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."
Scott Billings is a freelance journalist
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."
Scott Billings is a freelance journalist
National Media Museum, Bradford
Formerly the National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television, a rebranding exercise with Leeds consultancy Thompson Brand Partners renamed the venue as the National Media Museum at the end of 2006.
The museum had faced two problems: visitor numbers were failing and its name was hard to remember. In the year after the relaunch, visitor numbers rose by 10 per cent and accurate recall of the museum's name also improved (although a potential abbreviation to NMM can cause some confusion with the National Maritime Museum).
The National Media Museum belongs to the National Museum of Science and Industry, which includes the Science Museum, London and the National Railway Museum, York. It is currently exploring how a venue in the Science Museum might boost its profile. It is working with Event Communications and Thompson to look at how a London presence might be best expressed.
Formerly the National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television, a rebranding exercise with Leeds consultancy Thompson Brand Partners renamed the venue as the National Media Museum at the end of 2006.
The museum had faced two problems: visitor numbers were failing and its name was hard to remember. In the year after the relaunch, visitor numbers rose by 10 per cent and accurate recall of the museum's name also improved (although a potential abbreviation to NMM can cause some confusion with the National Maritime Museum).
The National Media Museum belongs to the National Museum of Science and Industry, which includes the Science Museum, London and the National Railway Museum, York. It is currently exploring how a venue in the Science Museum might boost its profile. It is working with Event Communications and Thompson to look at how a London presence might be best expressed.
Great North Museum
Tyne & Wear Museums' £26m Great North Museum will bring together collections from the Hancock Museum, Newcastle University's Museum of Antiquities, the Shefton Museum and the Hatton Gallery.
Its upward arrow primary visual identity, by Agenda Design Associates, symbolises the museum's northern roots, as well as suggesting "vitality and excitement".
The graphic device and the repeated use of the word "great" will be adapted by Agenda for a marketing activity and merchandising in the run up to the museum's launch in spring 2009.
Tyne & Wear Museums' £26m Great North Museum will bring together collections from the Hancock Museum, Newcastle University's Museum of Antiquities, the Shefton Museum and the Hatton Gallery.
Its upward arrow primary visual identity, by Agenda Design Associates, symbolises the museum's northern roots, as well as suggesting "vitality and excitement".
The graphic device and the repeated use of the word "great" will be adapted by Agenda for a marketing activity and merchandising in the run up to the museum's launch in spring 2009.
Museum of London
Working with Coley Porter Bell on brand strategy, the Museum of London has harmonised its three services, renaming the Museum in Docklands as Museum of London Docklands and the Museum of London Archaeology Service as Museum of London Archaeology.
The main visual identity is a multicoloured representation of the shape of London throughout history with a colour palette used to distinguish each of the three services.
The identity was created in collaboration with staff from every department, who met to discuss its roll-out. This in turn promoted greater internal interaction and understanding of the size of the museum's operations - one of the objectives of the branding.
Working with Coley Porter Bell on brand strategy, the Museum of London has harmonised its three services, renaming the Museum in Docklands as Museum of London Docklands and the Museum of London Archaeology Service as Museum of London Archaeology.
The main visual identity is a multicoloured representation of the shape of London throughout history with a colour palette used to distinguish each of the three services.
The identity was created in collaboration with staff from every department, who met to discuss its roll-out. This in turn promoted greater internal interaction and understanding of the size of the museum's operations - one of the objectives of the branding.
Museum of Sheffield
Sheffield Museums and Galleries Trust relaunched in May this year as Museums Sheffield following a branding process with Jane Wentworth Associates. The group compromises the Millennium Gallery, Weston Park, Graves Gallery and Bishops' House.
Prior to the branding process there was a "very woolly" mission statement, says head of marketing and communications Adam Lumb. Only after a vision was in place - following workshops with all 150 staff members - was designer Ned Campbell brought in to represent the organisation.
Rather than specifically launching the "new logo", the branding first appeared in May this year alongside a touring Vivienne Westwood show at the Millennium Gallery.
Sheffield Museums and Galleries Trust relaunched in May this year as Museums Sheffield following a branding process with Jane Wentworth Associates. The group compromises the Millennium Gallery, Weston Park, Graves Gallery and Bishops' House.
Prior to the branding process there was a "very woolly" mission statement, says head of marketing and communications Adam Lumb. Only after a vision was in place - following workshops with all 150 staff members - was designer Ned Campbell brought in to represent the organisation.
Rather than specifically launching the "new logo", the branding first appeared in May this year alongside a touring Vivienne Westwood show at the Millennium Gallery.
