The SEE Science Center in Manchester, New Hampshire, houses the largest permanent LEGO installation at minifigure scale on Earth - a Guinness World Record, three million bricks, an entire historically accurate replica of the old Amoskeag Millyard. An hour and a half north, on the Portland, Maine waterfront, the Children's Museum & Theatre of Maine sits a few hundred feet from the International Cryptozoology Museum - a real, serious kids' science museum sharing a stretch of shoreline with a museum devoted entirely to Bigfoot. One place went all in on a single, staggeringly specific thing. The other built a cluster of specific, wildly different things next to each other. Both work. Neither one is "family fun for the whole family."
Email Russell See ServicesOne New Hampshire attraction and two Maine ones, and between them, every strategy a marketing page actually has available to it.
Nobody builds the world's largest minifigure-scale LEGO installation by accident. It took two years, three partner organizations, and total commitment to one absurdly specific idea: rebuild one particular millyard, in one particular city, brick by brick, at one exact scale. Generic "science center" content couldn't have produced this. Only obsessive specificity about one real place could.
The point: total depth on one hyper-specific thing is a legitimate strategy on its own. You don't need six attractions if the one you have is the biggest anyone's ever built.
The Children's Museum & Theatre of Maine is the credible, broadly useful anchor of the Thompson's Point cluster - a real watershed aquarium, real theater, real science education, doing exactly what a family expects a children's museum to do. It's the trustworthy half of the pair.
The point: a cluster still needs one credible anchor. The weird stuff around it only works because something nearby is unimpeachably legitimate.
A short walk away, on the same waterfront point, is a two-story museum with ten thousand items connected to Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and every other creature that's never been proven to exist - and it draws its own crowd, its own reviews, and its own reason to make the trip, sitting comfortably a few doors from breweries, a winery, and the stores that share its foot traffic.
The point: the weird, specific thing doesn't dilute the credible thing next to it. It gives people a second reason to come, and a much better story to tell afterward.
Manchester picked depth. Three million bricks recreating one specific millyard is not a strategy that scales to "also have a dinosaur wing and a planetarium." It's a strategy that says: we are going to be the single best, most specific version of exactly one thing, and the record book will notice. It worked - it's the largest installation of its kind in the world, and people drive from other states specifically to see it.
Portland picked cluster. Rather than one overwhelming attraction, Thompson's Point put a legitimate science museum, a museum about cryptids, a couple of breweries, and a winery within a few hundred feet of each other on a working waterfront. No single piece of that is trying to be everything. Each one is specific and real, and together they turn a stretch of shoreline into a destination that no single tenant could have been on its own. I noticed at least three separate stores doing business in the immediate radius of the Cryptozoology Museum alone - a serious, working commercial cluster built around a room full of plaster Bigfoot footprints.
Neither Manchester nor Portland tried to be "fun for the whole family, all sciences, all ages, all interests." Both of them picked something specific - one giant thing, or several small true things next to each other - and let that specificity do the work generic breadth never does.
Here's the strategy that loses to both of them: the science center that tries to have a little bit of everything, mid-sized and moderately interesting across the board, competing with neither the record-setter nor the cluster. That's most law firm marketing. It's not committed enough to any one practice area, county, or case type to be the LEGO Millyard, and it's not specific enough about any of its distinct strengths to be Thompson's Point. It's the science museum nobody drives an hour for and nobody stumbles into on the way to somewhere else.
Pick one. Go all-in on a single, almost absurdly specific niche - one case type, one county's docket, one kind of hearing nobody else has bothered to specialize in - and let it become the thing you're known for the way Manchester is known for the LEGO city. Or build a cluster: several genuinely distinct, specific pieces of content and reputation, each one credible on its own, standing close enough together that a client who came for one discovers the others. What doesn't work is the third option, the one most firms default to without ever choosing it on purpose: a little of everything, none of it specific enough to be a destination.
And since this is apparently a food-and-drink guide now as much as a marketing lesson: after the LEGO city, the Thirsty Moose Taphouse on Elm Street in Manchester does the job well - over a hundred taps, no pretense about being anything other than a good taphouse. After Thompson's Point, Gritty McDuff's has the better building, and it isn't close - the original 1988 Fore Street location, Maine's first brewpub since Prohibition, a copper-topped bar in a genuinely old room, which is its own small case study in the same lesson. A newer Gritty's location might pour the same beer. It doesn't have the same building, and the building is doing real work.
For criminal defense firms ready to stop being the mid-sized science museum nobody drives to - whether that means going all-in on one specific niche, or building a real cluster of distinct, specific strengths.
Contact Russell Matson