Must cma: Seizing Opportunity to Build Brand Awareness
- Blog Post
- Collection
- Strategic Plan
From fierce Chinese tomb warriors to Warhol’s Marilyn and Monet’s Water Lilies, the Cleveland Museum of Art wants audiences to know that it has a “must see” collection.
Image courtesy Cleveland Museum of Art.
One of the world’s most popular exhibitions, Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, is currently drawing record crowds to the Cleveland Museum of Art — one of only 5 US venues. Demand for tickets is strong locally and across the country. So far, ticket buyers have come from 48 states plus our neighbor to the north, Canada.
When visitors come to the Kusama exhibition, they also have the opportunity to experience a world-renowned, encyclopedic collection that’s always on display and always free. This offers a great opportunity to showcase important visitor favorites to new and returning audiences at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which is Cleveland’s number one attraction on TripAdvisor.
That idea of “must see” objects within a museum full of internationally renowned masterworks was the seed for the must cma campaign.
Caroline Guscott, Director of Communications & External Relations at the Cleveland Museum of Art explains more about the motivations behind the new campaign.
Why now? What inspired the need for must cma?
Summer is always a very busy season for the museum and with the Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors exhibition bringing in so many additional visitors, we thought this confluence really presented an opportunity to build brand awareness. It was an ideal time to launch an institutional campaign that would share the museum’s renowned collection with new and returning audiences, and to build on an idea I had years ago to showcase visitors’ favorite artworks — works people seem to be drawn to organically. We decided to seize the moment to design a fun, easily accessible, promotional campaign around eight artworks and add to their mythology by encouraging visitor engagement through social media (#mustcma).
Very importantly, the must cma campaign fulfills several aspects of the museum’s recent strategic plan, Making Art Matter — aspects like strengthening and sharpening the master brand and identity, creating awareness and visibility of our collection, and driving increased visitor participation and engagement.
What inspired the tagline must cma?
CMA is the acronym for Cleveland Museum of Art, so we wanted to have fun and play on the idea of “must see” artworks. This campaign is evergreen — it is easy to shift while staying under the must cma umbrella: must join, must explore, “must see,” and so on. There are many possibilities. What I hope happens is that it becomes a catchphrase for people and that when they come to visit or are thinking about visiting the museum, they understand quickly that there are things that they must see and do that happen at the CMA.
How will the must cma messaging be communicated to all audiences? How do you plan to leverage the power of social media to spread the word about the campaign?
This campaign is activated onsite and offsite. We are placing out-of-home applications such as kiosk signs and shuttle van wraps but are also employing traditional means of outreach — television, radio, print, direct marketing, and heavy digital usage — all of our e-communications and social media. We intend to incorporate terrific user-generated images that we find on our Instagram to highlight visitor engagement with the must cma artworks and the museum as a whole.
There is a robust on site marketing push — the collateral propels visitors throughout the building, looking for each of the must cma artworks. Each artwork is identified with a must cma label and featured on other signage, like café table tents and wayfinding stanchions. The museum’s ArtLens app includes a must cma tour and the objects are featured on the 40-foot digital wall in ArtLens Gallery.
Video is also important to the must cma campaign. We are taking our three-minute on-site video loop and condensing it into a powerful one minute online commercial. Recently, the online commercial for last year’s institutional brand campaign, For the Benefit of All the People, Forever, won an Emmy® award.
What is your call to action?
Not every art museum has a collection like this — the Cleveland Museum of Art is home to a collection of true masterworks. These eight artworks are not just art historically significant, they are also visitor favorites — they are “must see” artworks. We want people to come to the museum, we want them to see the art, and we want to see how people engage with the collection. The campaign calls out these specific objects for new and returning visitors, and hopefully along the way, people will discover other artworks that become favorites — this notion relates directly to the subhead of the campaign — “So much to discover. So much to CMA.”