Immersive! Interactive! Multisensory! And Other Noise.
The art of non-speak
Introducing an immersive, interactive, multisensory entertainment experience unlike any other…
I just used ten words to tell you almost nothing.
Nothing specific. Nothing of substance. Nothing to give you any real idea what I’m talking about. Only the barest outlines of an allegedly entertaining experience that could be any one of a thousand other allegedly entertaining experiences.
I could be describing an escape room, a video game, a walkthrough art exhibit, or even a hike in the woods.
Yes, I rigged the sentence to make a point. I also could’ve pulled the same kind of language from countless real world sources. We see this kind of language everywhere. We use it all the time. Honestly, in our line of work, it’s hard to avoid.
The nature of noise
So much of the language we use every day to communicate with clients, guests, and colleagues has been overused, overloaded, and diluted to the point of near meaningless. Terms like “immersive” and “interactive” are so ubiquitous, they have turned into wallpaper most people barely notice.
When everybody is resorting to same limited vocabulary, how is anybody supposed to differentiate themselves or their ideas? In a world where everything is an immersive, interactive, multisensory experiential spectacle, do those words mean much of anything anymore? Or does it all just become more noise to filter out?
If we want to be heard, we need to understand the factors contributing to the noise overload in the first place.
Big ideas, small box
Let’s take a moment to acknowledge that selling a visitor experience of any kind is hard.
By “selling”, I’m talking about more than just marketing an experience to the public. I mean persuasively communicating a concept in any stage of the process.
Neither product nor service, an experience is difficult to fit into a neat box. No matter what kind of experience you’re offering, what you’re promising, in essence, is an enhanced slice of life. There’s an incredibly complex human dynamic at the heart of it. Boiling something that complex into succinct, compelling, and original language is always going to be a challenge.
So, we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s a circumstance that generates a lot of self-defeating noise.
The limits of language
The problem is not really with the words we’re (over-) using.
Terms like “immersive”, “interactive”, and “experience”—no matter how we may feel they’ve been abused—aren’t gratuitous buzzwords. They are pretty direct expressions of fundamental concepts.
If anything, these words have have fallen victim to their own usefulness. We keep returning to them because:
a) they give us a simple way to express some complex intangibles, and…
b) language doesn’t offer a lot in the way of effective alternatives.
One of the problems with abstract words is that they contain multitudes. It’s not that the concept it stands for is meaningless; it’s that it contains too much potential meaning.
We can probably all agree that in most contexts “love” is a positive thing. Without context, however, the word “love” is just a vague nod toward a vast territory. Much of the word’s power comes from the meaning surrounding it.
Over time, the words we use habitually become convenient shorthand for complex ideas. The problem arises when the words themselves become substitutes for engaging with the complexity. The shorthand takes the place of exploring the territory behind the word. We start treating things like “immersion” as a known quantity, as settled knowledge, rather than an open question.
Within organizations and between businesses, shorthand can turn big areas of inquiry into items on a menu. We treat the labels as readymade answers, as commodities.
The terminology begins to dictate the ideas. Language ends up getting in the way of meaning.
The success bias
Nothing sells like success. Until it doesn’t anymore, that is.
As is true of any industry, the visitor experience industry has a habit of emulating successful established models. It takes a lot of money to make money in this business. It’s no wonder owners and organizations want to reduce risk by replicating what has worked in the past.
Not only do we know that X succeeded before, we can also grasp what it is. Let’s do another one of those.
I’m not just talking about cynical cash-grab enterprises trying to ride the coattails of someone else’s success—although those certainly contribute to the noise. An innate human bias towards prior success often leads us to misunderstand the real reasons for success in the first place. It can also insidiously limit our sense of what is possible. Without realizing it, we define the world in terms of what we’ve already seen.
It’s the kind of thinking that turns the industry into a creative echo chamber. It also increases the tendency to place the wrong emphasis on features like immersion, interactivity, and multisensory experience, treating them as boxes that can be checked. Trying to reverse-engineer previous success inevitably results in diminished returns.
WHAT ARE WE CHASING?
Cutting through the noise is not about trying to avoid these words altogether.
What we need to recognize that immersive, interactive, and multisensory experience are not novel selling points. They are dimensions of the visitor experience, not the experience itself. They are facets of story-telling, they aren’t story itself.
The question we should be asking is: What it is it we’re really chasing when we talk about immersive, interactive, multisensory experiences? The ideas behind the words are still attractive, powerful ones, even if the words themselves have been sapped of much of their power.
When we think about it, though, the qualities we’re describing are also present in ordinary everyday life. Shopping in the produce aisle of your supermarket is an immersive, interactive, multisensory experience, even if no one is going to describe it as “entertainment.”
The Heart Of the Matter
Humans hunger for crafted experiences that more closely replicate the feel of real life. We also want something different from ordinary life. We want experiences that more fully engage us, mind, body, and spirit. We crave what the psychologist Abraham Maslow described as peak experience, “moments of highest happiness and fulfillment.”
So, the ideal of the visitor experience is to deliver a set of heightened circumstances that is designed to make us feel more alive. What really drives the success of an experience is the emotional and intellectual substance—meaning, theme, identity, world-building, story. Something we want to get closer to.
We don’t relate emotionally to the concepts of immersion or interactivity. They need to be in service of something we have a reason to care about.
Of course, it’s far easier to talk about features than it is to condense the emotional core of an experience into a pithy statement. Hence, the reason why the world is filled with so much generic noise.
The key is finding the human heart inside what we do and defining what sets it apart. What are the points of emotional connection that can’t be found elsewhere? Invariably, what people are drawn to the most are meaningful points of differentiation.
Your voice will carry farther when you find something unique and authentic to say.