Cultural institutions’ re-branding strategies: Social factors and creative trends

This article considers new practices of cultural institutions re-branding. The authors are interested in these new practices from two points of view - as a way of creating and changing the image of a brand and as a technology of creative development of public institutions that supposes their adaptation to the modern life and its contemporary trends. The requirements to the infrastructure of the modern creative city are tightening and the culture houses of the Soviet type are losing their relevance among nowadays interactive platforms and entertainment centers. Thus, the article examines the role of the creative platforms in the socio-cultural urban space of Moscow focusing on the transformations of the culture houses that are taking place according to the cultural policy of the city management that uses technologies and methods of new creative industries. The authors state that the main problem today is that it is hard for the society to accept the new cultural centers as an alternative to the familiar leisure sites for they are strongly identified with the state, outdated and uninteresting places. Such new cultural centers and brands require a special approach focusing on the social factors - the authors show the way of its empirical application on the example of the re-branding of the cultural center ‘ZIL’.

cultural branding, urban branding, urban cultural attractiveness, creative economics, cultural management, creative industries, the cultural policy of Moscow