I went to this interactive, inclusive, all-encompassing Van Gogh exhibit in Salt Lake City. Rooms with open walls filled with the master’s works, constantly in motion, constantly changing, while music and narration carried me through points of interest in the artist’s life and his troubles. I have a rudimentary understanding of Van Gogh; I know Starry Night, and I have often joked about him being clingy with his girlfriend. When she said he never listened to her, he sent her his ear, so she’d always have “his ear.” Cheap laugh, but hey, I’m cheap. And easy, really easy. If anyone wants to start that rumor, I approve.
But the event was stunning, and being surrounded by his colors and impressions of the world is humbling. Sure, we all know the Ear story, but I didn’t know that in his short career, he started painting at twenty-seven; he produced new work every thirty-six hours. Every thirty-six hours, Van Gogh created, well, a Van Gogh. He was so poor that he often recycled his canvases, painting new work over old work because he couldn’t afford new materials. He was his own worst critic, often tearing apart his work and viewing many of his now-famous pieces as deep disappointments.
The event itself was stunning. You walk through curated rooms, and the artist’s work was enormous on screens; you felt like you could and did step directly into his paintings, his street scenes and the gardens of color and texture. I found myself sitting in a room watching the cycle of the paintings go by three or four times, unable to pull myself away. Room after room of sights that ignited all the senses. People walking in silence, some weeping; even kids stopped in their tracks, unsure of what they were seeing, but moved, deeply moved by it nonetheless.
As I finished my time in the traveling museum, I felt an odd peace and a strange wonder. How did he keep going? Why did he stop? What was he thinking when he saw the world around him? His life was full of confusion and sorrow; his letters to his brother Theo show his struggles: “how he suffered for his sanity,” as the singer Don McLean wrote in his haunting tune, Vincent. And I was thinking about that line as I strolled, still in the dream, still enveloped by the colors, toward the exit. He possessed a kind of sanity we all lack. His vision of people and life, his love of people, and his desire to tell their stories with pigment and brush—what an incredible life and what horrific struggles he endured till he could endure no more. All of this was conveyed to the viewer in a way that encompassed us and put us in the middle. Dark rooms with incredible images exploding on screens hit you so deeply that you carried it—each room, each image; you carried them as you moved to leave. And from this dark womb of wonder you exited into …
THE GIFT SHOP! Suddenly bright lights shocked you into the reality of the present. The quiet mood gave way to voices hawking key chains and T-shirts. Placemats so you could eat your Friday Night Spaghettios right on Starry Night. “Won’t the kids love this, Edna?” Would the kids love to know that Van Gogh painted that lovely piece, arguably his most famous piece, while he was looking out his window in the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy, where he had checked himself in because he was having deep mental troubles?
Sure, have a placemat, have a pen. Buy a T-shirt or a bracelet and start a collection of Van Gogh charms; collect them all, don’t forget the ear. The transition from showing to shop was glaringly awful. There was no downtime, no transition from the dim rooms of exploding colors to the harsh, naked fluorescent lights of the merchandise section. You’ve seen how he struggled; you’ve witnessed how he turned his mental anguish into groundbreaking artwork; now remember those historical moments with Van Gogh playing cards, Van Gogh collector spoons, or a paint-by-numbers set of Van Gogh’s complete catalog; feel what it’s like to BE Van Gogh.
I’m not immune to the pull of the gift shop; hell, many times a gift shop in an airport or a hospital has saved my bacon, but this was different. At those other gift shops, you have to make an effort; they are usually self-contained, off to the side, and you can make a choice about going in or staying in your state of reverie and walking to your car. Here, you had no choice. Here it felt like: see the world of the great artist, understand his pain and his troubles, think about your own mental health and how it changes your days; all that was suddenly just the lead-up to being dumped, without choice, into the gift shop. If you like Van Gogh, you’ll love this bumper sticker. Honk if you’ve severed a body part and handed it to an unwitting prostitute. What a hoot; I bet Van Gogh would have loved this.
Or he would be standing in traffic with his palette and easel, his straw hat screaming at the demon automobiles and trying to get some help; one can never tell with these temperamental artists. Who knows, maybe he would have dug the gift shop, especially if he was getting a cut of the intake. I mean, he only sold one painting while he was alive, The Red Vineyard, so I’m sure he could have used some of the proceeds from the coffee cups and Li’l Van Gogh’s paint sets.
The question is, why? Why does every experience have to come with merchandise? Why does every emotional experience have to come with a snow globe? Are we truly honoring or understanding the artist if we’re just going to buy a T-shirt, wear it once, tell everyone about the exhibit, and then toss it at the stairmaster in the side room when we’re done? It makes you wonder: is the exhibit, or the opera, or the play the main point of the event, or is it all just a prelude to merch?
The Souvenir Shop Problem
The problem isn’t that merchandise exists. I’m not arguing against museum stores or suggesting nobody should own a Starry Night coffee mug; I collect fridge magnets from all over the place and from a huge variety of events and experiences. I can point to each one, tell you the story behind the magnet, why I bought it, what I wanted to remember about the moment, and truly enjoy the nostalgic trip it sends me on. I know all about the magnet and its history. I made a point of stopping by the gift shop and picking out something that would capture the experience.
I’m not a guy who takes many pictures. I have bemoaned the fact that these days, someone sees something happening and immediately pulls out a camera. I prefer to be present, take in the experience, and then commemorate it with writing or a story or maybe a trinket from the gift shop, but it’s very specific and connected to the experience.
This sometimes gets me in trouble when I travel, and friends will say, “Bring me a souvenir.” But what do I bring them? They aren’t sharing the experience, and if I give them something, I have to explain the experience that inspired me to purchase the trinket, and then they have it with no experience attached; if someone sees it, instead of a great story of an emotional or personal awakening, they say, “My friend got it for me; I have no idea what it means.” And that’s a problem because the trinket, the souvenir, gets confused with the experience.
A souvenir originally has meaning because something happened before you bought it. The cheap magnet from Yellowstone matters because you remember standing there. The concert shirt matters because you remember the concert. Without the experience, it’s cotton, ceramic, plastic, whatever. Because, despite the voices of the hawkers in the bright light, “cement your Van Gogh experience with this set of Starry Night knitting needles,” the object doesn’t contain the meaning; we put the meaning into the object.
You Can’t Merchandise Your Way Into Meaning
Now, you’re wondering, “Paul, what does this have to do with ThoughtLab and brands?” Well, I’ll tell you, incessant voice in my head, brands constantly do versions of the Van Gogh gift shop. They believe putting the logo on more things creates a stronger brand. Shirts, water bottles, tote bags, stickers, notebooks, whatever. But nobody develops affection for a company because its logo has achieved impressive surface coverage.
Maybe you think it’s great that you’ve given the masses twenty-nine easy ways to display your logo, to do some free advertising for you. But have you? Where is that T-shirt or baseball cap going? Is it handed off to a friend, worn as a sleep shirt, or just balled up and tossed in a corner? People don’t care for the merchandise because it’s not tied to an experience. There’s a hell of a difference between remembering a brand and owning something with its logo on it.
The merchandise only means something when something meaningful happened first. That’s why the ratty concert shirt you bought twenty years ago can survive three relationships, four moves, and repeated threats from someone who insists it belongs in the trash. It isn’t really a shirt anymore. It’s the night you saw that band. It’s who you went with, where you were in your life, and what happened when they played the song you’d been waiting all night to hear. The shirt didn’t create any of that. It simply became the place where some of the memory landed.
Brands sometimes get that order backward. They make the thing and expect us to supply the affection. Here’s our logo on a lovely insulated mug. Feel something. Here’s a hoodie. Love us. Here’s a sticker for the back window of your Subaru. Please turn your personal property into a tiny billboard for our company. But without an existing relationship, you haven’t created a souvenir. You’ve created an object, and the world is already pretty well stocked with those.
This doesn’t mean branded merchandise is useless. Far from it. If someone loves your company, works somewhere they’re proud to work, attended an event they’ll never forget, or had an experience that genuinely mattered to them, that object can become enormously valuable. Not because of what it cost and certainly not because you managed to squeeze the logo onto it, but because of everything the person sees when they look at it.
That’s the part you can’t print, embroider, screen, stamp, or laser engrave. You have to earn it.
Van Gogh didn’t need the gift shop to make me remember the exhibit. By the time I walked into that blinding room of coffee mugs and collector spoons, the experience had already done the work. I had been somewhere. I had felt something. I had learned something about a man I thought I knew and discovered how little I actually understood. A Starry Night refrigerator magnet wasn’t going to make any of that more meaningful.
The same is true of a brand. Before you start worrying about what people can take home with your name on it, give them a reason to want to take a little piece of you home in the first place.
Memory Comes First
I have stuff I should have thrown away years ago. We all do. Things with absolutely no monetary value that somehow survive every cleaning binge, every move, and every moment when I stand over the trash can, holding the contents of my junk drawer, trying to become the sort of responsible adult who doesn’t keep useless crap. Then I look at the thing, remember where it came from, and back into the drawer it goes.
That’s because memory has a strange way of changing an object’s value. Something that would mean nothing to anyone else can become almost impossible to discard because we’re no longer looking at the object itself. We’re looking through it. A ticket stub becomes the person who sat beside us. An old program becomes the night we first saw something that changed us. That ridiculous little souvenir becomes a doorway, and for a moment we’re somewhere else.
That’s an extraordinary bit of human behavior, and brands should pay attention to it because you can’t manufacture the part that matters. You can manufacture the mug. You can choose the weight of the T-shirt, obsess over the Pantone color, argue about whether the logo should be two inches wider, and order ten thousand of the damn things. What you can’t manufacture is the moment someone associates with it. The experience has to do that work.
And maybe that’s where the souvenir shop gets the whole thing backward. It appears to be selling objects, but the successful ones aren’t really selling objects at all. They’re offering us somewhere to put a memory. We don’t buy the magnet because our refrigerator has been crying out for another magnet. We buy it because for a few bucks we can take a tiny marker of that day home with us, stick it somewhere we’ll see it again, and occasionally be transported back.
For brands, that distinction matters. You don’t create meaning by giving people something to remember you by. You create meaning by giving people something worth remembering. Once you’ve done that, the coffee cup can take care of itself.
Don’t Kill the Moment
Maybe my real problem with the Van Gogh gift shop wasn’t the gift shop at all. Maybe it was the timing. Had I walked down a hallway, stepped outside for a minute, or been given even a little space between the experience and the opportunity to buy a coffee mug, I might have felt differently. Instead, I went directly from thinking about this troubled, brilliant man and the extraordinary things he created to wondering whether I needed Starry Night socks.
There was no room for the experience to settle. No chance to carry those thoughts for a while before somebody tried to turn them into a transaction. The exhibit had spent all that time carefully creating a mood, controlling the light, sound, movement, and pace, then surrendered the final moments of that experience to commerce. That’s what felt wrong. The gift shop wasn’t an extension of what I had just experienced. It was an interruption. Even though it only interrupted my walk to the car, it pulled away some of the emotional resonance I had built up during the exhibit.
Brands do this all the time. We become so excited when somebody has a good experience with us that we immediately want something in return. You bought something from us; would you review it? You talked to customer service; would you rate the conversation? You stayed at our hotel, ate at our restaurant, attended our event, or used our service, so could you please take another five minutes and tell us how wonderful we are? We barely give people enough time to decide whether they’re happy before asking them to announce that happiness to everyone else.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with asking for a review, sending a follow-up, or giving someone an opportunity to continue a relationship with a brand. Those things can be useful, and sometimes people are perfectly happy to do them. The problem comes when we treat every positive experience like an asset that has to be harvested immediately. Like an organ. We become so determined to squeeze additional value out of the moment that we risk diminishing the value of the moment itself.
Sometimes the best thing you can do after giving someone a great experience is nothing. Let them walk away. Let them think about it. Let whatever they felt belong entirely to them for a while without asking them to click, rate, subscribe, share, scan a QR code, or purchase the commemorative oven mitt.
Because a moment that’s allowed to linger has a chance to become something much more valuable than an immediate transaction. It can become a memory. And if your brand happens to be attached to that memory, you’ve accomplished something no gift shop could ever sell.
Give Them Something Worth Remembering
So maybe the question isn’t what you can give people to remember your brand. Maybe the question is whether you’ve given them anything worth remembering in the first place. That’s a much harder question because you can’t answer it by opening a promotional products catalog and deciding everyone needs another stainless steel water bottle.
What people carry away from a brand is rarely the thing the brand spent the most time talking about. It might be how easily someone solved a problem, the way they were treated when something went wrong, or simply the feeling that the company on the other side of the transaction actually gave a damn. Those moments don’t necessarily sound exciting in a marketing meeting, but they’re where a brand stops being a collection of colors, words, and promises and becomes an experience someone has actually had.
That experience doesn’t have to be enormous. Nobody expects buying a pair of shoes to have the emotional impact of standing inside a Van Gogh painting while music swells around you. Frankly, if your shoe store does that, I’m probably going to shop somewhere else. What matters is that the experience feels consistent with what you’ve told people you are. If your brand promises simplicity, make things simple. If you claim to care about your customers, give them some evidence. Whatever you’ve decided your brand stands for has to eventually survive contact with an actual human being.
That’s something we think about a lot at ThoughtLab because branding can’t end with the identity. The logo matters. The language matters. The website, packaging, advertising, and all the other things people encounter matter, but they’re setting an expectation. Eventually somebody has to experience the company behind them. When that experience confirms what the brand has been saying, something begins to stick. When it contradicts it, no amount of clever design will rescue the relationship.
That’s the real opportunity behind all this souvenir-shop nonsense. Stop worrying quite so much about how people will carry your logo into the world and spend more time thinking about what they’ll carry in their heads. Give them an experience that feels like you, treat them in a way that couldn’t have come from just anybody, and leave them with something they might still remember long after the transaction is finished. Then, if they want the T-shirt, sell them the damn T-shirt.
The Takeaway
I didn’t buy anything in the Van Gogh gift shop. No mug, no T-shirt, no collector spoon, not even a tasteful little replica of an ear to hang from my keychain. I walked through, blinked a few times under the fluorescent lights, and left. But I remember the exhibit. I remember sitting longer than I intended, watching those paintings move across enormous walls. I remember learning how relentlessly he worked and thinking about the enormous distance between how he regarded much of his own work and how the world regards it now.
Years later, when I saw an ad for the exhibit, I didn’t need an object to remind me that I was there. The experience managed that all by itself. Maybe that’s what brands should be chasing. Not another opportunity to get the logo into someone’s house, but a reason to remain in someone’s mind. A brand that creates a genuine connection doesn’t have to keep waving from a coffee cup to prove it existed. It becomes attached to something the customer remembers, and that memory is far more difficult to manufacture than anything you can order by the case.
That doesn’t mean we should burn down the gift shops. I like gift shops. I’ll probably continue buying ridiculous things from them and wondering six months later why I thought I needed them. The souvenir isn’t the problem. The mistake is believing the souvenir is doing the work. It isn’t. At its best, it simply points backward toward something that already mattered.
At ThoughtLab, that’s the distinction worth remembering. A brand isn’t successful because people recognize the logo, own the shirt, or can pick its colors out of a lineup. Those things can tell you that someone has seen you. They can’t tell you that you meant anything to them. Meaning comes from the experience you create, the promises you keep, and what remains with people after you’ve stopped talking to them.
Van Gogh died without knowing what his paintings would eventually mean to the world. More than a century later, people still stand silently in darkened rooms surrounded by his work and feel something. Then, apparently, we buy placemats.
Maybe we’re all a little complicated.
