When the Museum Comes to You

pic provided by Corning Glass Museum

As some of my previous posts shoudl have indicated, I'm a museum nerd. The ones that are not too far away I visit a few times a year. However, I've only been to Corning once on a school trip, and that's when I saw Corning Museum of Glass.

But the museum recently came to me, or at least a lot closer to home when it began its replication of a historic trip up the Hudson from Brooklyn with the GlassBarge. I found the demonstration intriguing enough to follow up on it as a marketing story by speaking to Rob Cassetti, the museum's senior director of creative strategy and audience engagement.

He spoke to me about how he conceived the idea for the GlassBarge as a combination of “pure mission” to educate people about glass “and pure marketing” to raise their interest in the museum.  Both objectives are served by delivering the experience of live glass blowing to audiences at various ports  from May through September.

Cassetti explained, that their “mobile glassblowing deployments” date back to 2001 and have extended through the country and even to Europe and as far as Australia. These demos have also appeared on cruises as a form of popular shipboard entertainment. Having realized that the glass demos had made it to NYC but not to the rest of the state which makes up a significant portion of their visitors, the museum resolved to reach out. The timing also fit the 150th anniversary of glassmaking arriving in Corning via boats and the Erie Canal Bicentennial.

I asked Cassetti what his goals are for the live campaign. He answered that one aspect would fall under branding, “this intangible of reputation building.”  But there is also the practical consideration of reaching its target market. He pointed out that the Hudson River stop are within 20 miles of 80% of New York State’s population. Accordingly, he anticipates more visits from those who got a sampling of the museum close to home.

Those visitors would likely include families with children who were particularly engaged by the demonstration. The presenters intentionally target that demographic, responding to their question. They also let them dictate if the glassblower should reveal the intended outcome or if they should guess what it is. At the show I attended, the kids opted to guess, and after some amusing wrong guesses, one realized that the blob of glass was being fashioned into a fish. Cassetti said that people don’t automatically include a museum of glass among attractions for children, but these live events show its kid-friendliness.

While organizations vying for the same audience don't usually cross-promote, they do when they are museums because each one offers something somewhat different. The GlassBarge also effectively promotes two other museums that are centered around water travel.The South Street Seaport Museum offered representatives to talk about about their historic tug that is used to move the GlassBarge along the waterways.The Lake Champlain Maritime Museum sent its people to show  the Lois McClure.

The Lois McClure is an authentic replica of a wooden canal boat from 1862
pic from Corning Museum of Glass

I got the back story to this from Cassetti. He explained that he was introduced to the people connected to the historical boat at a conference. He was told, "you absolutely have to talk to the people that do it," meaning navigate the Hudson and the Erie Canal. These people "knew how to do it," he explained, working off first-hand experience of "what would work and what wouldn't work." That deep expertise "was reason alone to do it." He considered it a "huge bonus that theirs is an 1862 canal boat from the period when glass making would have moved from Brooklyn to Corning" in 1868.

Bringing together history and craft is fitting for glass blowing, which is still done very much as it was over a hundred years ago. The mix of chemistry and artistry is what enables the essence of sand to be transformed into something beautiful that may have a particular function or just be admired as a work of art. Watching it take shape with the explanation of the necessity of a particular gets people excited about the process and the industry. And that's what museum experience is really about.