Bob Rogers, Chairman, BRC Imagination Arts: Why Your Message Is the Wrong Place to Start
 |
 |
 |
On this episode of People Solve Problems, host Jamie Flinchbaugh welcomes Bob Rogers, Founder and Chairman of BRC Imagination Arts and author of the new book Deep Story: A Complete Guide to Creating Transformational Visitor Attractions. Bob has spent five decades building visitor experiences for some of the world’s best-known brands and museums, work that has earned more than five hundred international awards. It started somewhere smaller. At eighteen, he performed magic in the Magic Shop at Disneyland, where the job was to amaze people and then sell them the trick while they were still amazed.
The lesson that stuck came after a customer bought a trick, read the instructions, and returned to expose him. A senior magician he admired told him the shop was not a temple built to display his skill. People came not to admire him, but hoping he would help them find some magic in themselves. Bob has treated that ever since as the foundation of selling, of hospitality, and of any attempt to communicate.
This is where he believes most business communication goes wrong. Organizations decide what they want to say and build outward from the message, but wanting to say something does not create anyone’s desire to hear it. Deep story runs the other direction. You look far into the audience for an emotional truth that already moves them, and far into the brand for the same thing, and the part people miss is that you are not looking for two triggers. You want the one that already exists in both.
He frames it with a formula he admits sounds silly for creative work. An audience, A, enters a triangle, the delta symbol of change, and comes out as A prime. A prime minus A is the whole assignment, and that difference is almost always a change of heart, not a change in what people know.
The Johnnie Walker experience in Edinburgh shows what that looks like in practice. It runs nine stories, and most guests arrive believing they do not like whiskey. Rather than teaching them the correct way to drink it, the experience asks what flavors they enjoy and builds a first cocktail to match. Bob reports net promoter scores in the low to mid eighties and a brand conversion score of ninety-one. Bartenders are trained never to push their own tastes.
When the Milwaukee Brewers wanted an experience honoring founder Bud Selig, the team passed over his complicated public record for something smaller. Selig fell in love with baseball because his mother took him to games, which is how much of the crowd came to the sport too. That, Bob says, is the trigger you cannot manufacture, only find.
For listeners whose reach extends to rearranging conference room chairs rather than commissioning a building, Bob suggests finding someone who will guide the process rather than decorate it, and starting with the heart rather than the technology. Fifty years have convinced him that people settle on emotion first and arrange the facts to fit afterward.
To learn more about Bob’s work, visit BRC Imagination Arts Connect with him on LinkedIn
You can also follow BRC Imagination Arts on LinkedIn and Instagram, and find the book at deep-story.com.