Location-based entertainment facilities (LBEs) often compare themselves to the competition down the road and worry, “Is my facility better than theirs? Is my entertainment better? Am I competitively priced?” etc.
Well, those other bricks-and-mortar LBEs are not the only competition. How about electronics, whether it’s the digital worlds we can enjoy at home including video game consoles, television or the Internet? In fact, electronic entertainment is not longer limited to the home. We now enjoy it on our many mobile devices (watch where you’re walking!).
Compared to electronic competition, is your LBE worth the time, cost and hassle of visiting? Is it compelling enough to get people to leave their homes, take time to travel there, spend their limited and precious leisure time and disposable incomes? Think about a family with children. It takes a lot of effort to round them all up, get them dressed, load them in the car, fight traffic and find a place to park. So we don’t only have the issue how your LBE compares with the expenditure of disposable time and money, but now there’s also added effort.
If you really want to sharpen your act, stop worrying about comparing your LBE to every possible competition you can imagine and start comparing your LBE to nothing, to just doing nothing. Is it really worth the hassle, the risk, the time, and the money? If not, if it isn’t that compelling of an experience, maybe you haven’t yet found the winning formula.
About Randy White
Randy White is CEO and co-founder of the White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group. The 31-year-old company, with offices in Kansas City, Missouri, has worked for over 600 clients in 37 countries throughout the world. Projects the company has designed and produced have won seventeen 1st place awards. Randy is considered to be one of the world's foremost authorities on feasibility, brand development, design and production of leisure experience destinations including entertainment, eatertainment, edutainment, agritainment/agritourism, play and leisure facilities.
Randy was featured on the Food Network's Unwrapped television show as an eatertainment expert, quoted as an entertainment/edutainment center expert in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times and Time magazine and received recognition for family-friendly designs by Pizza Today magazine. One of the company's projects was featured as an example of an edutainment project in the book The Experience Economy. Numerous national newspapers have interviewed him as an expert on shopping center and mall entertainment and retail-tainment.
Randy is a graduate of New York University. Prior to repositioning the company in 1989 to work exclusively in the leisure and learning industry, White Hutchinson was active in the retail/commercial real estate industry as a real estate consultancy specializing in workouts/turnarounds of commercial projects. In the late 1960s to early 1980s, Randy managed a diversified real estate development company that developed, owned and managed over 2.0 million square feet of shopping centers and mixed-use projects and 2,000 acres of residential subdivisions. Randy has held the designations of CSM (Certified Shopping Center Manager) and Certified Retail Property Executive (CRX) from the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC).
He has authored over 150 articles that have been published in over 40 leading entertainment/leisure and early childhood education industry magazines and journals and has been a featured speaker and keynoter at over 40 different conventions and trade groups.
Randy is the editor of his company's Leisure eNewsletter, has a blog and posts on Twitter and Linkedin.
