The Breman Announces Rebrand Campaign

The Breman Museum has unveiled a redesigned logo and a new branding campaign that is aimed at freshening up the public face it presents to the world.

The campaign that debuted earlier this month is also part of The Breman’s attempt to expand as a performance venue in its Spring Street auditorium and elsewhere in the city.

Significantly, The Breman, which is properly called the William Breman Jewish Heritage and Holocaust Museum, omits any mention of that in its new design scheme. Gone, too, is the big blue Jewish Star of David. What takes its place are two triangles, set one on top of each other and “The Breman” in bold black letters.

It’s a clean, simple design that provides the museum with an infinite number of design choices to boost visits to its important collection of Southern Jewish historical relics and its comprehensive program of Holocaust history and education.

The new marketing campaign has a more informal and youthful approach.

The rebranding effort, which came after two years of focus groups, interviews in the Atlanta community and discussions by the organization’s board, was ironically helped along by the recent pandemic. Because of public health concerns, attendance at the museum dropped sharply. The museum’s primary focus on gallery visits gave way to a stronger commitment to online programs of various kinds. The question, then, for the board and the professional staff was how to give The Breman a stronger identity, so that people would be moved to participate.

The recent chair of the museum board, Adam Koplan, noted in a press briefing in connection with the redesign that getting people interested in the facility was not only about getting them to look at what was hanging on the walls. The old slogan, “more than a museum,” seemed to fail to adequately describe what the organization was attempting to do.

“You go out into the community, and we’re not as known in the ways that we want to be known as,” Koplan commented. “And to some degree, there isn’t necessarily a glue that binds everything together in a way that people can clearly see who we are in all of the different kinds of things that we do. This was a challenge for us.”

In her five years as head of The Breman Museum, Leslie Gordon has put more emphasis on event programming.

Earlier studies by outside consultants had convinced board members that the future of museums must be more than framed pictures hung on the wall or objects displayed under glass. If the museum was to grow it had to become what Koplan described as a gathering space with frequent events that drove people to come.

It was what motivated the museum to hire its current executive director, Leslie Gordon, five years ago. She had managed the Rialto Center for the Arts and over the 15 years she was there, had built it into an impressive performing arts venue for Georgia State University.

Her charge in heading up The Breman was to transform the facility into a cultural center and community gathering place. Despite the restriction imposed by the COVID pandemic, that’s the direction The Breman is rapidly moving.

“COVID was a time for us to have to jump out there in a big way and do a lot of things,” Gordon says, “and they had to be virtual. But these virtual programs are now being done live. We learned that there is an audience that wants different types of programing. Some author talks, some film, some visual art, photography, and so forth and we think we’re there to provide it.”

Among the popular events The Breman hosts is the Molly Blank Concert Series.

The rebranding, which is a more informal way of presenting The Breman to the public, is aimed at tapping into the potential audiences that have streamed back into the city in recent years. The Breman, from its strategic location just off the I-75/I-85 downtown connector, is easy to find.

It’s particularly accessible to those who have been attracted to life on the Westside, Midtown, and the BeltLine. It’s a younger, sophisticated audience, but a more informal one. Like one of the recent marketing pieces emphasizes, it’s a crowd that prefers blue jeans and tennis shoes. In keeping with the relaxed approach, the poster proclaims, with a Southern drawl, “Where y’all get its chutzpah.”

Gordon is hoping her experience drawing youthful audiences to GSU’s Rialto will fit in nicely with the campaign’s approach to new Breman visitors.

“My immediate background is in the presenting world, but it’s also a relationship with other entities. And I think that collaborative gene, if you will, is something that’s very important for The Breman. But it’s a community, I think, that knows little about us.”

With its new marketing plan, The Breman aims to significantly change that.