Why the Guggenheim and Other Museums Are Hiring Brand Officers

Asked to think about what defines a museum, and most people will point to the institution’s collection or, in some cases, its location. Increasingly, however, what defines an art museum is its brand and the associated messaging—particularly in crowded museum environments like New York City, where institutions have to distinguish themselves to attract members. Consequently, a growing number of museums in and outside of the U.S. now pay a great deal of attention to developing a brand. Consider the Studio Museum in Harlem, which last year inaugurated a new ‘graphic identity’ to herald its long-anticipated reopening. More recently, the Guggenheim appointed its first chief brand officer, Tina Vaz, who told Observer that the museum’s branding is less about what is on display and more about the idea that “we were founded as a museum of the future, so that is very much part of our DNA.”

This futurism starts with the architecture. There’s the eye-catching and curvaceous Frank Lloyd Wright building in Manhattan and its Frank Gehry-designed outposts in Bilbao, Spain and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (expected to open sometime next year). The New York City building opened in 1959 on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and “began our engagement with architecture, which is also very consistent across all of our museums, which are these very transformative architectural spaces. We’ve always been at the forefront of introducing new voices and new visions in modern and contemporary art.” Or to put it another way, an edgy building hints at the edgy art inside.

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However, what it means for an art museum to have a brand more broadly may be difficult to put one’s finger on. “A brand is a point of view that lets us appeal to audiences through both their reason and feelings,” said Paul Dien, who since 2023 has been in charge of branding at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Before coming to the museum, Dien had the same job at the GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles, and the transition from a pop culture site to an art museum was “not easy.”) Vaz—who said her role and others like it reflect the changing nature of museum marketing and institutions’ increasing investment in the visitor experience—referred to the Guggenheim’s numerous locations as an “international constellation—we’re very much an outward-facing, cross-cultural, transnational brand,” but she defined the term as “a set of values that you stand for and the ways in which audiences experience you.”

Museums must also grapple with questions about what branding ought to accomplish. For businesses, a brand is not the product itself but an impression offered by marketers that aims to lead buyers to the product. General Mills, for instance, is not a brand, but a manufacturer of brands—Betty Crocker, Cheerios and Pillsbury among them—that produce a range of products. Robert Litan, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that a “brand is how the suppliers want you to perceive the product.” The brand of Bombas is wrapped up in charitable donations of socks and undergarments, while that of Seventh Generation cleaning products is focused on sustainability—in those cases, the brand has less to do with the products themselves and more to do with positioning the corporation as a good citizen.

“With an art museum, the brand could be ‘cool, fun place to go learn new stuff’ or an experience that teaches one refined tastes,” Litan said. Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has become part of the brand of the Louvre in Paris because it is the “must-see item in the museum,” said John Silvia, founder and chief executive officer of Dynamic Economic Strategy investment advisory. On the other hand, the Guggenheim’s brand, according to Kathryn Graddy, a professor of economics at Brandeis University and dean of its business school who echoed Vaz’s earlier assertion, is “its modern and fantastic architecture,” rather than any specific artworks within it. “I will try to visit the Guggenheim in any city there is one.”

Different museums handle branding their institutions in their own ways. Some, like the Guggenheim, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art and the Broad in Los Angeles, appoint people for this task, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art hired branding agency Wolff Olins to work out its messaging. One of the outcomes of that hire was the official adoption of the nickname “The Met” (and the associated logo) on all the institution’s marketing and social media accounts in a rebrand that inspired strong opinions. Writing for Vulture, Justin Davidson said, “The whole ensemble looks like a red double-decker bus that has stopped short, shoving the passengers into each other’s backs. Worse, the entire top half of the new logo consists of the word the.”

But a brand is neither a logo nor a slogan, although they may be part of the branding process. The Guggenheim recently unveiled its new logo: a large black G inside of which are listed the museum’s four locations (the fourth being the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice). The front steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art became iconic thanks to the film “Rocky,” but the museum’s brand is less a reflection of any particular space than “an expression of the cultural zeitgeist,” Dien said. For the Guggenheim, space is much more central to its brand.

“I do think people make the association of art and architecture; that’s very consistent across all of our museums,” Vaz said of the institution’s architecturally distinctive buildings. “A spirit of creative risk-taking is very much what people associate with us. I think they expect to see or learn something they didn’t know before, or they expect to have some kind of transformative experience with art—some sort of act of discovery.”