Each month ‘Insights in Action’ discusses how research and insight has made a commercial or societal difference and what you can learn from it. This month ‘Insights in Action’ focuses on Research World’s wider July theme of how academic and commercial research units work together.
The Context
The Royal Academy (The RA) is a British art gallery. Its Summer Exhibition dates back to 1769 and in 2015 attracted 194,000 visitors – 20% of The RA’s annual footfall. Consequently, The Summer Exhibition delivers significant income for The RA. This income comes from both the sales of tickets and art itself. Despite the large visitor footfall, The Summer Exhibition hadn’t embraced changes in culture and technology in the same way as competing art exhibitions.
The RA wanted to use research to overcome their inertia towards cultural and technological change and think about The Summer Exhibition more commercially. However, researching art consumption is complex. It requires non-interventionist research so as not to disrupt visitor’s experience. This means researchers can’t ask questions to visitors. Not being able to ask questions – the key tool of researchers – posed a significant challenge. To overcome this challenge, The RA combined academic and commercial research by collaborating with the London School of Economics and Northstar.
The Insight
This academic-commercial collaboration spawned an approach known as micro-anthropology. This involved:
- Observing hundreds of visitor’s behaviours at specific touchpoints at The Summer Exhibition in a discreet, unobtrusive way
- 3-question-conversations that asked: how was your experience? Why did you visit The Summer Exhibition? Where have you visited from? These were asked as a person was leaving The Summer Exhibition
- Photographing visitors observing art in The Summer Exhibition
This approach generated 4 key insights:
- The Summer Exhibition had too much art and not enough curation. This meant visitors often walked past walls which had too much art on them
- Families accounted for a large portion of visitors to The Summer Exhibition – specifically mothers and daughters
- Visitors want to digitally engage with art before, during and after visiting The Summer Exhibition
- The pricing of art had to be clearer. The current communication of price meant comparing prices – and therefore deciding whether to buy or not – was hard to understand
The Insight Activation
Each of these insights were activated against:
Insight: The Summer Exhibition had too much art and not enough curation
Activation: The amount of art on display was reduced by 15%. A huge decision for The RA given they previously selected 1,000 pieces of art from 10’000 applicants
Insight: Families accounted for a large portion of visitors
Activation: Communications now focused on specific typologies – including families
Insight: Visitors want to digitally engage with art before, during and after their visit
Activation: The Summer Exhibition website was redeveloped and had a smartphone app developed for it
Insight: The pricing of art had to be clearer
Activation: The redeveloped website and new app included clearer pricing information
The Impact
Despite reducing the amount of art on display, the Summer Exhibition increased visitor footfall by 30% and increased art sales by £1mn.
The Learnings
Too often commercial researchers don’t look at methodological fundamentals and focus on the latest technology. However, collaborating with academic research units can improve commercial researchers’ methodological skills. And, despite stereotypes, academic research skills can be applied commercially. Similarly, academic researchers can make their skills more agile and applicable by working in a commercial environment. Resultantly, when the academic and commercial research combine, both fields learn and can produce effective research that has a demonstrable impact.
