Business Card to Business Plan: Branding Your Museum
By Margot Wallace
Branding is no longer a marketing decision but a business imperative. Today's museums must compete for visitors' attention not only with fellow cultural institutions but a myriad of other leisure venues, from theme parks to concert halls. They must quickly communicate if they're an art museum or a contemporary art museum, a historic house or a history museum—and in regions with many art or history or science or culture museums, each institution must distinguish where it fits in. Branding is a challenge not only for the marketing department but also for curators, collections managers and everyone else responsible for maintaining a relevant, memorable place in our culture and economy.
Business considerations range from finding money to saving it. Branding facilitates both of these undertakings—and everything in between. Whether writing a grant or asking for government support, museums must stress the individuality of their goals. The development department must highlight the museum's core values to attract philanthropists looking to support institutions with values that match their own. When dealing with corporate sponsors, the question always is: how does your brand relate to our brand? Your museum's mission statement is a promise; your brand is its multi-faceted realization.
Once you determine what you want your brand to be, you have to integrate it throughout the institution. Every iota of your museum—architecture, exhibitions, even the museum store—influences how the public perceives your brand. Branding therefore should have a presence in the full scope of a museum's operations.
Business Plan
At each stage of the plan—mission, strategy, projects, timeline—someone in your organization must ask the tough question: Is this on brand? Adhering to your brand through all phases of a business brings all departments and activities under the same umbrella, forging unity and distinguishing it from competitive institutions. Your institution's financial administrators will appreciate the solid front. Grant-makers, community and governmental supporters and fund-raisers are looking for consistency along with distinctiveness.
Exhibitions
Exhibitions are, most likely, the reason your museum exists. Your collection is, of course, acquired according to the guidelines of the mission, and thus reflects the formal identity of the museum. The way you display objects reflects your brand, especially as context and meaning evolve. As for interpretation, how you tell a story—and how visitors perceive it—leaves a lot of space for your institutional personality to take shape. Every time a museum places an object on a pedestal, the floor, the wall or in a room, it brands itself. Branding might start with a mission statement, but its firm footing is established by exhibitions. Consider the component parts of a show and you'll appreciate the omnipresence of "brand."
There's the very title of the exhibition, which immediately communicates seriousness or a sense of humor, in-depth analysis or friendly survey. While exhibitions will and should represent a wide range of ideas that your museum wants to address, they must reflect your core values. Remember, this name will appear on your building, your promotional material, in sponsoring organizations' materials, in your store, your annual report and at the end of all e-mails. Look at the labels that interpret the individual exhibits and decide if your museum wants to sound scholarly or avuncular, whether you focus on the object or also honor the maker.
Where you place the labels matters: They can be at the end of the wall, on the floor or so high that visitors must guess at the artist's identity before they literally "look up" the answer. The Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis distinguishes itself from other museums with its approach to labels: There are none. Visitors must ask docents about the works, thus encouraging dialogue and deeper inquiry.
Didactic panels say as much about the museum as they do about the exhibition. By engaging visitors from the introduction through the interwoven parts of the show, panels tell a story. Unless they are poorly written, they should present a point of view that reflects your brand. Use the large panels judiciously to narrate the story just the way you hope it will be heard.
Volunteers
Those awards you give your volunteers don't just honor valiant service—they represent branding at its very core. Volunteers are what every branded organization dreams of: committed loyalists. Many start as visitors and deepen their involvement. Many double as donors, even as major supporters.
In every museum, volunteers' main job is representing your brand. This starts with recruitment, when you state clearly that volunteerism starts with an understanding of, and passion for, the museum's mission. While paid workers absorb the institutional culture quickly and repeatedly, volunteers may enter your sphere only once a week or month and experience the culture disjointedly. Inculcating the brand message should continue through every interview, meeting and training session, so volunteers understand that they are working for your brand, not just for a museum. Brand awareness should continue throughout a volunteer's tenure, through e-mail updates, periodic training sessions and even award events.
Think of where and with whom volunteers—usually influential people—spend their time. They patronize many arts organizations, mingle with arts-oriented peers, buzz about their volunteer jobs, invite their friends for a free museum tour and pass along their volunteerism passion to their children. In the best-case scenario, they spread the word for your brand. In the worst, they spread confusion.
Imagine if you asked your volunteers to distribute business cards whenever they went to a luncheon, the golf course, a parent-teacher meeting or a 30-year college reunion. Would they represent the brand inherent in the card? Would they intrigue a new visitor, sell a membership or identify a potential donor? Or would they be unable to articulate what they do at the museum and why they like it there?
Education Department: Tours and Programs
In the best of all worlds, every tour, lecture and program on your schedule would tie in perfectly with your mission. Every docent, lecturer or conference organizer would be attuned to your brand. To accomplish this, everyone at the museum should ask at the outset of a programming meeting: How does this reflect our brand? This approach lays a framework for the content. The setup could be as simple as a statement of the mission with a segue to the program. Certainly, brochures or programs should reference the mission statement. Hosts introducing a speaker should proudly link the distinctiveness of the institution with the worthiness of the guest. If brand similarity exists between the museum and the speaker, you can give that concept a title, print it on poster board and mount it behind the lectern.
Sharp branding works for school groups, too. Children like knowing why they've come to visit, and recent research with older students reveals that their enthusiasm for all things Internet stems in part from their need to be in the know. Because your education programs deal in knowledge, there is justification for following up with more information. A post-program informational mailing to classrooms and other attendees will be appreciated all the more if it reiterates the tie between your institution and the program content. And you can use the opportunity to reinforce "brand purchase," a classic marketing stratagem.
Museum Store
In a culture of shoppers, your store has huge potential for branding. Essential to its existence is the store's tie-in with your collection and themed exhibitions, giving visitors extra time for reflection and brand reinforcement. Here, they feel perfectly comfortable talking about their experience with each other or with sales personnel. Books are lined up like docents, ready to answer questions. Some of those books might be about the museum itself; it's a good opportunity to talk about your brand.
Never underestimate the primacy of store staff in your education hierarchy. One brilliant young salesman at a small art museum greets the purchaser with: "And what memory of our museum are you taking home with you today?" In many museums, the store is the first thing visitors see, and salespeople the only staff they converse with.
The store also provides a medium in which to present your brand message. Every rack has room for shelf talkers and table tents, providing additional information about your brand. Every tag can carry your logo. With the merchandise you can include other branded information, such as background on a furniture reproduction or ways to enjoy a toy telescope. When a well-designed shopping bag gets toted all around, it provides wide-reaching advertising and public relations for your museum.
Website
Visitors from all over the globe visit your website, and they need to know instantly why they should stay with you and not Google back to your competition. Your homepage therefore must reflect your brand in content and design. It must clearly communicate the identity of your collection and how the current exhibition reflects it. Choices of color palette, photos and illustrations and typefaces should reflect your public image. Wherever the visitor clicks, text and graphics should be consistent.
Website visitors are generally culture or leisure customers committed to visiting a museum or a competing activity in town. Locals will check out the current show or perhaps donor opportunities. Out-of-towners need details and a little persuasion. Even if the page contains nothing more than hours of operation and directions, it can reflect your brand image. It may be the only chance you get.
For a website to really succeed branding-wise, it must motivate lots of clicking. Links keep visitors involved in a site, absorbing increments of knowledge, acquiring familiarity, learning to love you. Different pages allow you to show your brand from many angles, to many diverging interests. You can add pages as time and budget allows. Just add judiciously, always maintaining your brand identity. Find a professional Web designer who understands this concept.
Board of Trustees
Trustees bring not just money and connections. They also convey sympathy with your brand, and they must be recruited this way. Of course, they may serve other organizations, but they wouldn't sign on with your museum unless they felt a connection. It's your job to articulate that bond. Remind each trustee, new as well as current, about your mission and vision. Highlight your distinctiveness from the competition and explain the identity you want to project. Remind trustees at every opportunity how various projects reflect your brand. Consider providing them with a short script about your brand that can be used in talking about the museum. Decide whether they should write solicitation letters on your letterhead or their own. When these high-profile people speak, their words carry heft. You can help them speak meaningfully for you.
Historic Houses
These pre-branded museums do a wonderful job of constructing a complex branded edifice around a simple name, and their success depends on that. Visitors return and donors continue to contribute when worthy homes do more than reminisce. Grand or quaint, they must mount an attractive schedule of programs and constantly redefine their relevance. They earn the support of their communities when they address current interests while honoring the past. What makes all their programs and initiatives so inviting is maintaining the brand personality that always harks back to the occupants who created it.
Business Cards
Cards are extremely inexpensive to print, so order plenty and use them liberally. A talented designer well versed in identity programs should create a good logo and carefully choose the type and paper. The message should be well thought-out and should communicate your brand statement. This may take the form of a tagline or a sentence or two on the back of the card. It's worth the effort. Your card comes straight from your own hand; it stays in the receiver's possession for a long time, along with a wallet-full of competing communications.
Living your brand in every aspect of your institution is not an extra; it's fundamental, because it focuses your options. It makes every choice easier, from editing label copy to purchasing items for the store to hiring new employees.
To prove how useful branding can be, approach the first to-do item in your next staff meeting with the question: "Is this on-brand or off-brand?" You'll find the answers more quickly and start to plumb the richness of your institution and what it stands for.
Margot Wallace is a full-time faculty member in the department of marketing communication at Columbia College Chicago.
