Branding a cultural institution

The place is heaving on a sticky summer’s afternoon as I dart through the queues for hot meals served on plastic trays. I see two young goths from out of town in platforms and thick eye make-up; middle-aged business men in a meeting; kids sporting dinosaur masks from the nearby Natural History Museum; fashion students bickering; an older woman in a jumpsuit and bright pink hair; Japanese tourists spreading jam and cream onto scones. I overhear a softly-spoken man on the next table saying that he is designing a treasure hunt in the museum for a friend’s birthday as he shuffles his handwritten cards.

The scene I have just painted in the cafe is idyllic, and it is one that genuinely moved me as I sat and looked around on that warm day at the crowd. Certainly, to suggest that the visitors to a museum as grand and historic as the V&A could represent a cross-section of British society is to romanticise the role of the museum as a civic meeting space for communities on a local, national and international scale. It also underestimates the challenges facing museums around the world when it comes to not only attracting diverse audiences but also making them feel welcome enough to visit more than once.

Let’s face it: museums can be intimidating spaces. Steeped in the violence of colonial history, weighed down by imposing architecture, and shrouded in often-obscure systems of knowledge, they are political and represent a significant source of soft power for a nation. Yet it is precisely the contradictions running through cultural institutions that have the potential to either bring them to life or break them apart – or, at their best, to do both at the same time. They are places for quiet contemplation while also serving as busy thoroughfares heaving with visitors; they are aimed at both locals and international tourists, and are funded by both public and private money. They must showcase the often-fractured past while adapting to the concerns and politics of the present. They are designed to appeal to long standing patrons and casual day-trippers alike; to the old and young; to experts in art history and to those who have never entered a museum before.

“The public sphere – especially across Europe, the US and the UK – is so divided and with such a proliferation of access to information, views, images and ideas,” Maria Balshaw, director of Tate museums and galleries in the UK, told The Art Newspaper this month while discussing her new book, Gathering of Strangers: Why Museums Matter. “I really feel that what the museum now does is offer a social space dedicated to expanding understanding, but not dedicated to any one particular view.” Balshaw argues for a heterogeneous reflection of these differences, with the museum becoming a site not just for harmonious discussion but for fierce debate. “Thinking gets binary so quickly—if you don’t agree with me, then you are opposed to me. But you can disagree and not be in opposition because the museum’s role is to offer the opportunity to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously.”

This multiplicity is crucial in the communication and branding of cultural institutions. For Lafayette American, who was responsible last year for the rebranding of the Toledo Museum of Art, these perspectives begin from the ground up – from the very fabric of the museum and the people who make it what it is. “You have to dig in deep, you have to connect with as many different strata as possible,” Toby Barlow, Chief Creative Officer at Lafayette, reflects. “You need to be talking not just to the museum director or head of marketing but to the people who sit and stare at the artwork and at the visitors all day. To the security, who stand in the corner anonymously, and to the people who live in the neighbourhood who are using this as their backyard or as their village square.”

In their design for Toledo, the letter ‘T’ assumes the form of a prism that refracts and distorts works of art from the museum collection. It is a playful take on the continuous reframing that takes place – from ancient to modern – within the walls of the institution. “We’re inviting people to interact and engage in a stronger way, taking these elements out of the archive and saying, ‘See what you can do with this. See how it reflects the way you can approach and play with art and the way you can move it around inside your own mind’”. When visiting a museum, whether as a child or in adulthood, it is all too easy to skim past the exhibits and feel as if none of it is really relevant to you. A successful display is one that reveals the connections between history and the here and now, between another person’s perspective and your own.

Accordingly, museums increasingly make attempts at mass appeal, folding pop culture into their broader cultural offering. Take the V&A’s current exhibition focused on the career of fashion model Naomi Campbell, or its upcoming display showcasing the personal style and influence of pop star Taylor Swift. Then there is the Musée national Picasso-Paris, who marked the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death last year with a new exhibition design for its famous collection conceived by British fashion designer Paul Smith; or the Brooklyn Museum’s much-criticised 2023 ‘Pablo-matic’ exhibition, which attempted to question the problematic legacy of Picasso through the humorous contributions of Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby.

Yet what these bids for popularity overlook are the deeper, more intimate connections that are possible even on an individual scale. If you’re into it, it’s in the V&A, the campaign conceived by adam&eveDDB and launched in March 2024, taps into this potential through a series of highly targeted activations. Rather than shifting the focus away from the odd and at times archaic nature of the museum collection, the campaign embraces these quirks wholeheartedly. “The collection is so unbelievably vast – there’s stuff for Hello Kitty fans, sneakerheads, skaters, Trekkies, gamers, gooners, knitters, you name it,” Creative Director Mark Shanley, who led the campaign, told D&AD. “So our idea was painfully simple – with 2.8 million objects in the collection, whatever you’re into, it’s in the V&A.”

The campaign plays on nostalgia, looking at how highly specific objects can evoke personal memory, leaning towards subculture and highlighting how a museum can both reflect the interests of its audience and play a part in shaping these passions. In one stunt, a century-old silver tankard engraved with the campaign message was buried in a popular metal-detecting location; in another, the message was emblazoned on a star player in Grand Theft Auto online. Shanley recalls how his own discovery of a Batman mug with a very specific logo in the V&A’s ceramics gallery was able to transport him back to his childhood obsession with Tim Burton’s 1990 Batman movie. “That’s the power of the V&A for me. That cheap Batman mug is displayed next to very valuable, important pieces of ceramic art and it’s given the same reverence. Because it's important. It’s a marker from a moment in our collective culture that tells a story. Or at least it tells a story for some people.”

For the rebranding of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) – Canada’s largest museum – earlier this year, a different approach was taken by Leo Burnett Toronto when encompassing the remarkable breadth of the museum’s collection, which spans millions of specimens and artefacts, with only a tiny fraction curated on rotation for the public. How do you visualise at a glance a range of objects so huge and so varied that they can never be seen together at any one time? Man Wai Wong, the Group Creative Director of Design on the project, was left speechless after a visit to the archives where she encountered everything from a colossal dinosaur femur to a Victorian moonstone hatpin to the armour of a samurai. “It was like a library that catalogued our human existence. Every item held stories of our past, as if plucked from our collective timeline, and that’s where the idea for the new identity was born.”

Rather than zoom in, the team instead chose to zoom right out. The concept of ‘a stitch in time’ became the basis for the museum’s visual communications, whereby the unfathomable scale of human history could be represented as a timeline that expands and contracts at any given moment. Each stitch within this larger fabric would reveal how each object linked to another across the centuries. “A lot of museums like ROM are perceived as old and dusty — that you have to be interested in history to step foot in one,” Wong says. “Yet they can also play a role in looking forward into the future as experts of the past. As an example, the Curator of Mineralogy is on the NASA-led team to study the first Martian asteroid samples to return to Earth. Based on her research of minerals from Earth’s history, she could inform us of the state of Mars and what the future holds for our neighbouring planet.”

It is surprising collisions like these, of seemingly disconnected time periods, places, people and even planets, that continue to make the museum as much a contested space of division as one of new connections. In the digital age, the largely unchanged presence of museums could be seen as anachronistic. When else do we encounter objects that are remarkable for their sheer physicality, for their staying power, and for what their presence can tell us about who we are today? These are things that cannot be fully communicated even in the highest resolution photographs, in digital walk-throughs or in 3D images. There remains much work to be done in how these stories are told to us by museum directors and curators. But they would do well to look first to the direct, in-person encounters that these institutions bring to life; they might even do a spot of people-watching on a warm afternoon among the crowds.