The next four or five decades are going to be an important time for cultural branding. Branding has long entered sport (Manchester United), the arts (Tate), music (Vienna Philharmonic) and culture generally in a big way, both for better and worse. For better: because it makes them more professional, more effective and more available. For worse: because it inevitably has the effect of commercialising them.
Huge cultural organizations are increasingly becoming global brands – the Louvre moving into Dubai is an example. Three or four very well known universities now have campuses all over the world. These aren’t campuses in the traditional sense, they are franchises – the word ‘Columbia’ or ‘Harvard’, for instance, will be treated as a franchised brand. Not all of it will be a good thing. But if it means that first rate education or culture can be made more widely accessible , it’s not all bad either. And branding is the means by which it will happen.
Some argue that this will mean an increasingly homogeneous and bland world. This is not true. No matter how globalised the world is or becomes in terms of universities, galleries, or whatever we are talking about today, there will always be new companies, new people, new ideas that pop up. Even the ubiquitous Starbucks is now re-styling many of its outlets as neighbourhood coffee joints with only a small Starbucks endorsement.
So I don’t think we need to worry about a world in which everything is the same everywhere. Like culture itself, successful brands are forever changing and adapting – producing a new experience for their audiences. Cultural organisations that can harness the power of brands will benefit hugely over the coming decades because their brand will clarify what they do and what they stand for to a broad audience. This will provide the means to keep young artists in business, preserve ancient culture for future generations, bring international sport to remote locations and so on. Branding, it could be said, is the greatest gift commerce has given to culture.
