who would be transformed, as if by magic, from their two-dimensional film existence into this special three-dimensional story world.
As designers, the Imagineers create spaces – guided experiences that take place in carefully structured environments, allowing the Guests to see, hear, smell, touch, and taste in new ways. In effect, Imagineers transform a space into a story place.
Ultimately, the Imagineers gave Guests a place to play, something Walt believed that adults needed as much as children. The design of the Imagineers gives power to the Guests’ imagination, to transcend their everyday routine. Walt Disney insisted that Guests should “feel better because of” their experiences in Disney theme parks, thus establishing the art of the show.
For the Imagineers, that meant considering everything within and relating to the parks as design elements. To build effective story environments and assure Guest comfort, the designers realize that they always had to assume the Guests’ position and point of view, and just as Walt did, to take the Guests’ interests to heart and defend them when others didn’t think it mattered.
It is up to the designers to provide Guests with the appropriate sensory information that makes each story environment convincing. This means that design considerations go beyond the attractions themselves to the service and operations staff, transportation, restaurants, shops, rest rooms – even the trash cans.
Initially, the Imagineers used the knowledge gained from their experience in films, but they soon found that their Guests themselves would teach them what they most needed to know about theme park design and operation.
To design most effectively for Guests, the Imagineers learned that they had to observe them up close, waiting in lines with them, going on attractions with them, even eating with them. The Imagineers paid attention to Guests’ patterns of movement and the ways in which they expressed their emotions. They were able to get an idea of what was going on in their minds.
When designers see Guests in their natural states of behavior, they gain a better understanding of the space and time Guests need in a story environment.
Disney Imagineer Marty Sklar, who retired in 2009 as the only Disney employee to have participated in the opening of all eleven theme parks around the world, is noted for many things, but one of the most cherished has to be his creation of “Mickey’s Ten Commandments.”
During his 54-year career, Sklar was involved in all facets of the theme parks – from concepts to design to operations. Along the way, he developed, refined and practiced key principles of leadership based on what he learned from Walt Disney and other Disney Legends, especially designer John Hench. He crystalized these “learnings” into the first of what he called Mickey’s Ten Commandments:
- Know your audience – Identify the prime audience for your attraction or show before you begin design
- Wear your Guests’ shoes – Insist that your team members experience your creation just the way Guests do
- Organize the flow of people and ideas – Make sure there is a logic and sequence in our stories and the way Guests experience them
- Create a wienie (visual magnet) – Create visual “targets” that will lead Guests clearly and logically through your facility
- Communicate with visual literacy – Make good use of color, shape form, texture – all the nonverbal ways of communication
- Avoid overload – create turn-ons – Resist the temptation to overload your audience with too much information and too many objects
- Tell one story at a time – Stick to the story line; good stories are clear, logical, and consistent
- Avoid contradictions – maintain identity – Details in design or content that contradict one another confuse an audience about your story or the time period it takes place in
- For every once of treatment, provide a ton of treat – Walt Disney said you can educate people, but don’t tell them you’re doing it. Make it fun!
- Keep it up! (Maintain it) – In a Disney park or resort, everything must work. Poor maintenance is poor show!
Exceeding Guests’ expectations is Disney’s Guest Service strategy, and paying attention to every detail is the tactic by which it is accomplished.
Class dismissed.
Application for ChurchWorld
Really? If you are involved in Guest Services at your church in any capacity, and can’t see the immediate and powerful application of Mickey’s Ten Commandments to your own Guest Services process, may I kindly suggest you are serving in the wrong ministry area?
“Be Our Guest” has been the invitation to Disney visitors long before the song from Beauty and the Beast became a box office hit.
It underscores an important element in the Disney vocabulary, that customers are not referred to as such, but rather as Guests. In the Disney nomenclature, the word “Guest” is capitalized and treated as a formal noun.
What’s the difference between treating someone like a visitor, and treating someone like a Guest?
The obvious analogy is that we do things differently when we bring Guests into our home. We clean up the house. We dress up. We prepare something special to eat. We host them. We take care of their real needs.
Disney expects Guests
At Disney theme parks around the world, they expect Guests – and plan to exceed their Guests’ expectations every time. What about you?
Are you expecting Guests?
Recommended Reading for this session:
Designing Disney: Imagineering and the Art of the Show, John Hench
Dream It, Do It: My Half-Century Creating Disney’s Magic Kingdoms, Marty Sklar
(for a complete reading list, see The Essential Guest Experience Library)
Guestology – the art and science of knowing and understanding your guests – is a term originated by Bruce Laval of the Walt Disney Company. The use of GsD is a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment that organizations that really want to understand and deliver a WOW Guest Experience need to study the best practices and principles in use today, and then adapt them to the context of their own environment.
the GsD (Doctor of Guestology) journey: 2nd Term Summer 2013
27gen.com 