A brand curator is one of a business critical support assets, of fundamental utility when contemplating significant change, a new product launch, a management re-shuffle, or a generational shift.

The curator can provide effective guidance during transitional periods involving these economic scenarios:

• Start-ups
• Spin-offs of new entities that will maintain a relationship with the core company
• Passing of direction to a new generation
• Business mergers or consolidations
• Creation of partnerships
• Engagement of sector-specific lobbying services

What does brand curation literally mean?

Although brand curation is a widely-used term on the international stage, it has not yet achieved high-visibility currency in Italy. It is a position, however, that we will increasingly need in the future, inasmuch as its very name implies problem-solving and cultural mediation: brand + curation = assuming care for a project, for business content, for a logo-related concept; evaluating language and communications within the context of the marketing-targeted community, of business partners, and of the internal business team.

The term was mentioned for the first time by Jonathan Mildenhall, creator of the Coca-Cola Coke’s Content 2020 strategy, where he exploded the concept of creativity linked to content, understood as value content for the target community and for the brand.

Many of the brand projects commissioned from us require, as their foundation, a process of cultural mediation, or wide-ranging awareness and understanding of the universe of which the individual business is a part, both as regards its internal operations as well as outwards towards the marketplace. The brand curator is a hybrid creature, bearing no pre-conceived leanings, one who can link together worlds often quite distant from each other through a focused concept or project that encompasses the targeted market, the products, and the value world of the individual business.

Simon Graj, a widely-published expert on brand positioning, offers stimulating observations on the subject. In considering the fundamental characteristics of the brand curator’s role, he sees the curating function as a kind of extension of the role of brand manager, an exceptional and highly-specialised extension, as interpreter of the brand’s values and identity.

The brand curator, in Graj’s way of thinking, facilitates dialogue and comprehension aimed at maintaining intact and authentic the full spectrum of the brand and all operations related to it.

Such a function requires deep understanding of the targeted market, requiring in turn continuous questioning of data quality —constantly-refreshed cultural insights and awareness of the behaviour of all relevant actors –, without ever succumbing to the temptation to pursue tempting but short-term opportunities.

It necessitates a profound, impartial, and detailed analysis of the ambiance that is the world of the brand, and an immersion into the experience of competing brands, in order to discover their success secrets and stand-out mechanisms.

For example, one of the needs common to all communities, particularly the millennials and those after them, is being able to recognise in their selected brand practices, behaviours, or traits that clearly testify to the authenticity of that brand’s parent business and to its sense of responsibility towards that same community. Knowing how to identify such practices and how to establish such virtuous contacts is a function of cultural mediation, of analyses, of insights, and of consideration of business values, all of which will eventually lead to the presentation of marketing decisions that will deliver such virtuous relationships.