Curating As a Brand Design Tool in Creative Organizations

Abstract

Today the role of curating extends beyond the museum field: websites are curated, commercial firms establish functional roles entitled “curator”, and individuals in the creative economy use social media platforms to curate their lives and cultural product as brands. Curating has been extended and elevated today because design has become a more critical and integrative factor in brand development on both the organizational and individual levels (Kennedy, 2012). Curating is one way to manage the brand’s meaning. It is a chaordic system (Hock, 2005; van Einatten, 2001) that situates the complex process of editing, merchandising and documenting the brand’s offering in co-created situations with the customer. Yet, the literature is lacking in explicitly exploring and documenting how curating is used in branding.