Brand Lands, Hot Spots & Cool Spaces: Welcome to the Third Place and the Total Marketing Experience

Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended, especially for marketing professionals
Review: Expert marketer, trend scout and specialist in mood management for public spaces Christian Mikunda presents Brand Lands, Hot Spots, & Cool Spaces, an insider's guide to how marketers successfully connect an emotional bond with the customer, placing him or her in the right mood to attract sales, and embellishing public spaces in such a manner that they become locations other than home and work that customers wish to visit regularly. From concept stores and design malls to lobbies and lounges, urban entertainment centers, fairs and expos, and much more, public spaces of all kinds draw upon the fundamental principles that Mikunda clearly delineates to better set their customers at ease and entice them into returning again and again. Highly recommended, especially for marketing professionals seeking to hone the attractiveness of their given projects.


Rating:
Summary: Not just for Marketing Types
Review: This book is recommended for anyone working in a traditional "third space" such as a library or a museum, anyone who uses libraries, or anyone who likes libraries but spends more time at Barnes and Noble.

The author, Christian Mikunda, suggests that "the experience society has grown up" and that we members of this society look for a combination of "entertainment with big, true feelings, with genuine materials and high-quality design, and help with our problems in everyday life."

As I read, it struck me this could be a description of some of the more architecturally spectacular libraries that have been built in the past few years: the main branches of Seattle Public Library, Salt Lake City Library, and the Vancouver Public Library in British Columbia (the latter two designed by Moshe Safdie) to name only a few. I've heard people express puzzlement about these buildings in an age when the Web has become a replacement for many, for a visit or a call to the library. Why, they ask, would these edifices be built?

William Dietrich in an April 25, 2004 article in Pacific Northwest, the magazine of The Seattle Times newspaper, wrote: "Above all, the [Seattle Public] library is designed to be inviting and intuitive to people who want to find a book. Designers calculated that the downtown Barnes & Noble bookstore had 40 times the people traffic, per square foot, as the old library. Why? What was the public sector doing wrong that the private sector is doing right?"

Mikunda provides an answer. He begins his introduction with a description of what a visitor to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice might do: have a look at the paintings and sculpture, go to the museum store, and have a coffee in the museum restaurant, all the time enjoying the particular ambiance of the location, above the Grande Canal.He describes the experience as being one of a place where one temporarily feels at home, that is emotionally powerful and allows visitors to recharge themselves. The museum is, he declares, a Third Place, one of three "staged habitats" (the others are Home and Work). Malls, theme restaurants, concept stores are all staged habitats too.

So, I think that this trend of building and redesigning libraries to be impressive architecturally is a response to the need people have to spend their leisure time in staged habitats and be entertained at the same time they accomplish something--whether it's browsing books in a library or a bookstore. More people responsible for library and museum spaces should read this book, along with "Better Together: Restoring the American Community."

As Putnam and Feldstein say in "Better Together" "Death-of-the-library scenarios define libraries as information repositories. If they were no more than that, then their eventual displacement by more convenient repositories would make perfect sense. But the library is a gathering place too [...] People may go to the library looking mainly for information, but they find each other there."

Mikunda's book will give you a different perspective on all kinds of staged habitats.