Curating as a Brand Design Tool in Creative Organizations

Today the role of curating extends beyond the museum field: websites are curated, commercial firms establish functional roles entitled “curator”, and individuals in the creative economy use social media platforms to curate their lives and cultural product as brands. Curating has been extended and elevated today because design has become a more critical and integrative factor in brand development on both the organizational and individual levels (Kennedy, 2012). Curating is one way to manage the brand’s meaning. It is a chaordic system (Hock, 2005; van Einatten, 2001) that situates the complex process of editing, merchandising and documenting the brand’s offering in co-created situations with the customer. Yet, the literature is lacking in explicitly exploring and documenting how curating is used in branding. Building on the perspective of Mark & Pearson (2001) that brands are about managing meaning; and the work of Gloppen (2011) and Lee, Chung and Nam (2013), this paper extends the brand touchpoint wheel and the designable touchpoints model as a heuristic to explore the ways in which curating is a methodology used by creative brands to operationalize the brand experience. The research methodology used is a series of interviews with curators in three creative organizations. Ultimately the authors propose that intentionally curated brands establish a strategic means to scale the brand and extend its scope. The paper will explore the role of curation in two fashion brands and a not-for-profit arts organization and identify significant shifts in branding within creative markets.