In a postmodern world—the one we live in now—the AUTHORITY, the curator, the author, the expert—anyone whose charge it is to create grand classifications and assign meaning—has been demoted. This is our Internet paradigm, is it not? The authority is now just one voice among many.
What does this mean for museum branding?
When you think overnight courier, what comes to mind? I'm guessing FedEx is probably at the top of the list. This was not always the case.
Let me take you back to the moment when a budding company called Federal Express slew the Goliath of its industry—Emery. Let's take a look at what happened and what you should learn from Emery's horrible death.
If you are not marketing and innovating, you will be eliminated from the market place. In business this happens all the time. More than 80% of the Fortune 500 companies from 1955 no longer exist. Maybe this sounds like an entirely different world from yours.
I'd suggest that it is not.
Nothing is not nothing, but something essential that we should be careful to preserve in our lives.
I took my family on vacation to a place with no electricity and no running water. We stayed there for ten days. It was electronics cold turkey, and at the end, the consensus among my three children—9, 12 and 15—was that we had stayed too long. I'm inclined to believe that the problem was that we did not stay long enough.
"As luck would have it, just at that moment Liberty—their canine sidekick—barks, jumps up from his bed and runs right into Uncle Pete’s time machine and ZAP! he disappears."
You think you are in control. "You"—your sense of self—your highly developed, amazingly capable conscious mind, housed in the big wrinkly hemispheric thing that we most often associate with the brain: the neocortex—is not really in control as much as it thinks. It's just easier for all of us to carry on with this delusion.
Responsive design has been around in various forms for a few years, but it is now coming into its own, and should be a serious consideration for any new website project.
