• Lessons from the past.

    Posted on September 24th, 2008 by and currently 3 commenting.

    Just got a an interesting email from my friend (and Brains on Fire’s founder), Mike Goot:

    “I just finished reading a fascinating account of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, called The Devil in the White City. In it, Frederick Law Olmsted, landscape architect for the Exposition (who also designed New York’s Central Park and all the gardens at The Biltmore Estate in Asheville), sent the following note to Daniel Burnham, lead architect, advising him on how to boost the Fair’s attendance, which initially was well below their expectations:

    It was critical, he argued, that the organizers concentrate not on promotional schemes, but on making improvements of a kind most likely to enhance the stories fairgoers took back to their hometowns. “This is the advertising now most important to be developed; that of high-strung contagious enthusiasm, growing from actual excellence: the question not being whether people shall be satisfied, but how much they shall be carried away with admiration, and infect others by their unexpected enjoyment of what they have found.”

    Amen, Brother Olmsted.

  • http://www.catchyourlimit.com Jeff

    What a quote…I’m thinking WOMMA should put him in the WOMMA Hall of Fame.

  • http://SwampFox.ws John Warner

    Amen

  • http://cbpotts.livejournal.com Cindy

    The Devil in the White City is an absolutely magnificent book to read from a marketing perspective: not only from the viewpoint of Olmstead, here, but also the incredible competition to get the design gig in the first place. There’s also a serial killer in there, and let me tell you, I would have paid a lot more attention in college had my textbooks had murder mysteries woven in.

    Well worth reading: it’s slow going in parts, but at the end you’ll be glad you read it.