Museums Going Global? Lights and Shadows of Leveraging a Museum Brand Internationally

INTRODUCTION Our society is literally, totally, obsessively hammered by hundreds of messages about various brands, that affect our tastes, our emotions, our ways of behaving. Branding remarkably shapes and models our economy and our culture and is invading areas of our lives we would have never imagined, such as education or sanity. Indeed, not only transnational giants such as Procter & Gamble or Unilever are implementing branding strategies, but also, surprisingly, institutions like museums, theoretically far and away from these concepts, clearly related to profit. Besides, it seems that just branding is not enough anymore for museums. They even aim at becoming famous global entities. The objective of this work is to investigate the meaning of going global for museums and the extent to which these institutions leverage their brands to internationalize themselves. The first section of the present work reviews the global branding literature. The advantages and disadvantages of establishing a global brand are critically examined, as well as the issues to be considered before the decision of branding globally is made. The fundamental duality between standardization and customization and global branding strategies are also analyzed. Since global branding is a social phenomenon also, contributes from sociologists, such as Ritzer and Klein are presented to provide the reader with a wider understanding. The consumers’ preference for global brands and the challenges that global giants will have to face, due to the increasingly sophisticated local companies, are finally examined. The museum’s world is then introduced. Their astounding renewal, which started in the last century, will be presented and commented. After being strongly criticized by the first avant-gardes, museums underwent a remarkable process of renewal, which involved their role, their goals, their functions and their intrinsic nature. Within this context of reinvention, museums opened their doors to managerial theories, practices and tools. Progressively, these institutions have also recognized the need for marketing, branding and positioning, due to the increasingly fierce competition among all the entertainment and leisure’s forms. 6