Planetarium Visitor Impressions: Getting to know your audience - a discussion based on TripAdvisor reviews. The SCISS white paper seeks to provide a greater understanding of visitor impressions following a planetarium visit, show how this insight can lead to stronger target marketing strategies and to encourage the use of creative and inexpensive market research methods. Like any other business, planetariums at several points in their life cycle have to decide what their planetarium is all about. As essentially a visitor attraction, a planetarium’s brand identity and how they present their value proposition to the target market is vital. Being part of a broader market, educational and learning centers such as planetariums have to have a clear value proposition against a climate of continuous change (new technology, competitors, economy, etc.). As champions of informal learning, the need for planetariums to reevaluate in order to stay relevant and attractive has never been more critical. This analysis is based on 700 reviews made over the last 3 years from planetarium visits around the globe on the world’s largest travel site, TripAdvisor.com. The reviews have been analyzed and broken up into different negative and positive aspects of the visitor’s experience mentioned in the review. The simplified aspects most commonly found in the observed reviews and those presented in this report include show content, technology, activities, service, location, crowds, comfort, language and dome architecture. Show content proved to be the aspect which produced the strongest negative and positive emotions. Because of this, a more thorough analysis of content related reviews was conducted. These comments were broken down to focus on the qualitative content related aspects and were set organically based on the most frequently observed remarks. These aspects were also divided into positive and negative points of view. In this paper, you will find an analysis based on The Kano Model which was created in the 1980’s by Dr. Noriaki Kano to demonstrate and explain how different classifications/categories of customer requirements and features have the ability to influence customer satisfaction differently. Understanding these consumer requirements is important for the sustainability of every organization in order to successfully align business efforts with the desires of consumers. There is a wealth of information which can be obtained by paying attention to the feedback from your visitors and this paper seeks to provide readers with a better understanding of how to interpret this feedback and develop marketing strategies around this knowledge. Hopefully reading this paper will provide a new perspective and encourage a greater focus on understanding your target market and your planetarium or science center’s value proposition. You can read and download the paper here. For questions, feedback or further discussion, please feel free to reach out to SCISS. We’d love to hear what you think!