How the Philadelphia Art Museum is reinventing itself for the Instagram age

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Sheri Lambert , Temple University

(THE CONVERSATION) On Philadelphia ’s famed Benjamin Franklin Parkway, where stone, symmetry and civic ambition meet, something subtle yet seismic has happened.

The city’s grandest temple to art has shed a preposition.

After nearly a century as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, or PMA, the institution now calls itself simply the Philadelphia Art Museum – or PhAM, as the new logo and public rollout invite us to say.

The change may seem cosmetic, but as a marketing scholar at Temple University whose research focuses on branding and digital marketing strategy, I know that in the tight geometry of naming and branding, every word matters.