Chapter 2
Immersionary Show Spaces

In the Arundel Mills mall outside Baltimore, Maryland, there is a new space for customers that is a little hard to describe, but it could be a model and a portent for the future. Part retail store, part branded environment, part classroom, part playroom, part product testing lab—Crayola Works might be confusing to a traditional marketer, but to customers it's just plain fun.

From outside, Crayola Works catches the eye with its bright blotches of playful color; inside it is like being in a crayon box—with rainbow colors in flashing lights and patterns on the floor. Transparent pillars are filled with colorful crayons and a black-and-white Volkswagen Beetle is available for kids to color on with markers. The space includes a retail store that sells everything from basic Crayola crayon boxes to arts and crafts, kits, and board games, and offers ongoing product demonstrations. But the other half of the 20,000 square-foot space is dedicated to a creativity studio where up to 200 children and adults can do arts-and-crafts projects.

Nancy DeBellis, Director of Retail Development for Binney & Smith, the makers of Crayola products, says that they want to use Crayola Works "to develop a tighter relationship with the people who buy and use our products, and to learn what they are looking for from our brand." They do that by offering an expanded range of products and by using the creativity studio as a learning lab for testing new products under development.

Figure 2-1. Crayola Works greets visitors with a colorful playground for the brand. Photo courtesy of Binney-Smith. Allan Holm Photography.

Zoogles, collectible plaster-cast characters that you paint, were being product-tested in the studio in late 2002 for release in March 2003. The Zoogles, whose characters each come with a distinct persona and biographical history, were available as a painting activity kit in the studio. A Crayola marketing team spent time with the kids and adults who were painting these special advance-release toys; they listened to customer questions, tested names for the characters, and fine-tuned the toys' instructions. "It was basically a 30-day customer focus group," says DeBellis, "which was an extraordinary opportunity."

Crayola Works is itself a testing ground—for multiple business models that the brand is considering deploying elsewhere. There is the retail store, of course. And the studio, whose admission price is the purchase of one activity. These activities change each month, with an average of 10 available at a time for a range of prices (from $7.99 to $29.99) and for a range of ages. Friday nights have seen 15-year-old boys custom-painting their soccer balls as preschoolers sat at the next table using color wands. School groups are booked every day (as well as church groups and scouts) for Curriculum Connections, where art teachers customize programs that tie art across the fields of science, geography, math, and language. Birthday parties have been particularly in demand, as has the Made By Me program, a sort of arts-and-crafts child-care option for the mall. For $30, parents with their shopping hands full can drop off children aged 5–12 for 90 minutes, during which the lucky kids have a snack and make four hands-on creative gifts for their grateful family.

Figure 2-2. Product playspace meets arts and crafts and kids' creativity inside the Creativity Studio. Photo courtesy of Binney-Smith. Allan Holm Photography.

Crayola Works is a new space and a new experiment. It benefits from an array of engaging ways to delight and learn from customers, and it enjoys a choice location from which to attract them. Located in one of the top four retail markets in the U.S., Arundel Mills provides strong local and tourist demographics and a crucial educational market as well. The relationships formed in the store and studio are continued when customers leave the space too, via an email newsletter. The subscribers who tested products still on the drawing board (like glow-in-the-dark Model Magic clay) receive follow-up offers to buy unique products made only for the store. Responses to exclusive offers have been as high as 40 percent.

The Crayola Works show is part of Crayola's strategy to control its brand destiny by moving from a product-only positioning to a positioning as an arts and crafts brand that offers creative experiences. They aim to focus on positive feelings adults have for the brand and getting them to pass that on to their kids, and to give kids new and different ways to express their creativity through the brand. Moreover, they want to pursue part of the brand's core mission, which is to keep creativity in schools in the face of widespread cuts in arts funding. These goals are ambitious, but by creating an experiential space that is both extremely fun and participatory, the Crayola brand has created a terrific show that looks poised to achieve them.

Immersionary Space as Show

When a space becomes show business, we call it immersionary (immersive + visionary). These environments create a show that completely immerses the customer in an experience of the brand, and offers a vision that links the brand to their own lifestyle and values.

Such experiences may be created inside retail stores, in nonretail play spaces, in branded destination experiences, or in brand museums or theme parks. In each, there is a unique opportunity to differentiate the brand, engage customers, and build brand relationships through an environment where customers can meet and interact with the brand on an ongoing basis.

The experience of an immersionary space lacks the sharp focus of a live show's dramatic performance. Participants tend to come and go, for longer or shorter visits, depending on their wants and needs. Each visitor's show overlaps with the others'. However, for building relationships, immersionary space shows have a particular advantage: they provide an ongoing live experience where companies can meet customers, and customers meet each other. Customers can come back to the show repeatedly, at their convenience, and can interact with the brand continuously.

The 1990s saw entries into creative retail space by a host of new players such as Nike, Disney, Warner Brothers, Nickelodeon, and the NBA. Many were extending their brands into merchandising for the first time. The mixed results proved that 3-D advertising in a showcase retail store is a tough proposition, and that themed merchandise in a themed environment is often not enough. What adds more value, and a higher ROI, is to provide a real experience, to make it a show—as we saw in The NBC Experience Store, which offers a mix of experiential retail and live interactions via its Theater and the linked Studio Tour.

The best shows created in customer spaces are hybrids that offer a range of interactions and value added and use their one-on-one experience to talk to customers. Like Crayola Works, these shows can be research and learning tools for companies: places to try out new merchandising ideas and get the kind of direct feedback that you can't get from selling products through other channels. Great immersionary space shows are highly participatory, even social environments.

Participatory shows need to understand that customers won't return unless you offer a variety of experiences or activities for them, accommodate their different needs, and continue to innovate. MRA International, which worked to develop the concept for Crayola Works, offers an apt set of guidelines for participatory show spaces:⁸

• Provide a mix of individual activity and group activity offerings (especially to appeal to weekday group visits such as school or tour groups).
• Provide both short and longer time-frame activities (for different types of visits and visitors with different attention spans).
• Provide guided and unguided activities.
• Provide a balance of sequential and product-oriented activities (e.g., making a toy bear) as well as nonsequential exploratory activities.
• Deliver both a fun experience and some take-away value (customers enjoy the process and they have something afterwards that encourages a return visit).
• Vary your menu of offerings regularly so no one—staff or customers—gets bored.
• Provide a mix of activities within spaces (e.g., kid-centered spaces need adult activities too, to keep the parents coming back, or even get them to come on their own).

Let's look at some more cases of shows that create an immersionary space and what lessons each can offer.

Interactive Retail Space Shows

In 1999, Sears decided to put on a show for its male customers interested in tools. Their advertising campaign for women ("Come see the soft side of Sears") had worked well, but Sears had a harder time getting men to make the trip to the mall to find out what Sears had to offer them.

They knew that a man's entry point to Sears is the tools department, and they wanted Sears to be branded as America's Best Tool Store. But they were hampered by customer perceptions that store personnel were not tool experts and by the misperception that Sears sold only its own tool brand, Craftsman—even though they sold other brands as well.

Rather than creating a new stand-alone show space, Sears invented what it dubbed Tool Territory, a playground for tool-loving men. This new show-within-a-store was tested in 13 stores in its first year, and by 2002 nearly half of 870 Sears nationwide had put on the show. The Territories are up to 10,000 square feet and offer row after row of power tools of every kind, each one powered up and ready to be picked up and tried. Browsing enthusiasts engage in small arms races over the voltage and power of handheld tools in a revamped product line that includes every major competitor brand, such as Makita, DeWalt, and Power Cable. A master craftsman is on hand, dressed in a black uniform with the Tool Territory logo and slogan, "Where Tools Rule." These craftsmen are genuine experts, with 10, 15, or 20 years' experience in the building or automotive industries. They instruct customers, answer questions, and demonstrate the latest in product innovations like strap wrenches, bolt-out tools, and reversing ratchet wrenches in a shop space called the What's New Center. The Tool Territory is open and visible to the rest of the store, and festooned with placards that shout out the mantras from its advertising: "18,000 tools in stock. Collect them all." "Finally, daycare at the mall for men." "The man who dies with the most tools wins." The show has allowed Sears to gain credibility by displaying a wider array of competitor brands, while using customer interactions to show off what it sees as Craftsman tools' competitive edge.

Its success has also been leveraged in nonparticipating Sears stores through an initiative known internally as Tool Territory Light, whereby lessons learned from the Territory are applied to marketing, merchandising, and pricing at other stores, minus the interactive space, experts, and product demonstrations. Three years into the program, the results are a testament to the power of show business in a retail space: consistent improvements in tool sales have been measured in both cases, but with a significant advantage in Tool Territory vs. the nonexperiential Tool Territory Light.

Figure 2-3. Sears's Tool Territory: he who dies with the most tools wins. Photo courtesy of Sears.

Sears's show offers an example of how you can build a show space within a larger store, and provides two important lessons. First, the right staff is essential to delivering an interactive customer experience and immersing your customer in the brand. Second, a hands-on learning environment can transform your relationship with your customers and dramatically increase their interest in and understanding of your products.

A company in a very different category, Apple Computers, is using a remarkably similar approach to immersionary space. Apple began launching its new interactive Apple Stores in 2001, opening 53 stores over two years in key locations around the U.S. The Apple Stores are different from any other computer stores you have ever seen. They offer a participatory branded environment for customers to learn more about the brand's products hands-on, with the assistance of expert guides and tutorials. The Apple Stores reflect the design savvy that the company is known for in its products. Hardwood floors, white walls, curved shapes, high ceilings, and subdued lighting give it the look of an art gallery or a trendy futuristic bar. Half of the retail space is dedicated to demo stations where visitors can explore and play with products, making iMovies, burning CDs with iTunes, and using digital cameras. In the back is the Genius Bar, where you can sidle up to a local guru and ask your most intractable Mac computer question. And in case you stump the genius, there's even a special red phone to call headquarters for the answer (a touch supposedly lifted from an old Batman episode). The show also includes a theater with a 10-foot HDTV screen for product demonstrations, movie-making contests for local kids, and workshops like the Made on a Mac talks where professional photographers, CPAs, and video editors show off the brilliant work they do on their Macs.

The stores are part of Apple's overall marketing strategy to expand its customer base by recruiting first-time users to the Macintosh platform. With a current market share of about 5 percent, Apple wants its stores to be an important strategy tool for reaching out to the other 95 percent who are currently not considering a Mac. The strategy starts with a plan to ambush these customers by building the stores where the target audience is already spending time. The Apple Stores then use interactive show business to show off the Mac as the hub of a digital lifestyle. Apple prides itself on having the best platform for connecting a home computer to digital cameras, camcorders, and MP3 players. Showing that to new customers (and getting them to reconsider the non-PC alternative) requires a new kind of customer experience: a place where customers can play with the coolest peripheral gadgets and interact with staff who can educate, entertain, and attract new Mac disciples. The place and the players need to be hip but friendly, and the whole experience fun.

With its Apple Stores, the company has used show business to enter the retail category for the first time. With only a few dozen Apple Stores planned, compared with 3000 other retail locations nationwide, the scale of the stores is limited, but Apple has said it hopes they will soon be profitable, beyond their advantage as a marketing tool. Although it would have been less costly to provide a one-on-one experience through traveling events like Intel's mobile messenger show, this approach wouldn't have created a show that could pay for itself. Given Apple's strong cash situation at the time, their bolder choice seems smart.

The Flagship Store as Show Business

Flagship stores sometimes attempt a kind of immersionary experience, but too often they're just the same-old retail in fancy dress. A few companies go beyond that to actually incorporate what we consider show business elements in a flagship store. A recent example is Prada.

Hoping to expand and strengthen its brand image, Prada has decided to complement its many small fashion boutiques with a series of super-sized stores in a few cities around the world. Building a show out of what Prada does best, they aim to extend the company's core competence in cutting-edge design and reflect it in the architecture of their new premier retail spaces. The New York superstore in SoHo was designed by world-famous architect Rem Koolhaas. The show was built to serve as a performance space for fashion events, as well as a store. The environment combines Koolhaas's high-concept design with hi-tech features like dressing rooms whose glass walls turn translucent with the push of a button. The spectacular glass elevator is designed to be completely transparent, without even any visible metal parts, just elegant sliding glass. Merchandise displays hang from ceiling grids, allowing for flexible redesign of their positioning above the beautiful pink resin shelves and marble floors. At the center of the store is "The Wave"—a central sloping set of broad steps that descends from ground floor to the lower level, and serves as either a dramatic display space for shoes or bleachers for a performance when the store hosts a fashion show.

Prada offers an unusual environment that immerses you in their brand. Though it remains to be seen what the benefits of this costly flagship store will be, the investment is a brand-building exercise, and certainly displays the brand in a mesmerizing way. But without a strong component of customer participation or learning, or customer interaction with staff, the spectacle of a flagship store may not deliver the depth of brand affiliation that show business makes possible, and thus may not provide the right experience.

Brand Museums: The World of Coca-Cola

Many show business spaces do not involve retail, however. Instead, the show is more like a museum or theme park about a company or brand. One such show is The World of Coca-Cola, located just three miles from Coke's headquarters in Atlanta.

Customers had been coming to Atlanta for years, asking Coke for some kind of tour or museum before the company decided on a plan and opened its show in 1990. "The aims," says Phil Mooney, Director of Coke's Archives Department, "were to help the city in its downtown revitalization, to be responsive and provide consumers something they said they wanted, and to make a landmark statement that, 'Atlanta is Coke's home. We've been here 100 years, and will be here for a long time more.' "

The show certainly is a landmark. Its entrance is presided over by an enormous suspended globe with a rotating neon Coke sign inside of it. Inside, the show business couldn't be better, as amusement and entertainment await in a world of Coke for visitors to explore. The immersionary environment is full of flashing videos, overlapping soundtracks, and sensory overload of interactive exhibits and video presentations. The galleries showcase the world's largest collection of Coke memorabilia and offer exhibits that trace the heritage of the 110-year-old company and its marketing. Visitors can watch vintage TV commercials, discover the evolution of Coke's packaging and vending (including the first soft-drink dispenser in outer space), and listen at a greatest-hits kiosk to advertising jingles sung by famous pop stars over the years. The Bottling Fantasy offers a mystifying show of zooming bottles on assembly lines that presents an aestheticized version of the bottling process: all machines, no people. Then there's the 1930s Barnes Soda Fountain, with a period jukebox of Coke songs and costumed staff playing the role of soda jerks who demonstrate how the drink used to be made. For a taste of something different, the popular Tastes of the World offers 18 thirst-quenching beverages from around the world made by Coke but unavailable in the U.S. (mango Fanta, anyone?).

The World of Coca-Cola is not afraid to be a little tacky in celebrating and encouraging its customers' zeal for the brand, either. Videos on display range from montages of global factories full of glistening bottles, to a faux-historical comic video, The Search for Refreshment with comedian Dom DeLouise, showing Socrates, Dr. Jekyll and others through the ages questing for the right beverage until Coke's miraculous discovery by Dr. John Pemberton in 1886. In the Take 5 history booths, the history of the United States is presented in five-year installments, each with a side note on the role of Coca-Cola in that period. The funniest show, though, is the futuristic soda fountain near the end: put your cup in place and an ultrasonic sensor triggers a series of sound effects and a stream of Coke that appears to bubble up through a column of flashing lights and leap in 20-foot arcs over your head before rippling down through a nozzle right into your cup. What show biz!

With a modest admission price of $6 for adults, The World of Coca-Cola is not intended as a revenue center. Nevertheless, the corporate museum, which is Atlanta's most popular indoor attraction, pulls in close to 1 million visitors a year, allowing it to recoup its substantial operating costs and clearly contributing to the city's tourism industry. The real success for Coke has been the brand experience provided for loyal customers and the museum's use as a public relations tool. The World of Coca-Cola has been featured on the History Channel and Food Network, during the Super Bowl and NASCAR events, and in NBC's live broadcasts of the Atlanta Olympics. It has been used for press conferences and photo ops, and has even been featured in the credits of local television newscasts.

Despite its successes, the company feels that even more could be done with a World of Coca-Cola. The exhibit space is fairly static, beyond changing the content of individual videos, and such. Because of a design choice to build the experience around a linear treatment of the brand's history, an issue began to arise by the mid-1990s of how the World of Coca-Cola could continue to evolve and follow the latest in the brand's history. Plans are now underway for the development of a second-generation brand destination in Atlanta, which will address these issues and provide an even greater experience.

Brand Destinations

As we have seen, immersionary space can create a destination for the brand instead of a store. General Mills offers families visiting the Mall of America a Cereal Adventure immersed in the brands of breakfast cereal that the company has made famous. For a modest entrance fee, families can take a break from the mall to explore the Trix Fruity Carnival, walk through the marshmallow maze of the Lucky Charms Magical Forest, or slide down a giant spoon into a bowl of Cheerios. Other exhibits let you explore how breakfast cereal is made as you climb on a tractor, operate the controls at a make-believe factory, and walk through a giant cooker. In the Wheaties Hall of Champions, you can look through sport lockers full of vintage Wheaties boxes, sports artifacts, and information on Wheaties athletic champions.

Even brands that are not linked to consumer products have decided that they want to create a show business space for their brand. ESPN is taking brand play to "x-tremes" with a new series of skate parks, located inside shopping malls, that promote interest in its X Games programming by transporting visitors into the exciting athletic atmosphere of the TV show. The X Games skate parks feature facilities for in-line skating, skateboarding, and stunt biking, with halfpipes of all sizes, ramps for the beginner to pro, and a kids section with less daunting ramps. The parks will host ESPN events and currently offer classes and equipment rentals as well as lounges, video game areas, and retail outlets with X Games branded merchandise.

Sport brands that develop show space have an advantage in linking their brands to customers' lifestyle and social community because they easily relate to fun and engaging group activities. In these brand spaces, companies may try to offer customers a Third Place, the sociological term for some place between work and home that creates a sense of community, as discussed in Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone. An ambitious show business destination of this type is currently being planned by the Dallas Cowboys as part of a proposed new stadium development for the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. The development, which would be anchored by a new stadium for the football team, would not only include new retail, dining, hospitality, and entertainment, but also a branded destination called Legend Square.

The idea of a destination experience for the Cowboys is appealing because of the strength of their brand (the biggest seller of sports merchandise in the U.S. and considered one of the top three sports brands in the world) and because the metroplex area lacks a significant "must-see" tourist destination for a city of its size. Legend Square would be a year-round place to experience the brand and celebrate both the Cowboys and a broader range of sports heroes. "We want to create a place where local, regional, and hopefully national heroes will be celebrated," says the Cowboys's Director of Stadium Development, Jud Heflin. "A place where other athletes will want to celebrate… and not just sports heroes, but other heroes as well. If you want to commemorate a firefighter or police officer or a local principal, this would be a place where they could be celebrated." Central to Legend Square would be the Dallas Cowboys Fieldhouse, which, instead of just offering a Hall of Fame, would provide a place where fans can participate in sports on a variety of courts and playing fields, in amateur leagues from lacrosse to flag football. Corporate challenge courses (middle managers climbing around on ropes) would allow for subsponsorships (e.g., the Ford Explorer Course) that would help link the Cowboys brand to a broader consumer lifestyle. Competitive sport experiences would be offered for youth, and adults could participate in branded leadership seminars like The Cowboy Way, or make use of the building's meeting facilities.

This show may sound like brand extension gone amok, but the Cowboys have a track record of success in the area. By partnering with experienced real estate developers, they have already created two hugely successful upscale housing developments in the area, branded by the team's owners, Jerry and Steven Jones, whose names are synonymous with the Cowboys thereabouts. They have also built one of the nation's top-ranked municipal golf courses, the Dallas Cowboys Golf Course, in Grape Vine, Texas. This is the only NFL-branded course in the country, with carts named after famous players, the Cowboys star on every tee, and a story from Cowboys legend to read at every hole. With a guarantee of traffic from the adjacent stadium, Legend Square could be a show that creates as well as celebrates legends.

Pure Playspace: When the Show Is Free

In what we call "customer playspace," there is no admission charge and often nothing for sale. These immersionary shows are rare, but they do exist. For customers, they are like a gift of pure play, an environment for interaction, fun, and learning through a brand—but no pressure to buy. For the business, the show can have rewards of its own.

PBS, the nonprofit public television producer, has recently announced plans to team up with the Mills Corporation (a developer of shopping malls) to create PBS Kids, a "themed play area" in malls nationwide, starting in Nashville. The play areas will feature popular PBS children's characters like Barney, Arthur, the Sesame Street characters, and the Teletubbies. They will include reading nooks, televisions with PBS programs, learn-and-play areas, Internet kiosks, and other displays. Events will include guest appearances by PBS stars as well as reading workshops and community events organized by local PBS affiliate stations.

Figure 2-4. Nothing for sale in a studio for discovering and exploring the Shiseido brand. Photo courtesy of Shiseido.

There will be some sales of PBS merchandise at the sites, but PBS insists that this will "not be a store" motivated by sales, but a free playspace for families, a destination designed to develop its brand. Most of PBS's reward for this civic-minded space-creation will come from licensing its characters to Mills. For the real estate developer, the project is an opportunity to build a free attraction that will draw a prime demographic group (education-conscious parents shopping with kids). That will raise the value of the retail space. Mills has pursued other creative partnerships as well (Crayola Works and the X Games parks are both in Mills malls), because they bring real value in a mall category dominated by shopping centers with nearly identical lists of chain stores.

Figure 2-5. Shiseido's show of hospitality: interactive technology, personal beauty consultants, and free facial massage. Photo courtesy of Shiseido.

Another version of a pure playspace opened in New York in 1999, put on by Shiseido, a market-leader for high-end cosmetics in Asia that is hoping to establish a stronger presence in the U.S. among trend-setting consumers. Their challenge was that their younger target segment was unfamiliar with the brand and perceived it as more "high end" than other similarly-priced competitors. Shiseido needed a new way to reach these customers and introduce them to the brand. So they created the Shiseido Studio.

At the Studio, customers are invited into a nonretail exploration space dedicated to beauty. Inside, they can play with and learn about Shiseido's entire line of beauty products. There are no pushy salespeople; visitors are greeted by a pressure-free environment and nonintrusive beauty consultants who are ready to answer questions and cater to their interests without thinking of commissions or sales.

Customers learn about Shiseido's 130-year history and its various product lines by inserting digital product cards into computer stations embedded in tabletops with translucent screens. Each catalog item is linked to related products with navigation maps, showing how products complement each other for optimal results. And if you're curious about the makeup but don't want to spoil the look you put on this morning, you can explore the Interactive Makeup station. It takes a digital picture and creates four different images of you with four possible makeup combinations. If you select one, the Navigator shows a video of how you could create that look and prints out information on the required products. Customers move between these technological consultants and the live beauty consultants on hand, testing out products and asking questions. They can also enjoy sample spa treatments like facial massages and sign up for free classes on skincare, makeup, and topics like "D-Stress Solutions" and "Fragrance, Experience, Meaning."

Some visitors are perplexed when they decide they're sold on the product and then discover that there's no cash register to accept their purchase. Instead, they are given a list of nearby locations where Shiseido is sold. The show at the Studio is all about engaging and luring the customer into the world of Shiseido. And the interaction and learning is mutual: customers have the option to register a customer profile and create a wish list. The resulting sales leads are linked with detailed profiles of customers' product interests based on their electronic explorations in the store. Shiseido uses this information in direct marketing that offers promotions tailored to specific product combinations customers have explored.

The nonretail show concept for the Studio came from a similar show called the Cosmetic Gardens in Japan. Starting in New York, the Studio has been replicated to 11 cities around the world. Almost 20,000 people visit the New York Studio each year. "Our goal is to educate people about the brand… the Studio is more about touching people, and building word of mouth," says Michelle Torio, the Studio's manager. "It ties to our corporate motto: teach others to live well and beautifully." Indeed.

Lessons Learned

Immersionary space shows offer a wide variety of models for creating fun, engaging, extraordinary experiences for customers. As we have seen in this chapter, they include the following types:

• Interactive retail space—like the Apple Stores—where customers creatively participate, test products, learn, and interact with company employees
• Show-within-a-store—like Sears's Tool Territory—where an interactive space is placed within a larger retail venue
• Flagship stores—like the Prada superstore in SoHo—where boundary-breaking environments immerse the visitor in a visionary world of the brand
• Brand destinations—like the World of Coca-Cola or the Dallas Cowboys Legends Square—where a brand can be leveraged into a non-retail experience such as a museum, theme park, or athletic course, that builds relationships with customers
• Pure playspace—like PBS Kids or Shiseido Studio—where nothing is for sale and customers are free to play, experiment, and learn through the show
• Hybrids of these types—like Crayola Works—where playspace, product testing, customer-employee interaction, and immersion in the brand all come together

Great immersionary show spaces create new worlds for customers to experience and explore. Most important, they provide a brand experience that can be repeated. Immersionary shows should:

• Create an environment that completely immerses the customer in a fun, surprising, and memorable experience of your brand while offering options for varied levels of participation to suit the customer.
• Enable interaction with the customer and among customers to provide one-on-one experiences that can shape customers' perceptions of the brand, and that can be used to gather information about customers' needs and desires.
• Encourage visitors to sign up for continuing information; the customers most interested by your show space are likely to be high-value customers.
• Be innovative and flexible enough to incorporate new experiences and changes in marketing strategy.
• Partner, if advantageous, with other brands that will extend the relevance of your own brand for customers, or bring expertise in a new area (golf courses, retail stores, etc.).

Show business doesn't just happen in live performances or immersionary spaces. Quirky and unusual kinds of show business are appearing everywhere in new media and in old media rediscovered. These shows use invented and reinvented media that don't fall neatly into any marketing category. In the next chapter we will see unusual product placement in movies, a swimming pool used as a billboard, sandals that can imprint a brand all over Miami Beach, and how sticking a bra into your annual report can get investors' attention.