Is the Museum Brand God Dead?

Has the museum brand met its maker? Are brands just a modernist vestige of 20th-century marketing? Do museums even need to bother anymore?

I originally wrote this article in response to a reader comment more than ten years ago. Much of it is still relevant to today’s museum marketing landscape. I’ve revised the original accounting for some of the many changes in the museum sector since then.

“Museums are not meant to be experienced in a consistent or predictable fashion. Branding to, as you suggest, standardize the visitor experience is a modernist notion that is unhelpful for today’s cultural institutions.” —Lily (commenter)

Is the museum brand god dead?

Lily suggests that postmodern thought—the tearing down and parsing of the notion that one must appeal to authority to make sense of one’s experience—applies to museum brands. Bear with me as I offer some background first on what a brand is, and then take up this question of a paradigm shift that might alter what is required of a museum brand in 2025. If you just want the answer first, it’s yes: museums still have to bother.

As to the other question about the brand god, you’ll have to read on for that.

What is a museum brand?

Indeed, what is a brand anyway?

Short answer: A museum brand—like any brand—is whatever your audiences hold in their minds about you.

That’s it.

You have a brand whether you choose to exercise any control over it or not.

It’s not your colors, your logo, your tagline, or your collection. It’s what they—your visitors, members, funders, community—remember about those things. It’s the sum total of the images and ideas they associate with you. It’s not necessarily the truth, but it is their truth. (You are a brand consumer as well, and your internalized truth counts—but what really matters is the brand as understood by those who attend your programs, renew their membership, or advocate for your continued existence.)

So, what does the public hold in their minds about you? For good or ill, that is your brand.

Branding, therefore, is all the things you do to bring your consumer’s truth closer to the truth about you. Your marketing, communications, exhibition selection, building, educational experiences, and visitor services practices all contribute to your brand. Your audiences carry a mental model of you that includes logos, memorable experiences, favorite exhibitions—or the staff member who helped them find the bathroom when they were flustered with their toddler in tow. It might also include the time they found conflicting opening hours online. Unfortunately, negative emotions stick. So you must be careful. A brand is fragile, built of countless small moments.

The branding process

How healthy is your brand? Do you clearly understand who your audiences are—and how well you’re meeting their emotional and intellectual needs? Can you look at your exhibitions, programs, and communications from their perspective, not your own?

When we work with public institutions, one of the first steps we take is to visually diagram the mental models held by their audiences (see Brand Value Map). What is the relationship between what the institution thinks it offers and what the audience believes it offers? Adjusting, realigning, and improving that gap is what we call branding. (This assumes a strong core offering—product issues are a separate post.)

So let’s assume for a moment that your institution’s value is not fully understood by your audiences.

We are in the habit of relying on this authority to help us understand the world—to see the proper “order of things.”

What aspects of your offer have real emotional value for your audience? What do they care about most? Answering that begins with a deceptively simple question: Who are your audiences?

A detailed answer—at the level of individual personas—reveals which audience segments naturally connect to different aspects of your brand. It also shows you which segments could connect with more effort. But you can’t guess. You have to investigate.

Once you know what each audience needs from you, you gain the insight to communicate in a way that resonates—one that speaks their language and meets their needs, not just your goals. “Effective” communication in this context means emotionally relevant and culturally attuned. When branding is done well, your marketing becomes both more efficient and more meaningful. But the sequence matters: Understand, then act. The brand idea comes before the logo.

Museum branding and the erosion of authority

For most of human history, we accepted the top-down authority of institutions—cultural, religious, scientific—to organize knowledge. We were trained to look to these sources to explain the “order of things,” packaged into taxonomies, interpretive texts, and “expert” commentary. This imposed order assigns meaning, packages it and doles it out in discrete, easily digestible forms like museum labels, names for things, or species designations. Thanks to Science we understand that a house cat (felis catus) is an entirely different category of animal from a dog (canis lupus familiaris) even though both may be beloved house pets.

The postmodern movement calls into question this way of chopping up the world. Originating in 19^th Century philosophy with Friedrich Nietzsche (who famously pointed out the increasing irrelevancy and waning authority of the church with “God is dead.”) and Søren Kierkegaard, a rebellion has been mounted against such inherited hierarchies. Why, they asked, must one’s conception of the world always be handed down from trusted authorities? These thinkers and their philosophical heirs have proposed that an individual has the power—and the right—to create meaning and to decide what is personally relevant. This suggests that how we give meaning to things—how we distinguish one category from another—might just be arbitrary. Or, it could mean that all systems are equally valid, thus giving each individual the power to create her own world of meaning and parcel it up as she sees fit.

The authority, the curator, the author, the expert—anyone whose charge it is to create grand classifications and assign meaning—has been demoted.

I appreciate this idea, and it’s what I hear Lily gesturing toward. Who are we, she asks, to dictate how a person experiences our museum? Isn’t that contrary to what we now value: agency, personalization, lived experience?

A museum brand that seeks to “standardize” experience could be seen as tone-deaf in a world that champions multiplicity and co-creation. We live, after all, in an era where a visitor may post their own interpretation of your exhibit on TikTok and gain more traction than your official marketing campaign.

I’m reminded of the preface to The Order of Things, in which Michel Foucault quotes Borges’ fictional Chinese encyclopedia classifying animals in categories like: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’.”

In a postmodern—or even post-2020—world, this typology isn’t just possible. It’s relatable.

The authority, the curator, the author, the expert—anyone whose charge it is to create grand classifications and assign meaning—has been demoted. The authority is now just one voice among many. In our digital and attention-fragmented culture, this is the water we swim in.

In this second quarter of the 21^st Century, who is to say that Borges’ list, with its amusing classifications, is not just as good as the scientific version we use with its arcane Latin designations?

So what does this mean for museum branding in 2025?

Has branding become irrelevant—an outdated system that should no longer hold sway?

Nike has moved beyond “Just Do It.” Apple no longer urges us to “Think Different.” These brand giants now say less, trusting their visual cues, product experiences, and cultural presence to do the work. Is this a sign of a post-branding future—or a luxury reserved for the brand elite?

Let’s be clear: a brand is not your logo, slogan, or style guide. It’s not even your core concept or brand idea. A brand is a living thing: a constellation of concepts, memories, and emotional cues carried around by real people who interact with your museum.

So you have a brand whether you choose to exercise any control over it or not. It is there, inside and outside of your museum, walking through your front entrance (or not, as the case may be) blurry and nondescript, or sharply in focus and shared by many. Your brand lives, breathes, evolves, grows, and fades as you nourish it with whatever you feed it: exhibits, ads, events, news, images, anything and everything that reaches people’s minds.

So, can museums opt out?

Freedom or fragmentation?

Have we reached that place where a person can and should hold any idea about you that she likes, experience your offers just as she chooses, and make of that experience whatever she will? Does such freedom now exist? Freedom from curatorial authority, freedom from conceptual frameworks, freedom from the authority of the artist, the learned, the brand manager?

It’s tempting. It appeals to our values of freedom, access, and equity. But I believe it’s also a trap.

Maybe you do need to be more than the sum of the parts of your collections, more than the object of random thoughts unmolded by concerted and coherent effort.

As much as I would like to imagine it, we are not free. We are not free from our desires and preconceptions. We are not free from our basic needs and our primitive modes of cognition. We use patterns and mental shortcuts to make sense of the world. We resort to stories to understand and communicate ideas. These things (shortcomings?) make us human, and underlie all our everyday choices. We borrow, we reuse and recycle. It’s just too damn hard to create ideas from scratch. So we don’t.

We can’t.

We know from brain science that our decisions, our ideas, our very thoughts are not ultimately characterized by freedom or originality. Every minute of every day we make use of what is given to us. We think we are rational and independent of outside influence, but in fact we are ever the victims of manipulation and coercion both subtle and profound. We are driven by our emotions and our basic needs. We think we are free only because this notion of ourselves feels good and right. Nothing more.

In liberating me, you would, I believe, unfortunately lose me to those who do not share your optimism about the human capacity for invention.

In a postmodern vision of a brand, you would leave me alone. You would not bother me with your brand idea. My decision of what museum to go to, what exhibit to see, would be left entirely up to my free will. And in liberating me, you would, I believe, unfortunately lose me to those who do not share your optimism about the human capacity for invention. You would lose me to those whose more pragmatic schemes DO employ the tools of marketing and persuasion, whose use of mechanisms such as branding—that accursed spawn of modern marketing—serve to foil your best-laid postmodern plans for the release of my free will.

You will lose me to a better brand and wonder why.

That brand might not even be a museum.

So: Is the museum brand god dead?

Maybe you are supported by the state and do not need to market yourself. Maybe your only competition is your own past best endeavors. Maybe you operate above the fray, outside of the need to attract, or maybe the raw magnetism of your collection is sufficient attraction in its own right.

But maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s just not enough.

Maybe museums are in the same not-yet-liberated world as everyone else. Maybe your craft, your inventions, your products are worth the added effort of figuring out how to impress upon me—your audience—why I should care. Maybe, just maybe, you are in competition for the same hearts and minds, for the same dollars and devotion as everyone else.

Maybe the idea of your museum brand—the answer to the question “Why do you matter to me?”—is not irrelevant at all. Maybe you do need to be more than the sum of the parts of your collections, more than the object of random thoughts unmolded by concerted and coherent effort. Maybe you do need a brand after all—lovely animals drawn with fine camel-hair brushes notwithstanding …

Does your museum need an affordable way to improve its brand today?

Because we know that not everyone needs or can afford our full process, we created a guided tutorial package for our foundational brand strategy tool: the Brand Pyramid. Watch the video for a preview.

For more information on this brand strategy tutorial, visit here where you will find a fuller explanation and link to a free download of the first video.

Illustration by Anne Mieth for Tronvig Group