The experience of an international icon

Authors: Juriaan van Waalwijk and Moji Shahvali lecture and research at Academy for Leisure & Events at Breda University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. Juriaan focuses on the power of storytelling in experience design and Moji is interested in studying and designing leisure experiences for more and better social interactions. 

Born in Brabant in the Netherlands and grown to be an international art icon, Vincent van Gogh is celebrated all around the world; his paintings and his life are seen as a source of inspiration for all ages. Nowhere else can you get this close to Vincent as in the small village of Nuenen where one can literally walk in his footsteps. Here, the Van Gogh Village Nuenen Foundation works hard to acknowledge and attractively display the important Nuenen period of the legend to all national and international visitors, while also contributing to the leisure economy of the region. While the indoor museum does not showcase any of Vincent’s original paintings, it beautifully portrays his life in Nuenen in terms of his interactions with his parents, his love, and the residents of the village, leading up to his first masterpiece The Potato Eaters. 

The stories of the different locations
Over 90% of museum visitors generally visit both the indoor museum and the surrounding village of Nuenen with a tour guide. The tour includes over 20 locations, some of which show the exact views and scenes that Vincent carefully portrayed in his paintings, such as the actual church Vincent painted and took to his mother when she was too sick to go to church herself. Other meaningful locations to Vincent include the house where he used to live with his parents for several years in the late 19th century, and the house of his neighbour Margot with whom he fell in love. The volunteer guides, with great passion, artfully narrate the tales of Vincent’s struggle to balance a difficult family and romantic life with his intense dedication to work, which sometimes intrigued the local community and was at other times frowned upon, because of how he looked and what he portrayed. 

Our research set-up
To better understand how visitors experience the indoor museum and the guided tour of the village, we conducted research in 2019, and again in 2023 after the museum underwent a large-scale renovation. This project was supported by the Centre of Expertise in Leisure, Tourism and Hospitality with the goal of making scientific research applicable and attainable for the industry. In each round, a group of tourism and leisure students were invited to Nuenen as research participants. In the more recent round of data collection, 40 students participated, aged between 20 and 30, originally coming from the Netherlands and 16 other countries. None of them had visited the previous museum set-up in Nuenen, although two-thirds had visited at least one other Vincent-centred attraction or had looked up information on Vincent and his life before the visit. During their visit, research participants were carefully tracked with Bluetooth beacons (indoors) and GPS tracking (outdoors), while wearing wristbands that measured their level of emotional engagement in real time. They toured the museum and village and also gave feedback on their experience using questionnaires before and after the visit. This all provided valuable information for the redesign and marketing of the museum. 

Emotions during the visit
When visitors were asked about the details of their experience and how the visit was perceived, emotions seemed to play a big role with three-quarters of all participants being emotionally moved by the visit to some extent. When asked as to what exactly had touched them emotionally, several visitors mentioned the films played in the museum and how “[it] gave me a clear image [of] how things were in the past and I could totally imagine myself sitting there”. This phenomenon of ’imagining being at the scene’ is referred to as ’narrative transportation’ and was specifically measured in our study using six separate items. In museums, different storytelling techniques are used in films or guided tours as a way to invoke narrative transportation and emotional responses in visitors. One visitor illustrated this by noting: “The part when the guide talked about Van Gogh’s lover, how they used to take walks, and how she tried to end her life; that story was beautiful yet tragic.”  In short, the data revealed that visitors experienced a spectrum of intense emotions during their visit - mostly positive but also negative ones - which are likely to leave a lasting impression and word-of-mouth. 

Memorable moments
Asking about ’memories’ rather than emotions brought to light various aspects that can be creatively incorporated into the museum design. The open answers to the question: “What elements of the museum visit do you remember the most?” notably pointed to the interactive elements during the visit, especially the interactive installation called ’the light lab’ and one respondent mentioned how “the photobooth made me happy with my fellow classmates” describing a photo opportunity where visitors can sit around a dining table and act out Vincent van Gogh’s first masterpiece.

Meaningful experiences
Narrative transportation was found to also have a significant moderate relationship with how meaningful respondents found the visit to be. Meaning generally results from stories and elements that upon reflection bring new insights to people relevant to their everyday lives. As one respondent mentioned: “The house of Margo, the story behind her and Vincent, it was all relatable. Even today, people’s love choices are influenced by public opinion”. A significantly strong positive correlation was also detected between meaningfulness and how people rated the NPS score question - an industry standard measure of how an organisation is doing - hinting at how storytelling can be used for reaching various organisational goals. Moreover, the interviews consistently highlighted a concept known as ’self-expansion’, which gauges personal growth through new, exciting, interesting, and sometimes challenging experiences. This also showed a strong correlation with how meaningful they found the visit to be.

Connecting with the host community
Up to this point we found scientific evidence that the museum is successfully providing experiences that many people would hope and expect from a museum of this calibre. However, there was another component of such leisure activities that we paid particular attention to in our research. That concerns the quality of human connections during and after the experience. Social interactions are a critical component that determines whether an experience is found to be good or not, especially for international visitors on holiday. Connections that a museum visit can facilitate among visitors themselves but also with the host community, in this case the residents of Nuenen, can make a trip to the Netherlands much more special. We therefore inquired, both prior to and after their visit, about the extent of their connection with the residents of Nuenen. We also measured the extent of their connection with their fellow students (also visiting the museum), using overlapping circles. The results showed that, on average, students felt only a little more connected to other students, after the visit. Interestingly though, there was a sharp increase in how much more connected they felt to the residents of Nuenen, a location they had never visited before. Even more interesting, as seen in Figure 1, we found a strong association between how connected respondents felt to the residents of Nuenen as a result of their visit, and their reported likeliness to revisit the museum, at least in the small sample we had. 

This article was published in Uncover Magazine - Internationalisation. You can read the complete magazine via this link.