Pee #3 - PLACE

So what do I mean by Place? Consider the previous analogy, where Purpose is potency and Passion is romance. After all this sweaty-palms stuff, what do you have left?
For a lot of people, the answer is a resounding "nothing." But for others, this answer is, well, something--a relationship. It usually isn't what you'd expect. Maybe it's a lifetime of resentment and misery, or a quiet sort of contentment. For a lucky few, it's a neverending good time.
Inevitably, if there is a "relationship," the people involved find their place. In much the same way, great attractions find their Place too.
Place isn't about location, though location certainly plays a role. Take Rock City, for example. Located in Chattanooga, TN, this is one of those quintessential American establishments, a mom-and-pop roadside attraction that opened in 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression.

Rock City: High Atop Lookout Mountain

Back in its early days, Rock City was a scenic stop that included a hike to the top of Lookout Mountain, where Frieda Carter (wife of Garnet Carter, inventor of Tom Thumb Golf) had created a bucolic trek through natural and contrived rock formations. From this vantage point visitors could purportedly "see seven states."

Blame Global Warming...the most I've ever seen is four!

Rock City is picturesque, idiosyncratic, and a work of love. But plenty of attractions have the same attributes. What sets Rock City apart--what gives it Place--is the way it has positioned itself as this quirky, curious stop along I-75. It seems like everyone has heard of it. For some reason Rock City rises above other highway diversions.
Why? It's hard to tell. Certainly part of it is attributable to the 70-year old campaign of painting barns across the USA with the famous "See Rock City" slogan. But as importantly, Rock City delivered the goods for all those people who ventures from the Interstate...the anxious moms, the weary dads, all those high-strung kids who had been pent up in cars for hours on end, even the grandmas looking for birdfeeders and souvenir spoons.

One of the most successful marketing campaigns: The Rock City Barn!

What does it deliver? Rock City is a sweet, almost anachronistic oasis from the stress of highway travel. As it has grown, its retained its eccentricity. Nestled among Frieda's original rock garden are caverns with weird 50's-era day-glo storybook scenes. Ladies dressed like Mother Goose greet kids and a robot gnome acts as a barker at the entrance. For the Northerners making the pilgrimage to (or from) Orlando, this is the anti-Disney, devoid of corporate artifice and brand promotion. It just feels honest.

That's the Place that Rock City occupies. It's not just that it's a welcome respite from the noise. Rock City is trusted and it delivers. Folks know going in that this place has served generations of travelers just like them.

Circling back on the "Pee #1 -Purpose" post, we have Disneyland. You can argue that the Purpose of this attraction has drifted from Walt's original family park vision and today is something less certain, less definable. To many, Disneyland appears to have consciously violated its founding principle, adding big-budget thrill rides that deliberately split the family, forcing short guests, frail guests, and timid guests into backwater attractions.

Disneyland's Grad Nite--a tame but non-family affair--appeared in 1961.

Though some folks may think that such criticism is unfair, Disneyland's Purpose isn't entirely obvious. That said, Disneyland's PLACE is cemented. It is this legacy attraction. It has entertained millions of people for almost six decades. It is safe. It is all-American. For many families with kids, it is a rite of passage. For locals, it is almost like a neighborhood attraction, a place to go with friends or on a date. For people around the world, Disneyland is a place they trust (even if they don't trust the country it is located in), a place where they expect to be entertained in ways no one else can. Disneyland is an American landmark.

Place is about the relationship an attraction has with its audience. A Great Attraction successfully defines that relationship and in the process creates its Place.

Many attractions fail because the relationship they set out to create never takes hold. Like some lovelorn teenager, their efforts go unacknowledged.

Other attractions, with a history of success and an established Place, attempt to redefine the relationship, upping the ante, showing up one afternoon with a toothbrush and asking for a key to their girlfriend's apartment.

Sometimes this works, as it did when Walt Disney World added its EPCOT Center in 1982, hoping and praying that guests would be hungry for another day of Disney theme park-ing. That gamble resulted in the Mouse's Florida property becoming a multi-day destination in the minds of folks who otherwise considered the Magic Kingdom a drop-in-for-a-day park.

It seems that just as often, an attempt to redefine Place is refused by the audience. Disney's attempt to repeat its Florida success with the addition of Disney's California Adventure is an easy example. But it can certainly happen on a more local scale.

Consider COSI from "Pee#2 - Passion." This was a joint that was loved in its community. But a high-profile move into a colossal Arata Isozaki building, a completely new collection of whiz-bang exhibits, and (perhaps most importantly) a 60% increase in admission costs resulted in a huge backlash. The folks that COSI had established a relationship with didn't know what to expect from this new thing. It took COSI the better part of a decade to recast that relationship with a newfound commitment to partnerships with local and regional organizations who share a common purpose.

Establishing an attraction's Place is not easy, but it is essential to Greatness. Once that Place is found, it can still be bobbled and lost.

Pee #2 - PASSION

To paraphrase Clara Peller: Where's the Passion?

If Purpose = attraction potency, then Passion is attraction romance. It is all the heady stuff that comes with young love. It's buying flowers and sending notes. It's thoughtful little gifts left on the car seat and playful little nibbles on the ear. It's inside jokes. It's ironing a blouse when no one asked you to.

What's Passion? It's what happens when the people responsible for an attraction sincerely care about what they are creating. You could say they've fallen in love with it, or you could say they've been drinking the Kool-Aid.

A few important things about Passion:

1. It can happen anywhere. Passion can happen in design. It can happen in operations. It can happen at the top of the organization or it can be a grass-roots thing that emerges at the most junior positions.

2. Passion can work miracles. It can make meager budgets seem big. It can make impossible timelines work.

When you consider what the WED folks were able to accomplish in the 1950's and 1960's, well, let's just say its insane by today's standards. Timelines were incredibly compressed. Staff was small, especially the core team. But incredible things happened because people cared. Consider It's a Small World and the work involved. Not just design but translating that to set fabricators, general contractors, robot-builders, lighting guys. Add in things like songwriting and audio production for this whole mess. And a new ride system.

Forget the tired "jokes" about the song, you'd be proud to have created a legacy attraction like It's a Small World.

It's a Small World was built in one year, from concept to opening. This accomplishment is a testament to the prowess of the Disney organization. But the real take-away is the result: It's a Small World remains one of the most pure, most resonant theme park attractions ever. The people who created it had passion.

3. Passion is contagious. It can spread within an organization. This happens when an individual or a group brings an energy to a new project. It can also happen when someone in operations demonstrates that they care and shows their colleagues the results of this kind of attention.

Passion can also "infect" the audience. One of the best examples of this is happening now at Holiday World in Santa Claus, IN. This tiny little park has created a buzz for itself by adding great attractions, maintaining a clean-as-a-whistle operation, and making the place a value for consumers. It is clear that the Koch family and the folks they employ really have a passion for what they do. And in the past eight years or so, the audience has caught on. I first heard about Holiday World through word-of-mouth, from someone who went and just fell in love--not from some marketing machine.

Zat you, Santa Claus?

4. Passion forgives a lot of mistakes. When an attraction is lavished with attention and caring, folks give the little gaps and edges a pass.

One of the clunkiest attractions I ever knew was the original Center of Science & Industry--COSI--in Columbus, Ohio. It was this weird thing that had crammed its way into an abandoned county building. It opened in the mid sixties and over the next four decades collected the most random exhibits, from see-thru German women to walk-thru exhibits from the 1964 World's Fair to a freakish band of half-scaled Presidents of the United States to a display of every Cracker Jack toy EVER MADE. Oh yeah, they had a troupe of rats who played basketball also.

COSI: This is the future, at least as it looked in Ohio in the 1970's

It was cluttered and disjointed. Show quality was all over the map. Wayfinding was a mess and the adolescent kids in the audience always smelled like they needed deodorant. But you knew the people who were running this place cared. There were shows all the time. There was always something new (not always fresh) being added. The place was a great success in its original, pre-1999 form.

5. Passion matters to guests. This is the key thing to remember. Guests can smell passion and, as importantly, they know when planners, designers, and operators are just phoning it in. The gawd-awful reaction to Disney's California Adventure is in part because the people visiting can tell that this is not the loved-on Disney they expect but an off-the-shelf amusement park laid out by mall developers. I never visited the failed Wild West World in Kansas but its no surprise that place tanked. Just looking at the images the place screamed "County fair rides at theme park prices."

So, if Passion is so darn important, why don't the people that are investing millions of dollars on attractions "get it" and insist on it, just like they insist on ADA compliance and toilet seats? My answer: you can't insist on Passion. You only get that from certain folks and, even then, only when they can really feel it for the job they're working.

Today, you go to Orlando, or Southern California, and you'll find that demand for service employees is pulling resources like taffy. The volume of new attractions being developed internationally is doing the same thing with designers and engineers. Passion--where it exists--is being stretched thin. Toss in the fact that some things are really just hard to care about (you can only design so many attractions about XYZ characters, you can only bang the corporate gong so often before you go into a mild coma) and it is no wonder that so many projects are delivered stillborn.

Passion has never been easy. It's sometimes cheap. But if you can find it, you should sure as hell do whatever you can to keep from losing it.

PEE #1 - PURPOSE

So, getting into the Three Pee's of Great Attractions, we'll start with what may be the most obvious Pee: Purpose.

It seems natural that all attractions have a purpose of some kind. On a cynical level, the purpose of many attractions is to separate guests from their money.

But that's not what we're talking about when we say "purpose." We are asking whether an attraction has a reason for being. Is that reason something that audiences sense? Does it really matter to folks that this place exists?

When attractions have Purpose, it's an energy, a form of potency. It's Attraction Viagara. These places are going somewhere.

Places like the British Museum have this kind of Purpose. At the British Museum, people experience Great Works collected from all around the world. The art here spans thousands of years and encompasses sexy things like Egyptian statuary and enormous pieces of Greek architecture. It is all real and all right there. You're not supposed to touch the stuff (some do) but you can examine things down to the pock mark. It can be seen from all sides. It can be smelled. It is a heady and a huge experience.

Artifacts like this Moai are presented at the British Museum, giving locals a reason to stay out of pubs.

Disneyland certainly had Purpose when it opened. Walt Disney conceived this park in the midst of America's great suburbanization. This was a place where families could have fun together. Disneyland embodied the aspirations of middle America circa 1955. Visiting the park became a sort of pilgrimage.

(Walt's original vision behind Disneyland is less central to the park today and its purpose is less focused. Corporate Disney wants to suggest that this is a wholesome fun park that is uniquely able to dispense "magic." For many folks, the park has taken on a more vague, nostalgia-influenced role. We will talk about this more when we get to PEE #3-PLACE)

Disneyland's purpose came from Walt Disney's convictions in what a theme park could be. For the first four years, there were no thrill rides due to concerns that many adults wouldn't be interested.

Why is Purpose important? Well, look at some of the places that seemingly lack a sense of purpose.

When Planet Hollywood debuted in New York in 1991 and began to deliberately open locations in destinations like Beverly Hills, this was a brand that felt like it had purpose. "Real" movie artifacts were on display and real movie stars visited and owned the joints. You could find them in cool destinations all over the world.  It felt like each of these places were special, each one existed as a unique Hollywood oasis created so that regular folks could step into that exclusive world. Joe Sixpack from Columbus, Ohio would brag to his pals that he'd visited the Planet Hollywood in Miami (the t-shirt was proof).

But expanding into a mall in Joe Sixpack's midwestern town was not the way to remain special. As Planet Hollywood grew, oversaturation eroded what guests percieved as its Purpose. Today, Planet Hollywood has gone through two bankruptcies and is just a big Johnny Rockets with rubber Schwarzenegger props.

Planet Hollywood Casino: Why does the world need one of these?

The same thing happened with the entire Six Flag's Worlds of Adventure fiasco. For years, two really special parks--Sea World and Geauga Lake--existed on the same little lake in Northeast Ohio. Sea World, in fact, was a huge success, much better received than its cousin that opened in Orlando a year later.

Sea World works because there is a palpable sense of Purpose behind the place. That was obliterated when Six Flags bought that marine park and merged the two properties into one giant thing. No more was there a modest little amusement park across the lake from a special little sea life park. Now, there was this behemoth that sounded like it belonged in Orlando and could never really explain what kind of animal it wanted to be. Six Flags couldn't make sense of it. Neither could Cedar Fair. After stumbling badly, the park was closed down, parts were sold off, and now exists as just another water park.

Anyone else remember when the Justice League was at Sea World Ohio?

Purpose matters. It's how guests understand what an attraction "does." When there is no apparent Purpose, the attraction just goes limp in the public's mind. Purpose is attraction Viagra.

The Three Pee's of Great Attractions - Pt. 1 of 4

Who's to say what makes a Great Attraction? Well, this is the Internet, so anyone can say anything they want...

So, with that, Aracuanbird presents: The Three Pee's of Great Attractions.

But first, let's clarify what we mean by "attraction." Does this cover themed attractions, like parks? Why yes it does! But it also includes any place that is both a diversion and a physical place. Attractions are places you go to that provide experiences that are different to regular life.  They are real, dimensional entertainment...entertainment being anything a person decides to do with their time that isn't about paying the bills. 

With that in mind, attractions can be museums, zoos, hotels, restaurants. For some people, the airport may be an attraction. For others, it's a truck stop (I know a great TA on I-75 south of Cincinnati).

Mount Rushmore is an attraction!

With that in mind...The Three Pees of Great Attractions:

1. PURPOSE
2. PASSION
3. PLACE

Now...what do we mean by each of these Pees? Check back later to find out!