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InsightThoughts on arts marketing from Sumo

Issue 01—Autumn 2010

Despite the pressure on funding for the cultural sector, the UK is experiencing a boom in museums and galleries rebranding. Last month the Science Museum revealed its new identity, while the National Maritime Museum and Horniman Museum have both announced that they will follow suit with new brands rolling out in the next twelve months. This could be seen as preparation for the Olympics, with each venue positioning itself to benefit as much as possible from the expected rise in tourism, but away from the capital venues large and small are also taking a fresh look at their branding. These organisations are perhaps conscious that a venue which has a clear ideaof what it stands for and why it matters to it’s audiences stands a better chance of attracting both funding and sponsorship in harder times.In this issue of Insight we take a closer look at branding with a behind-the-scenes look at how the Wordsworth Trust has repositioned itself for the future with a new brand. We also talk about the trend towards flexible brand identities and what it means toa marketing manager and give you a word of warning with ten branding mistakes to avoid.

Thoughts on arts marketing from Sumo Issue 01—Autumn 2010

The Branding Issue

Introduction ........................................ 1Rebranding Wordsworth ...................... 210 branding mistakes to avoid .............. 7Being brave: flexible identities .............. 9

Contents Sumo71 Westgate RoadNewcastle upon TyneNE1 1SGwww.sumodesign.co.uk

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1

Rebranding WordsworthThis was the case with the Wordsworth

Trust, an organisation founded in 1891 as a living memorial to William Wordsworth and his contemporaries in the Romantic cultural movement. Although willing to embrace the branding process, there were nevertheless some in the organisation who questioned its relevance and value.

‘Historically, the Trust had seen marketing as a necessary evil and had probably never really thought about the brand at all: things like Mars chocolate were brands, but not the Wordsworth Trust,’ says Paul Kleian, who joined in 2007 as head of marketing and communications.

The Trust’s properties include Dove Cottage in Grasmere, Wordsworth’s home at the height of his creative output, and the award-winning Jerwood Centre. Together they present the Trust’s Museum and Art Gallery and its extensive collection on Wordsworth and Romanticism. Its range of activities reaches academics, tourists and the local community through an ongoing outreach programme.

But despite obvious strengths as a long-established and invaluable cultural heritage organisation, the Trust lacked a coherent commercial strategy at a time when guaranteed funding was becoming scarce. To reach more people, more effectively, this needed to be taken seriously, says Kleian. ‘We didn’t have a brand or a clear cut ethos of what the organisation was for. Staff and trustee perceptions all differed and in each case was different from what most visitors thought. But I knew we would have to set aside our own feelings in this because it’s about what our customers think—the scholars, tourists, schools, artists and poets who visit us and work with us. The Trust is actually a very complex organisation that isn’t aiming at any one of these groups but all of them, and that has to come across.’

The Trust agreed to engage a branding and design consultancy and three groups were shortlisted, including Sumo. ‘Two companies were just selling logos, even though they barely knew the organisation, but Sumo stood out in a class of their own,’ says Kleian. ‘I was insistent that we went with designers who would engage as many people as possible within the Trust so that staff had ownership of the process and results. This is what Sumo were proposing.’

While the visible outputs of a branding process are often a new logo and colour palette, this belies the value and depth of the process. ‘Anyone who is thinking

WRITER Scott Billings

A good brand development process typically means change, or at the very least a questioning of the place and purpose of an organisation. This process inevitably throws up hurdles to overcome, but in doing so, can produce some inspiring results.

The Branding Issue 2

01The new Wordsworth Trust logo

The daffodil and quill symbol played to the strengths of the association of the two main aspects of Wordsworth in the mind of the general public; poetry and his poem, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.

02‘Discover’ icons

A series of icons was developed to deliver short, concise messages directly to the audience who will engage with the Trust as a visitor destination. The icons promote various aspects of the offer to help reach a wider audience.

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of starting a branding process should be deeply suspicious of any design group which immediately starts selling logos,’ says Kleian. The process is actually a careful examination of who you think you are, what your customers think you are and where you would like to be, as Sumo creative director Sarah Hanley explains:

‘We held workshops that are designed to draw out the vision and values of the organisation and everybody speaks at these. We used image prompts and analogies with other things like celebrities or vehicles to examine the Trust’s attributes.

This is a good exercise to get people to think about what they are. It turned out that the perception of the Trust was of a highbrow organisation for older, middle class people. But they wanted to offer a journey and experience that is open to everyone.’

Sumo’s workshop gave staff the opportunity to discuss what the Trust is all about, says Kleian. ‘The designers appeared to have completely open minds and this in turn opened minds in the workshop. It was very well done. It became clear that we all think of the Trust in different ways, but we also started to look at it as if from the outside looking in. It was a clever thing and by the end of it a lot of heads here were nodding.’

After the workshop, Sumo produced a document of findings, but no new visual identity. From these findings Kleian and the designers identified four fundamental ‘pillars’ for the organisation—accessibility, knowledge, creativity and heritage—and distilled these into an expression of the Trust’s purpose, namely: ‘Sharing inspiration from the past for the future’.

Once these unifying ideas were in place they could be reflected in graphic designs, including the logo. Informal research showed that the two things people most closely associate with Wordsworth are writing and daffodils, the latter being the inspiration for his celebrated poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. The designs for the Trust’s main visual identity captured these associations with symbolised renderings of a quill and daffodil. Along with the primary logo, Sumo produced a set of design guidelines that are now used by the Trust to create its own printed material, signage, exhibition graphics and so on.

03Wordsworth Trust pattern

The pattern was designed to be used across all aspects of the Trust’s materials, from paper to wrap items in the gift shop, to endpapers in Trust publications. The pattern could be adapted to fabrics and packaging, potentially opening up other avenues of income for the Trust.

4The Branding Issue

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04/05/06/07/08Photography style

Photography became more intimate, capturing connections between visitors, objects and the surrounding landscape.

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‘We went backwards and forwards with these graphic ideas, selecting typography and a colour palette which reflected nature and the local landscape, for example, and also developed different visitor brands under a set of Discover icons,’ says Hanley. ‘It was important that everything is seen as academically authoritative to scholars, but the visitor brands need to attract tourists to the venues too.’

Much more than a new logo, the branding process gave the Wordsworth Trust an opportunity to look carefully at itself, from the outside as well as from within, and to forge a clearer vision of its identity and purpose. This identity is now communicated through bespoke graphic elements that are flexible enough to speak to its wide range of audiences and promote all its venues and activities.

But where the design process stops, the new Wordsworth Trust culture is only beginning to emerge. ‘It’s not over internally—it’s an ongoing process,’ says Kleian. ‘I think we’ve done a lot to make everyone think about our customers and people here now ask about the story behind the things we’re doing. Sumo’s consultative attitude really helped our own processes to become more consultative too; it was a really great way to work.’

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09Leaflets

Examples of 1/3 A4 leaflets.The ‘Discover Wordsworth’ leafletis aimed directly at potentialvisitors, the other two examplesare promoting its academic resources and giving informationon how to donate and supportthe work of the Trust.

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The Branding Issue

1Thinking

your brandis just

your logo

WRITER Jim Richardson

7

branding mistakesto avoid

Branding, a commonly used term throughout the business world, essentially means to create an identifiable entity that makes a

promise of value. It means that you have created a consciousness, an image, an awareness of your museum. It is your organisations

personality. Numerous museums try, but many fail at creatinga successful brand.

Your brand is not yourlogo, it is the perceptionthat your audiences have

of your organisation and is formed through everything

that you do.Your logo is an important

part of this, but thinking about the messages that

people get from everything you do will give you a better

foundation for yournew brand.

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6Losingsight

of your competitors

Your competitors are anything which audiences

choose to attend, support or do instead of coming to your venue. There can be a lot to learn from other industries and other approaches—in terms of how they present

themselves, the language they use, the communications

channels they use and how they use them, how they work with their branding agencies,

how they gather feedback from their audiences etc.

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and take a

look around the wider market to see what your venue can

learn about how to reach out to them.

7Not

beingconsistent

Once you have rolled out your new branding, you need to apply it consistently and police how others are using

it. A great way to manage this is by having brand guidelines which tell everyone in your organisation how the brand identity should be applied.

9IgnoringSocialMedia

10Refusing

tochange

Social Media websites like Facebook and Twitter are a new battleground for

managing the reputation of your brand. If somebody

has a bad experience at your museum, then this is easily

shared online. Monitor social media websites for mentions of your venue and learn how

to deal with any negative feedback.

Don’t stick with your branding if it isn’t working

for you, instead start to think about how it could

work better for you and start planning for a rebrand.

8Not having a thorough

marketing plan

It’s no good establishing a great new brand identity

without a well thought out marketing plan to support it. You need to think about how

the brand will reach your audience, having a focused marketing plan in place will enable a smoother, targeted

roll-out of the brand.

5Not having

a goodcreative

brief

When you're ready to speak to designers about creating a new brand identity, you

need to put together a good creative brief which gives them a good overview of

your museum and the aims of the rebrand.

4Not

knowingyour

strengths

Lots of cultural organisations try and appeal to everybody, and this isn’t always possible with limited resources. Think

about what your strengths are, and build your brand

around them.

2Creating

yourbrand in avacuum

For the best results, you should involve people from

across your organisationin the development of

your new brand. Brand workshops are a

great way to bring together a diverse group to talk about what makes your organisation special andwhat it should stand for.

3Not

listeningto your

audiences

Your audiences are a great source of information about how your venue is seen by

the public, and getting input from visitors and non-visitors is important to the branding

process. What perception do people have of your

organisation and how does that compare to the way

you’d like to be seen?

The Branding Issue

What perceptiondo people have of your organisation and how does that compare to theway you’d like tobe seen?

Since then, as consumer expectations have changed, brand identity management has advanced. We are used to products and services changing rapidly—even launching in Beta. We want our products available all the time, ideally delivered to our door. We like personal attention, recommendations and chances to interact with companies and impact decisions as a crowd. In business, we don’t wear suits and we use first names and informal speech. As a result of these, and many other social and commercial factors, we are more drawn to ‘dynamic, helpful and fun’ than their previous staid counterparts. As such, the best modern identities have a palette of materials, not just a logo, and a set of principles, not specific rules.

The big advantage of a flexible identity for cultural organisations is that it allows you to align your logo with multiple performances, exhibitions, venues or business streams. The easiest way to do this is to have colour options. For example, The Guardian uses their different coloured logos for distinct sections of the publication and the Southbank Centre apply their colourways and checked patterns in various permutations.

The Natural History Museum01 have been able to give real depth to their logo by inserting images of living things into the ‘N’. The identity Sumo designed for Gallery North02 takes its inspiration from an architectural detail on the building which can then be recoloured, textured or cut out as relevant. Allowing the logo to be a ‘container for content’ as Wolff Olins put it, seems to be a growing trend with the London 2012 and AOL logos, the logo for the Museum of Arts and Design and the tourism logos for New York and Melbourne.

On the spectrum from prescriptive to fluid brand management, the identity for TATE03 is slightly more radical, with a series of versions of the logo itself, and as they become more blurred, they are less legible—breaking one of the basic principles of traditional logo management. There don’t seem to be rules governing which version is used, when, and they have various colourways. However, this all fits perfectly with an organisation which is itself groundbreaking and sometimes controversial.

Being brave:flexible identities

WRITER Jemma Bowman

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01 02 03

What if your brand values are about being maverick? How do you apply the concepts of breaking rules and being free to logo management? For the surfing brand O’Neill04, their identity consists of their name and a wave—applied so loosely that there are almost infinite variations. However, this isn’t completely free reign or mismanagement; they’re not creating a hotchpotch of logos, they’re keeping enough recognisable elements—the reminder levers—that you still know who they are. And meanwhile they are staying true to their pioneering founder and their brand value of the ‘spirit of innovation’ (and giving their clothing designers plenty of scope for branded decoration in the process).

A different but also brave approach is that of the Scandinavian ferry company Viking Line, who reduce the brand to just four of the letters when they use it on merchandise, advertising, communications etc. This gives them a way of branding without using their logo. However, perhaps a pattern is a more expressive and evocative tool for this, such as the one Wordsworth Trust (see p2) use in a variety of ways to add branded texture or colour.

Another significant modern shift in identity control is the acknowledgement that logos can be treated playfully and creatively. Stemming from TV idents such as MTV, BBC2 and E4, other brands have followed suit, for example Pixar and Talk Talk. Tate and Lyle became Tate and Smile to highlight their Fair Trade efforts, replacing the logo across their packaging range. Even Warner Brothers, a corporate giant, sometimes shows a sense of humour, such as the chocolate version of their logo shown before Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. The V&A05 use their logo as part of straplines, giving them an ownable, cognitive and stylish approach—literally a ‘brand language’!

The Google06 logo is the behemoth of this group; they have created countless versions of their logo and continue to ‘play’ with it. They edit, recolour, embellish or animate the logo as they wish, associating themselves with whatever anniversary or quirk they choose. They don’t even retain all the letters since they are, according to Interbrand, in the top 10 most recognisable brands in the world. And it’s certainly a popular approach—they even have fan sites like www.logoogle.com. and they are number eight in Saatchi & Saatchi’s Lovemarks list.

For a brand manager, I think this can be unnerving territory but, if done well, it can ‘breathe life’ into the identity, the logo itself then becoming an ‘animate’ touchpoint for your brand. Even if you don’t take things that far, being willing to flex your identity and apply a bit of charm and expression can only say positive things about the organisation it belongs to.

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When I first worked on brand guidelines, in the late 1990s, they were full of absolutes: ‘always’, ‘never’, ‘must’ etc. They asserted that the brand marque is to be treated with respect and restraint. And that the parameters of the guidelines document were finite; no other options were permissible. The logic was that precise consistency maximised brand recognition and said ‘reliable, global and professional’ becausethat was what consumers wanted from their brands.

04 05 06

The Branding Issue

Sumo is a design company specialisingin the arts and cultural sector.We create great design which turns heads, grabs hearts and inspires audiences to attend the arts more often.

Sumo71 Westgate RoadNewcastle upon TyneNE1 1SG

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