Why Art Galleries Need To Be Brands
The origins of what we call a brand today can be traced back to the earliest history of humanity. Primitive clans marked their territory with totems. Family badges showed the affiliation to relatives. The marking of objects can already be found in early cultures, such as in ancient Egypt. For example, bricks were provided with symbols to superficially mark their origin. In the Middle Ages, the guilds claimed their goods to be labeled to distinguish them from those of the competition.
The brand as a system, after today’s popular understanding, begins with the industrial revolution. Back then businesses began to produce for mass markets and consumers faced an abundance of products and consumption opportunities. Shops and purchase advice yielded to supermarkets and self-service. Products became black boxes for consumers what led to an urgent need for confidence-building measures. Thus brand building became an elementary part of business management in order to compete.
In a consumer society, then as now, brands have the task to give a sense of direction — formulated more radically direct consumers. Brands must be a (quality) promise to minimize uncertainty like purchase anxieties. Brands arrange our lifeworld, determine identities and create communities.
The conditions that apply to consumer markets and define the need for strong brands, can be transferred to the art market, especially in the 21st century. The formerly exclusive art market, accessible to a small part of society, is rapidly democratizing. The consumption of art becomes more accessible. But also confusing.
The fundamental driving force of this development is the increasing digitization of the art market. Artists, galleries and auction houses are omnipresent on the internet, especially social media. Countless online platforms offer marketplaces for the purchase of art. The Internet and social media are reducing entry barriers that will make the art market not only more accessible to consumers, but also allow anyone to position and stage themselves as artists or dealers.
Today, the established art market is facing a multitude of emerging players in the form of online marketplaces and self-marketing hobby-artists. Consumers on the other hand are experiencing a confusing oversupply of affordable art marketplaces, „artist”-Instagram- accounts and Pinterest-galleries. This is precisely where the analogy to the post-industrial mass market can be drawn. Works of art become black boxes. Collectors (consumers) lose their orientation and trust.
The former gatekeeper role of galleries is obsolete. Not in spite of this, or perhaps because of this, galleries as part of a democratized and qualitatively diluted art market have a crucial duty: Being a brand. To be a brand that collectors trust. That legitimizes art and thus delimited it from hobby art. That leads the helpless collector, is a seal of quality and thereby reduces fears. Galleries need to focus on their skills. The competence to discover and curate good art. The competence of the expertise and the relevant processing and communication of contents.
Read more about how galleries, in the face of a digital world and millennial collectors generation, can successfully position themselves as a brand in “Go Social or Go Home“.
NO SERVICE 24/7 is a berlin-based full-service agency for strategic brand communication operating at the intersection of arts, culture and lifestyle.
Feel free to get in touch for further insights and ideas on how to successfully market art in 2018. — contact@noservice.today
