Stories of Cultural Connections
Louvre Abu Dhabi
Purpose
- Transforming organisations
- Building brands
- Shaping places
What we did
- Brand strategy
- Naming
- Visual identity
- Verbal identity
- Campaign
The Louvre is the most well-known and visited museum in the world. Transporting its brand from central Paris to an unknown island in Abu Dhabi is no straight-forward task. It raises manifold questions about what the two museums share and how they’re different. Questions which, two years after opening, Louvre Abu Dhabi still weren’t clear on the answers to. While the partnership between Abu Dhabi and France sought to create the Emirate’s first museum and inspire a museum-going nation, it had become more a tourist spot than a cultural space for the local community. We were appointed to help bring unity and clarity to what the Louvre described as “France’s largest cultural project abroad.”
Finding purpose
Continuous discord cracks, then craters organisations. After speaking to many teams from security to curation to director to government, it was evident that people didn’t understand the museum strategy nor what it meant for them. We asked a simple question: what changes in visitors between entering and exiting the museum? The answer: the realisation that we have more in common than we know, on account of the museum’s curatorial approach of presenting parallel artefacts from distant times, geographies, and cultures side-by-side.
This led us to the brand platform, Stories of Cultural Connections, which in turn led to a new, shared vision and mission. Stories of Cultural Connections informed everything; organisational culture, work processes, visual and verbal identity, visitor experience and wayfinding. Amongst the turmoil, the brand identity had confused itself. We developed a new design system, influenced by the quadrangle forms of the museum’s walls, creating a modular framework that flexes and stretches for every format. A new trilingual voice broke down cultural barriers to open the museum up to all.
Small habits lead to big changes
Brands are the accumulative actions of every employee – the only strategy the visitor sees is the execution. We worked with all levels of the organisation to weave the new strategy into the day-to-day habits of every staff member. We made it meaningful, understandable and actionable through training sessions, handbooks and pledges. The result was a joined-up organisation. A singular vision that everybody owned. A new, empathetic work culture. As silo walls dissolved and internal inefficiencies evaporated, what remained was a museum able to focus on its raison d'être; to bring culture from around the world to its local community.
