American Express OPEN Forum: Powering Small Business Success

Project RE:Brand

Breathing new life into business with the help of branding experts.

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WOMAN
American Express Open is empowering business owners. Follow our new mini-series as we pair different small businesses, each with their own experienced branding agency who is also a small business. Mocada opened its doors ten years ago. Today the museum showcases work by African artists from around the world. Located in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York, Mocada was founded by Laurie Cumbo as a direct result of her graduate thesis.
LAURIE CUMBO
My name is Laurie Cumbo. I’m the Fonder and Executive Director of the Mocada Museum. Mocada is the museum of contemporary African Diasporan arts. When we talk about the African Diaspora, we’re talking about the continent of Africa and one of the greatest migration stories in world history. We have an exciting gift shop. It has items from the local Diaspora community in Brooklyn, as well as internationally. Artisans have an opportunity to sell their work here at the museum.
QUESTION
Laurie and her colleague, Kimberly(?), will be working closely with experienced New York City branding agency TODA(?). TODA’s mission is to help rebrand Mocada in order to help protect the organization as a serious institution.
LAURIE CUMBO
Mocada’s now at its ten-year phase and there’s a certain magic that happens anytime you’ve been doing something for ten years. There are all these different looks for the museum. But the challenge is that there’s no stream-lined identity. So that these different things don’t necessarily go with one another.
MARCOS
My role in the Mocada project is to deal with (Inaudible) and to really keep an eye on what’s needed from our client’s point of view.
DORIE
My role as a designer at TODA is to work with the team and to be working in a really hands-on way.
MARCOS
And we create a variety of ideas and different visions of what a brand can look like and present it to our client. So we’re here today to talk about everything that’s on your mind.
LAURIE CUMBO
One of the challenges that we’ve had is that our logo is designed into the architecture of space. It’s embedded into the windows. It’s embedded into a lot of things that (Overlap)
MARCOS
Really?
LAURIE CUMBO
… cannot be changed.
MARCOS
To learn today that they invested, um, money in their architecture years ago and regularly placed into the windows permanently the … the logo(?) type was a little bit of news for us.
DORIE
Their logo is not the only thing that defines the brand.
LAURIE CUMBO
When we first started in our new space, we utilized interns to do a lot of our design work.
MARCOS
Uh-hm.
LAURIE CUMBO
The challenge was the consistency.
MARCOS
There are a number of challenges that they have, whether it’s how their store works and how people experience walking into their place for the first time … to tackling this idea of celebrating their ten years.
LAURIE CUMBO
I would really like for TODA to make us look very contemporary, very sleek, very sexy, very stylish, very in the know, very avant-garde, very international, very global.
DORIE
(Laughs)
LAURIE CUMBO
Um … and all those things in one.
DORIE
In stages involved in a branding campaign always start with understanding the needs of the client. Then from there, we begin a research phase.
MARCOS
And then go towards what’s a constant development phase.
DORIE
They reflect one and then we apply that direction further.
LAURIE CUMBO
One thing that I would really like to see happen is that we have a well-designed, consistent marketing package.
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WOMAN
Join us next time when we find out the embedded logo presents an opportunity or challenge for TODA. And we discover it’s Marcos(?) and Dorie(?) are able to capture the essence of Mocada and translate that into a range of rebranding directions.
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