On brand: How arts organisations are adopting new identities for the 21st century

For anyone involved in corporate branding – not least the consultants who rely on it to pay their mortgages – it’s serious business. But for those who think, like Shakespeare, that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, it may seem otherwise. And for myself, as somebody who long ago, before the honest world of music criticism beckoned, worked in corporate image-building, I remember much of it as 20 per cent substance, 80 per cent tosh.

But that said, optics matter these days, even in the arts where sending out the right messages and avoiding the wrong ones has become a tool of survival. And it’s interesting to see how many music organisations have taken this on board so vigorously that they’ve been prepared to spend time and resource on a change of name.

The Musician’s Benevolent Fund has become Help Musicians; the MCPS-PRS Alliance has become PRS for Music (a no-brainer that one, perhaps); the Sage Gateshead is now The Glasshouse; Colston Hall is now the Bristol Beacon; Aldeburgh Music is Britten Pears Arts. And most recently it’s been announced that the Royal Opera House is henceforth the Royal Ballet and Opera, while St John’s Smith Square will be Sinfonia Smith Square.

Different reasons lie behind these rebrands, but the last two – the ROH (as we should no longer say) and Sinfonia Smith Square – make useful case studies because they both involve the ditching of familiar, much-loved names in favour of something that suits the objectives of the organisation – but maybe not its public. So there’s risk involved, and advocacy needed.

With the ROH, the argument is that the existing name signifies a building rather than the activities of the companies who give it life. And as chief executive Alex Beard was keen to stress when we talked, those companies address an audience beyond the building itself, with productions broadcast to cinemas worldwide, and educational projects running in some 1,500 schools.

For Royal Ballet and Opera chief executive Alex Beard, and the hundreds of thousands of dance enthusiasts who attend performances each year, see the Royal Ballet as 'an essential part of the enterprise’ ©Karolina Kuras

That the building has symbolic potency, as opera houses do – think the Fenice, Venice or La Scala in Milan – he doesn’t deny. But current policy nonetheless prioritises activity over bricks and mortar. Beard is also keen to stress that ‘while a typical rebranding reflects some vision of the future, ours is different in that it’s catching up with long-term reality’.

What he means there is that for 46 years the Royal Opera and Royal Ballet have functioned side by side within the House, but only the Opera has had overall name recognition. ‘After the pandemic’, Beard explains, ‘we did some research and found that even among people you’d expect to know these things – professionals, civil servants, captain of industry – just two out of five understood that the Royal Ballet was an essential part of the enterprise’.

That had to change. And it’s changed very pointedly in that the new name puts the Ballet first. Beard says this wasn’t forced through ‘by the Ballet clamouring on the door’. He insists ‘we simply thought that RBO made a more satisfactory acronym than ROB. And B comes before O in the alphabet, which has force as an organisational principle in matters like this. Both considerations pointed us in the direction we took’.

As for the costs – at a time when the House is facing real-terms cuts of 20 per cent – he says much of the work has been done in-house: ‘the new name was entirely ours, no branding consultants involved. And new design on our logo was needed anyway because the existing one didn’t work on social media. The typeface was too light.

‘But whatever we’ve spent is justifiable because it leads to an increased perception of value for people who want to be associated with us – an example being our new principal partners Rolex who are now visibly supporting something more than one art form in one place.’ That, says Beard, translates into increased giving. A return on investment.

St John's Smith Square is due for a major refurbishment in 2027 and, with new Sinfonia Smith Square branding, is ready to embrace its new identity (Image courtesy of Sinfonia Smith Square)

Not dissimilar considerations lie behind the name-change at St John’s Smith Square, although the issues there are both more urgent and more complex. For a long while, Smith Square has had problems. It’s a glorious building of historical importance, but in poor shape, and apart from its choral festivals at Easter and Christmas, it struggles to pull audiences, with increasing competition from venues like St Martin-in-the-fields which has upped its game as a concert space.

The need to rethink how the building works is obvious. Consideration started back in 2021 when the training orchestra, South Bank Sinfonia, moved into the premises and the two organisations merged. Soon after that, a new CEO was found in Rosie Fraser. It’s significant that her background is not in arts management but in regenerating listed buildings at risk.

Under Fraser, everything came together: plans for a major refurbishment (scheduled for 2027) and for what comes after – because, as she says, ‘repairs are the easy bit. On top of that, we need to ensure that the building is adapted in the right way, to realise our vision of what it should be doing – and make it financially sustainable’.

Creating a new identity has been part of that process. And although the new name could be criticised as vague – ‘Sinfonia Smith Square’ doesn’t explain much – it does reflect the coming-together of two disparate entities, an orchestra and a hall, that are now effectively the same enterprise with a common goal.

Aigul Akhmetshina as Carmen and Piotr Beczała as Don Jose in the rebranded Royal Opera's production of Carmen ©2024 Camilla Greenwell

‘When the merger happened’, says Fraser, ‘it brought a new energy, but things weren’t connected up: we were running two identities, two websites, two sets of accounts. Now the connection is complete, which makes things easier for everyone – not least our audiences when they encounter our new online ticketing software’.

That said, the new name could seem to privilege the orchestra above the building. There’s a risk that Smith Square might appear so totally the fiefdom of the band that other artists will think twice about using the space. And dropping ‘St John’s’ severs the last links with the building’s past as a church: a past that lends a certain resonance, especially for those mainstay audiences who come for the seasonal choral repertoire. There are reasons why people want to hear their Good Friday Passion at Smith Square rather than the Barbican, and it’s not just a matter of who’s singing.

Fraser understands all this, but isn’t fazed by it. One of her goals, she says, is to make the hall ‘a more welcoming space’ for visiting artists (with plans to attract bigger names than tend to come at the moment). As for ecclesiastical heritage, she says ‘we’d never wish to rewrite history: that this was a church is part of its ethos. But you have to remember that it suffered serious wartime bombing; and what remained was, by the 1960s, at risk of being knocked down and replaced with a car park. Thankfully it didn’t happen, and whatever we do in our refurb will be done sensitively. We want the building to thrive. But that means accepting it’s no longer a church: it’s a concert hall’.

So it’s farewell St John’s. And no doubt, given time, ‘Sinfonia Smith Square’ will feel as meaningful as ‘LSO St Luke’s – except the saint there still gets token recognition. Does it matter? Maybe not. Maybe what matters is the future not the past. But as a brand consultant would be quick to tell you, names have potency – and our attachment to them has a power as well.