Brand and deliver

December 3rd, 2008

Nothing’s been the same since Tate Modern. It opened at the turn of the millennium with a piece of visual branding that redefined how a gallery might communicate with its visitors.

The design work by branding giant Wolff Olins, packaged Tate as a consumer product, a leisure activity to be chosen like a new car might be chosen, its marque imbued with a certain promise of quality, experience and - importantly for an art gallery - approachability.

The logo did not just represent the new gallery of modern art on London’s Bankside, but tied the whole family of Tate venues - St Ives, Liverpool and the renamed Tate Britain - together in a unified, consistent offer.

In the eight years since Tate Modern’s opening, the museum sector’s understanding and application of consumer branding has come a long way. Museums, particularly the larger ones, see the value of a strong identity, not only to attract visitors, but also to engage stakeholders, sponsors, partners and staff.

Smaller museums, along with consumers generally, have gradually become more aware of the impact of brand personality too, although there is some way to go, says James Alexander, chief executive of museum design group Event Communications.

“Do all museums really get it? No, I don’t think they do - especially the smaller ones. They may say they need a new logo, which sums it up really: the logo is the end of the process, not the start.”

Know thyself

When well executed, branding touches every part of an organisation, focusing minds and resources on who you are and where you want to be. But with tight budgets and multiple stakeholders to please, capturing the essence of a museum is not simple.

“It’s also difficult if staff spend most of their time worrying about next year’s discretionary budgets, audience segments and so on. These are frontline issues for them and it’s hard to think beyond that,” says Alexander.

A full rebrand will take about six months to a year and can cost up to £50,000, although smaller organisations might be able to do it quicker and for less than half that amount of money. Despite the cost and effort, it’s worth it. A clear, well-managed identity - not just a logo, but the whole identity of an organisation - can help secure commercial partnerships, attract new visitors and even save money.

But achieving that kind of clarity can be tricky, especially given the trend towards branding multiple venues under a single group identity. This autumn has seen the launch of the brand for Newcastle’s forthcoming Great North Museum created by Agenda Design Associates.

The £26m project brings together collections from the Hancock Museum, Newcastle University’s Museum of Antiquities, the Shefton Museum and the Hatton Gallery. And the Museum of London (MOL) group has just unified its three operations - MOL, the Museum of London Docklands and Museum of London Archaeology - under a brand identity created by Coley Porter Bell.

Many groups - including Tate, Museums Sheffield, National Museums Scotland, National Museum Wales and now the Great North Museum - have opted for an overt parent brand, with individual institutions sitting as sub-brands in the visual identity scheme.

The new MOL branding takes a similar approach, with each service identified by a different colour, all drawn from a multicoloured primary marque inspired by the changing size and shape of the capital over time.

Presence power

“For the Museum of London, we had some major work to do in terms of unpicking what we and other people thought we stood for, since we had evolved into a group which includes MoLAS (Museum of London Archaeology Service) and Museum in Docklands,” says the head of press and marketing Jo Fells.

“We looked at a range of models for how this could be made into a more coherent whole, illustrating the size and scope of the museum’s expertise and ensuring that every time we announce an important archaeological find, the Museum of London is clearly mentioned, for example.”

Fells’s comment touches on the value and power of strong group branding. If visitors view the parent group positively - as, say, a creator of exciting, intelligent and educational exhibitions - then other venues in the group will benefit from that association.

“When we open an exhibition at Museum of London Docklands, we want potential visitors to understand that it will share the quality of academic and production values they know from the Museum of London,” Fells explains.

Individual versus group identity

This power to cross-promote venues efficiently is a good argument in favour of group-wide branding; it’s efficient, clear and brings cost benefits.

“It’s about economies of scale,” says Jane Wentworth, principal consultant of branding consultancy Jane Wentworth Associates, which has worked with the Victoria and Albert Museum, National Museums Scotland and the Natural History Museum.

“You’re promoting one identity and experience to customers. While multinational companies might have big enough budgets to manage lots of individual brands, museums can’t afford to.”

But bringing venues together in this way can be problematic. An umbrella brand may run the risk of eclipsing, or at worst obliterating, the distinct personality of individual museums, especially where institutions are disparate in nature.

Tyne & Wear Museums (TWM) rebranded its group identity in 2005, but purposely left individual sites with their own styles (although the Great North Museum now subsumes some previously distinct museums). The TWM identity is instead used as a kind of quality marque to endorse the different services.

Jim Richardson, director of Newcastle branding group Sumo, regularly works with TWM’s Robson Brown-created visual identity and finds its approach works well. “It’s a strong but simple parent brand that sits in the corner of each leaflet, poster and so on, while each of their 12 venues has an individual identity.

This really ticks two boxes: it lets the organisation cross-market through the TWM brand, which also acts as a marque of quality, and allows each individual venue the room to market themselves on their own merits.”

Domineering brands

Perhaps a worse-case scenario for group branding is the creation of a parent brand that doesn’t really mean anything to anyone. Richardson believes that monolithic branding can be taken too far.

“There has been a trend for implementing this kind of parent brand for a group of museums, often at the expense of the individual museums’ personalities,” says Richardson.

“It’s important to leave room for museums to show what makes them special and not be too heavy handed with the brand. I think the National Museum Wales and National Museums Scotland parent brands overpower the individual venues and become quite bland.”

What group branding does allow is a consistency of style and tone that is usually easier for visitors and museum partners to understand. The Imperial War Museum (IWM), which has five sites, is consolidating its branding under the existing Minale Tattersfield-designed logo to strengthen its marketing.

“We’re pushing that logo to the forefront and the sub-brands are being pushed back,” says IWM head of corporate marketing Lindsay Ball. IWM’s corporate plan says this will “increase brand visibility and awareness and underpin the development of commercial opportunities”.

Despite the benefits of rebranding, it can meet with resistance. Some people view branding as unjustifiably costly, time-consuming and even meddlesome. The University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum is undergoing a £61m transformation and has grappled for some time with how the brand identity will promote the redeveloped museum.

“It took us a long time to decide when to kick off the branding project because I think the time had to be right,” says Ashmolean deputy director Edith Prak, who has worked with Jane Wentworth Associates intermittently for a number of years.

“We were concerned that people would use the branding process to express their anxiety about all the other changes that were happening; there is naturally a lot of worry in an organisation that is going through this much change.”

Of course, it is change and dynamism that keep organisations alive. And branding is a means of determining firstly how you want to change and secondly how to communicate those changes to others.

As Prak says: “Once staff could see the prize at the end - a whole new Ashmolean Museum - there was wholehearted enthusiasm for the project. I would really recommend the branding process to everyone who is ready to do it.”

This article was written for Museums Journal, December 2008.

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Out with the old… in with the new

December 3rd, 2008

To sceptics rebranding can seem like a worthless exercise. The idea of reducing an organisation’s complex activities to a single glossy logo could be viewed as costly and irrelevant, and the branding process itself a distraction from more important matters.
The notion of someone coming in to tell you what your museum stands for and how it should present itself to the world can render even the most open-minded staff wary.

But every museum or heritage organisation has a brand, whether it likes it or not. Managing that brand effectively is undeniably a worthwhile investment that can translate into more visitors, new partnerships and increased funding opportunities.

People’s perceptions of a museum can be influenced by all sorts of things: direct experience, a friend’s opinion, expectations raised by marketing material, or a report in the media.

What is perhaps less obvious is how branding and design can help to direct and support these “messages” to help create a positive, clear picture of what the museum has to offer its visitors and partners. But how do you go about defining and promoting your brand? What is the process like, how much might it cost, and what are the benefits?

While big museums might draft in branding experts every few years, for smaller museums the idea of working with a consultant to rebrand the organisation might be quite daunting. To some staff it may seem an unnecessary expense, gobbling up money that may otherwise have found its way to their projects and the collection.

Branding consultants may be seen as meddlers, charging the earth for a pretty logo. But that should not be the case: undertaking a rebrand should be a valuable opportunity to work through what a museum stands for, how it operates and who it is for.

It need not break the bank - and may not even result in a new logo. But there are a few things to think about going into a branding exercise, however much money you have to spend and whatever size your museum or organisation.

Get everyone involved

A good branding process puts an organisation’s people and activities at its heart, with designers acting as consultants and facilitators, not flouncing egomaniacs. It is first about understanding what is important, special and valuable about a museum, and second about looking at ways to best communicate those attributes to the outside world.

Consistency is especially important. Many smaller institutions may find that their marketing communications develop ad hoc, with a bit of in-house design work here, a bit by a freelance there, and maybe the odd bigger job by a local design company.

The results of working like this are usually disconnected and lack the kind of coherent personality and style that visitors can understand and remember.

Investing in a definitive branding process, on the other hand, will help hone the museum’s style and result in a set of design guidelines from which all future communications can be drawn up.

So how do you go about choosing a consultant or designer? Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that the logo comes last: it is the process of determining your museum’s objectives and character that is most important.

For this reason, it is not a good idea to appoint someone who arrives offering a range of possible logos, however great the financial temptation.

What you are after is a consultant that wants to work with your staff so that the final result is effectively co-designed, with input from as many people in the museum as possible. Inevitably, this will take longer and cost more, but the results should then be strong enough to stand the museum in good stead for perhaps a decade.

“Twice recently we’ve pitched our full development process, showing our portfolio as credentials, but there have been other groups that have turned up with a set of graphic ideas and said to the client ‘pick one’,” says Jim Sutherland, director at Hat-Trick Design, which has worked with National Museums Scotland and the Natural History Museum, London.

“If you just pick a design like that it undermines the idea of involving everybody. Also, if a museum gets something effectively for free then they haven’t invested anything of themselves in it, so it’s going to be much harder for them to understand it and promote it.”

Jim Richardson, a director of the branding consultancy Sumo, who created the new visual identities for Brighton & Hove Museums and Shetland Museum & Archives, agrees: “While it is easy to be seduced by pretty pictures, it is important to communicate to the designers where your organisation is and where it is heading. This is normally done in a written brief and through discussions with the designers. Having a well thought-out brief will save you time and money.”

In the same way that a brand is not just a logo, a branding process is not just graphic design. It is about staff - from the director and trustees to the front-of-house - talking about what the museum means to them, what its collections hold and represent, what visitors say, what it stands for and how it might be improved.

Involving people in this way should also help reduce any scepticism about the branding process itself. The Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London is currently working on a masterplan under its 2020 programme and has started by consulting staff.

“It hasn’t been a case of the directors saying, ‘This is what we want it to be.’ Instead we’ve been asking staff ‘Why do you come to work?’, ‘What kind of museum should this be?’,” says Lindsay Ball, head of corporate marketing at the IWM.

To do this, it is worth having one member of staff act as a facilitator for the workshops and strategic thinking that your branding consultants will carry out. People need to be able to feel comfortable giving their own views, without worrying that comments will be piped straight back to managers.

“A branding project is only as good as the people running it,” says Jane Wentworth of Jane Wentworth Associates. “Without support and buy-in from the top, as a consultant you’re on a hiding to nothing.”

People working in the shop, galleries and at reception also have to be consulted as they are the representatives of the brand, says Wentworth.

“People always accept that things could be better, so you ask them what could make it better, what kind of organisation do you want. But people are often so cowed because they are not generally listened to, so they think there’s no point offering their views.”

It may be tempting to undertake some of this “brand personality” research in-house. According to Wentworth, this should be resisted if possible.

“It’s really important to get someone from the outside to do this. Clients sometimes ask if they can save money by doing the interviews themselves, but you can’t. It’s like trying to psychoanalyse yourself; it doesn’t work.”

Carrying out some basic market research yourself first may be sensible, however. “The first step is to research the perception of your organisation,” says Jim Richardson.

“This doesn’t need to cost a lot of money - you can do it yourself by speaking to visitors about why they are visiting, whether they would recommend a visit to friends and family, and how they would describe the museum to other people. Also, involve people from across your organisation so they can see the benefits of the process first hand.”

If you have in-house designers or work regularly with a freelance, it is vital that they are involved from the beginning, too, as they will be the people handling the design guidelines once the branding process is finished.

“The next step is to compare this perception with how you would like to be seen,” says Richardson. “In order to change the perception of your museum, you may need to change exhibition displays, outreach programmes, advertising messages, price of entry, and many other things.”

Call in the experts

Although it may be possible to arrive at some of these conclusions through self-assessment, bringing in external consultants at some point is essential.

They will provide the kind of perspective on where you are and how you are viewed that is hard to attain from the inside, showing you where your communications are confusing, contradictory or counter-productive.

As well as working with staff, they can also talk to people outside the organisation, such as potential partners, about their perceptions of the museum.

Tyne & Wear Museums decided in 2005 to carry out an assessment of how a new “parent brand” might relate to the 12 museums and galleries it runs. Staff worked with design agency Robson Brown. “We did a lot of consultation with staff, across the district councils, and with visitors,” says Sheryl McGregor, the communications manager of Tyne & Wear Museums.

Gathering all this research together and marrying it with visions of where the museum wants to be is the real value of the branding process.

From here, designers will begin to work up graphic elements of your visual identity, such as colour palettes, typefaces, logos, photography, and the tone of voice, which when combined, will become the public face of the museum. With strong research and clear objectives, you should not have to go round the houses at this stage.

No logo?

It may be that a new logo is unnecessary. The Victoria & Albert Museum in London has undertaken a lot of brand strategy and communications work with Jane Wentworth Associates over recent years without altering its established Alan Fletcher-designed logotype.

A great deal of rebranding can be realised by changing the way the museum is organised and operates. On the other hand, it may be decided that a whole new name and logo will help to reinvent the venue.

Whatever you choose, it should tally with your initial objectives, whether that is improving public awareness and understanding, securing sponsorship deals or putting together a stronger funding bid. Most likely, a strong brand identity can achieve all of these.

According to Sheryl McGregor, creating a distinct brand identity for Tyne & Wear Museums to run alongside its separate museum identities has given the service a public face. “We didn’t really have [that] before, so this has really helped, especially with cross-marketing our different venues,” she says.

For museums that sit as part of a larger family or network, full control over brand and visual identity may or may not lie with the individual venues. Some museum groups take a fairly monolithic approach to branding, where each venue sits as a sub-brand of the parent identity.

For example, all the Tate venues use the same graphic styles, with colour-coding to set them apart. By contrast, at Tyne & Wear Museums each venue retains its own brand and visual identity, with the group logo as a smaller element on communications, acting more like a seal of quality.

Understanding how your venue fits into the bigger picture and broader marketing strategy is therefore essential to ensure that everything supports everything else. This is especially true when a museum is part of a local authority or university, with its own brand identity.

So how much does all this cost and how long will it take? There is no definitive answer to this and, keeping in mind the things discussed above, it is worth shopping around two or three design and branding groups and getting them to present a credentials pitch. From there choose the ones you like and begin to talk about your requirements and budget.

That said, according to Wentworth, very loosely speaking a full rebranding project with research will take around six months to a year and cost around £40,000 to £50,000. A small organisation might be able to do it for around £20,000 in four to five months.

That said, Tyne & Wear Museums’ budget was £10,000. As with most things, it is worth investing as much as you can, then work with your designers to get the most out of that budget.

Once complete, an effective brand identity should run for a good number of years, remaining fresh and flexible enough to meet changing demands. Also, a good design consultancy will stay in touch and offer advice on any issues that emerge as the visual identity is implemented and extended.

Maintaining a strong brand means keeping public perceptions of your museum or gallery on message. And if you have successfully communicated your brand’s attributes to all staff, these perceptions will be reinforced each time people visit or come across your marketing material.

Having an effective brand makes it much easier to attract commercial partners and sponsors too, says Wentworth. “If you haven’t got [your brand identity] together, you haven’t got anything to demonstrate how you talk to partners and visitors. With it, you’re looking at more visitors, more sponsorship, more revenue.”

When you measure the cost of rebranding against these benefits over ten years, it can be money well spent.

This article was written for Museum Practice, Winter 2008.

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