Frame 3: Anything else that works
The 6sensory Supper for marketing executives is easily the most elaborate dinner experience I’ve staged. It’s hard for me not to share every detail that made it special. But the examples I chose above about making the digital, physical, were just moments in the dinner, they weren’t the overall theme. The overarching premise was “a dinner to stimulate all six of your senses,” a play on the company’s name. What better environment to do that than a restaurant.
Guests were shocked to discover that their company’s “Dark Funnel” was hidden in invisible ink on their menus, each one personalized for each guest.
The invisible ink bit above stimulated their sense of sight. The wine aroma kit exercise was smell. The sugar cookie forms were about touch. The Blue Blazer cocktail was about sound (making a Blue Blazer is a quiet activity unless the maker spills boiling hot water on their hand in which case it can be quite loud, yes, I speak from experience). Taste is too hard to explain, but the food is front and center for it, and it sets up the finale where there is a grand reveal about “the sixth sense.”
In other words, 6sense’s products were not “demoed” in any sense of the word like Microsoft Dynamics CRM was in Dinner by Dynamics. Sure, there were screen shots of the product, and guests certainly learned a lot about the entire suite over the course of the evening, but the products were not the vehicle by which the evening progressed; instead, it was a handful of elaborate reveals about the senses.
And when I say elaborate, I mean elaborate. The five senses we were all taught growing up were obvious; I described each in a short sentence. The sixth sense…well, that’s different. Throughout the course of the evening, as I was going through slides, I inserted full-size photos of famous people that would appear for a split-second. One could easily think it’s a glitch until they see it happen the second and third and fourth times. A few times, a guest would interrupt me to ask what was happening, but I had some PowerPoint magic to make it seem like they must be seeing things; perhaps they should slow down on their alcoholic intake.
The finale, then, starts with Simon & Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence playing as I make a flaming cocktail called the Blue Blazer. This is because, if I succeeded, they would hear nothing, but if I failed, they would hear genuine screams of agony as I’ve accidentally poured scalding hot water on my hand (don’t worry, that only happened once, very early on, and it was my fault). The cocktail takes just 30 seconds to make and the slides then automatically transition into a slideshow with photos of that night’s dinner while I recap everything we covered. After going through the five senses, I remind them that I promised them I’d stimulate “all six.” The video below, taken by a friend at a 6sensory Supper in Seattle, WA, is representative of the reaction upon the grand reveal:
The 6sensory Supper made extensive use of Framework 2, turning a lot of digital concepts into physical things, but ultimately, the content was delivered through a framework that was a play on the its name. Perhaps you have a company name, tagline, mascot, ad campaign, or something else that can be used as a vehicle to deliver food, drinks, education, and entertainment.
