CHICAGO’S STUCK ON BRAND AID, AND IT HURTS TO WATCH

8:20 a.m. CST, February 21, 2014

The other day I went to see “The Lego Movie,” the biggest blockbuster of 2014 so far, currently in the midst of its second wave of word-of-mouth-driven box office, and I left the theater not feeling scuzzy. I didn’t feel bullied or solicited. In fact, I felt no desire to buy Legos or declare my love for the endless ways in which mankind has learned to shape a pile of plastic blocks. I didn’t even have some overwhelmingly nostalgic yearning for my favorite childhood toy.

I never felt sold.

Instead, what resonated was the message: The world is composed of people who need to follow the instructions and those who would rather build something original — so what kind of builder are you going to be? Remarkably then, rather than turn all Kumbaya, “The Lego Movie” creates generous, if opinionated, distinctions: Follow-the-instructions people are not bad; they just tend to have a vested interest in making sure you follow instructions too. And, iconoclasts, unstructured creativity leads to great, and lousy, ideas.

As entertainment, “The Lego Movie” is the rare movie to extol the power of creativity while actually showing some itself. But as cultural marketing, it’s almost Martian: open-ended enough to trust the audience’s ability to think for itself. Which, not coincidentally, is the point of Legos.

To put this another way: smart branding. Or rather, invisible branding — form follows function.

Very unlike the recent decision to rebrand the John Hancock Observatory with the glib and cloying moniker “360 Chicago.” Or the decision last summer to rebrand the West Side’s Bloomingdale Trail as the so-hip-it-hurts “606.” Or the suggestion, courtesy of the mayor’s office, that we refer to the music-theater nexus at Broadway and Lawrence Avenue as the more confident, business-enticing “Uptown Entertainment District.”

All of which strike me as prime examples of how our eagerness to regard everything and everyone as a possible brand, merely wanting to maximize its branding potential, has grown obvious, reductive and pretty presumptuous. And all of which serve to remind me: the venerable observatory has not yet received its spiffy upgrade (the name changes in March); the Bloomingdale is a year away from becoming miles of reconstituted, artfully manicured landscape; and, last time I checked, Broadway and Lawrence is dead much of the time.

But all of which, when placed alongside “The Lego Movie,” makes me wonder: How is it that a giant product placement of a kiddie flick feels less bullying in its branding than the insistent rebranding of weightier, long-established cultural mainstays? How is it that a title like “The Lego Movie” sounds shockingly modest — truth in advertising, basically — compared with the shouting, amusement park hullabaloo of “360 Chicago”?

Moreover, if a Chicago landmark can become “360 Chicago” with such alarming breeziness, then how tempted are other local cultural and arts institutions to zing up their images, to nip and tuck until their branding seems more like a reflection of how they want us to think of them than how they actually are?

Putting on my marketing hat, I contacted a few local institutions that I thought might, you know, consider rebranding: I called Criss Henderson, longtime executive director of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier, and asked him if he would he consider rebranding his theater as something less, well — elitist. After all, I reasoned, it’s Stephen Sondheim’s “Gypsy” that’s drawing raves for Chicago Shakespeare right now. You are not just Shakespeare. And that’s got to be confusing to the tourists swelling Navy Pier every weekend.

I also preached the Gospel according to “The Lego Movie,” saying how seamlessly it blends brand and message without cheapening either, saying more Chicago cultural organizations could take a few lessons from it. Henderson stopped me: He’d just seen “The Lego Movie” with his kids. I was right, he said.

Really?

“Well, it was amazing,” he said. “You leave more appreciative of the art of the medium (Lego). But it also proves that you can transcend the transactional necessity that comes with selling. Which is not easy. Shakespeare himself said, ‘What’s in a name?’ And remember, Shakespeare is one of the strongest brands of all. I mean, he made it in ‘The Lego Movie’ (as a nimble, break-dancing Bard). But we (the theater) are very aware there is an aversion to his name from certain segments of society.”

Henderson said the theater does have fairly routine conversations about changing its name to something that reflects its range, but never serious conversations.

“Our brand is our quality. Besides, you can push too hard to communicate. I walk on Navy Pier, look at our name: I know the brand impression. But we don’t need to convert everyone.”

I tried the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, which, frankly, is neither a society nor anything all that Renaissance-y. Its art is contemporary, which sends a very mixed message and is probably terrible branding. I called Hamza Walker, the Hyde Park museum’s director of eduction and associate curator. Perhaps the 99-year-old institution could change its name to RenaiZZance Society for Contemporary ArtZ?

“Oh,” he said, surprised, then added: “I like that! I think we need to do that!”

He was joking, but added, seriously: “The thing is, image change, name change, it comes up more than you might think. It used to come up more frequently. Someone (on a university board) always wants to change the name to reflect contemporary art. It comes up often enough it made it as far as a branding consultant fairly recently. But their response was: You have too much brand equity at this point; don’t change anything.

“And that’s the right decision,” Walker said. “It’s not as if rebranding would demystify us to people. At some point, do we start removing vowels so we play better on Twitter? If you don’t respect the audience, you can condescend.”

On the other hand, since its founding, the Field Museum has been the Columbian Museum of Chicago (a reflection of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition), the Field-Columbian Museum, the Field Museum of Natural History, the Chicago Museum of Natural History, then back to the Field Museum of Natural History; in 1994, it was renamed, simply, The Field Museum. Which is elegant, nicely Chicago and devoid of cheap spunk.

Indeed, when I asked the Art Institute of Chicago if it was planning any rebranding, its spokeswoman sort of cackled: They just added a kind of logo, and until recently the Art Institute never had a logo.

Solidity is its brand.

Said Gary Johnson, president of the Chicago History Museum, which rebranded itself in 2006 after 150 years as the Chicago Historical Society, “The key is choosing a brand that lasts more than a generation.”

Like “360 Chicago”?

He laughed.

In all fairness, Montparnasse 56, a French company that runs observation decks in Paris and Berlin, owns the Hancock Observatory, and, according to Eric Deutsch, Montparnasse’s head of United States operations, rebranding commenced after consideration of several factors, from “people’s perceptions to how, when you say ‘observation deck’ in Chicago, other entities do come up.” (Such as the Willis Tower observation deck.) The rebranding, he said, is about creating a more specific identity in Chicago: “We want to be more energetic.”

Understandable.

And yet, consider: Chicago doesn’t have a Chicago Zoo. So the Lincoln Park Zoo is Chicago’s zoo.

“So sometimes we do wonder if we need to add ‘Chicago’ to the branding,” said Sharon Dewar, public relations director of the Lincoln Park Zoo. “We wonder if people know where Lincoln Park is. But we also know that so many generations have been bringing their kids here, we do have a responsibility to those traditions too.”

An interesting thing about branding culture: Ask marketing people if it’s much different than branding potato chips and you hear a few similar refrains.

“With cultural rebranding, you can lose associations that have built up, and make people nervous, especially if there is this idea that the art, not the marketing, should be enough,” said Tim Calkins of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

“Presenting yourself as the brightest shiny thing can come off looking like a mask,” said Bob Faust, whose eponymous Chicago-based firm has handled the marketing for the Third Coast International Audio Festival and singer-songwriter Nick Cave.

But the warning I heard most often: You can’t expect an audience to like being told how to think, especially when there is a long history involved.

“When an arts group or a cultural landmark or whatever has gathered some ownership from a community, people feel invested in it, and so the branding has to go beyond the product.” That’s Annika Welander, strategist for Chicago’s Someoddpilot branding agency, which does work for WBEZ and Pitchfork (they designed the online tastemaker’s iconic forked logo). “A lot of the time,” she explained, “branding culture is more about reminding (a client) to go back to the initial place it started from.”

For instance, added Chris Eichenseer, creative director of Someoddpilot: “We’re working with an important Chicago theater group, very well-known. (He refrained from naming names.) Ultimately, its branding should be about saying that what was true about it when it started, why people went and felt that connection that made it a success and a name in the first place, those things ring true today. There’s power in authenticity.”

Hence, rebranding Detroit (via cinematic commercials) as a city where real people still make things by hand; and the rebranding of the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association, a 102-year-old business network, as the more colloquial, locally meaningful Magnificent Mile Association.

“But, eventually, none of it really matters if the actual thing doesn’t reflect the values of the brand,” said Dan Lin, co-producer of “The Lego Movie.” He was explaining to me about some of the potential pitfalls of making a movie based on a beloved brand.

But he could have been talking about Detroit (where the day-to-day reality of the city itself can be far from stirringly cinematic) or the 606 (which until last year was better known as “that abandoned elevated rail line on the West Side where everyone jogs illegally”) or 360 Chicago (which until now was a somewhat passive, mild-mannered tourist spot with a view).

These are modest pleasures — just as a Lego, a block itself, is modest.

“Our intention with the movie was always this: Call it ‘The Lego Movie’ upfront, establish that identity right away, then you don’t have to sell it. Or even mention it,” Lin said. “You don’t sugarcoat it; actually, there are inside jokes in there about failed Lego sets. But you don’t talk down. You recognize the thing for what it is, then you can get really creative about how you use it. But, of course, all of that means that you assume the audience is really intelligent, which we did.”