As the Marketing Manager at Wysing i recently attended an Arts Marketing day www.a-m-a.org.uk  in London and certainly the key note speech was incredible ….Robert Jones of Brand design agency Wolff Olins www.wolffolins.com    spoke about ‘What do galleries stand for ?’

He emphahsised how all aspects of the business should be inspired by the brand …but he recognised that Brand is a dirty word in public art galleries so instead looked at an organisations’ values and what it stood for …this he said was pretty much the same as the brand.

he quoted the work they had done at the Tate ten years ago with the phrase Look Again Think Again … how art began democratising itself through just that phrase and alongside new buildings and new strategies has seen the phenomenal growth of the Tate over the last ten years with regards to audiences and profile.  www.Tate.org.uk

he also said in the future people will be less passive consumers and as they are already very very active participants and consumers and so now galleries and their web portals have become platforms on which people can do things for themselves - platforms of activity.  Brands are now platforms.  Now we have a different less emotional commitment to a brand and we are more interested in what we as individuals can do with an organisation … not only what it stands for.

Brand loyalty is therefore less secure than in previous times.

 As we take our own Wysing website into new and adventurous territory in the coming months and years this will remain in our minds as we hope to provide access to more individuals and communities from around the world who are interested in what we stand for and what we offer to both artists and the public alike - without perhaps ever having to actually visit Wysing itself in rural Cambridgeshire…

 Already our long established International and National Residency programme past present and future takes our work into countries and places that we could not previously reach and as we all enter an expanding exploding global ‘market place’ Wysing as a model for art practice, for artists residencies, for experimentation and risk taking in the visual arts and for mentoring and support to studio holders and visiting artists alike will become a model we hope other organisations, artists, curators and individuals worldwide will want to work with and be inspired by.

The Tate holds an annual weekend called Come Play and these words struck me as something we encourage artists to do on site here at Wysing - to experiment to develop their practice as well as encouraging the public to participate and be part of our programme - often in a friendly accessible perhaps even comic way to encourage understanding and engagement in the process of making art itself.