At the risk of hammering a hoary cliche, what’s in a name? For most things it’s just a useful handle. But ask Pepsi or Coca-Cola if their names don’t matter. Ask Cher or Prince. The right name is critical for "branding," or creating a clear product awareness within public consciousness.

Two of Hawaii’s best-known and beloved museums are changing the names this month. Although you may have grown up with the Honolulu Academy of Arts and the Mission Houses Museum, from here on out they are the Honolulu Museum of Art and the Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Sites and Archives. Get used to it. It won’t happen overnight, although the Academy has set a target date of March 1 and Mission Houses by April.

The Academy is sponsoring "Better Together" on Feb. 24, an "Art After Dark" celebration of the branding launch plus the final merger of the Academy and The Contemporary Museum.

"Your brand is the sum total of who and what you are, what your company stands for, what your product promises the consumer. It’s the very soul of your product, service, and company," says Anne Murata, a longtime Hawaii advertising professional and the Pacific Aviation Museum marketing manager. (Within a few years of opening, the Ford Island museum was named TripAdvisor’s No. 8 visitor attraction out of more than 600 national sites, thanks largely to intensive branding.)

"Branding is how one makes this essence known to the ultimate purchaser or consumer, whether it be in collateral, advertising, public relations, packaging design, store design, stationery design, flowers in your restaurant. Everything must reinforce the other; it goes across all communications and product-delivery lines. When done well it leaves a desired, unified, consistent image in the public’s mind. People know who you are!"

"It’s a matter of communicating clearly with visitors who we are and what we do. You could have a Halekulani Hamburger Stand, but that doesn’t mean it has hotel rooms," said Stephan Jost, director of the Honolulu Academy of Arts (I mean, director of the Honolulu Museum of Art. You see how complicated this can get.)

"It was clear that the museum, like everything, needed to evolve and change. There was an amazing amount of confusion and needless duplication. Each section of the Academy operation essentially ran their own marketing, because they’re very rational people and they knew it was needed at that time. But to make a clear customer impression, we needed consistency."

"If you can deliver one consistent message, which makes your marketing resources go further with less expenditure. Focused brands enhances. Scattered messages are costly," said Murata.

Re-branding isn’t an overnight process. At least, it shouldn’t be.

"When the museum was reaccredited by the American Association of Museums back in 2006 and 2007, we had already had to think about it," said Academy Communications Director Lesa Griffith. They got serious when The Contemporary Museum signed a letter of intent to combine operations. "When the museums officially merged last July 1st, we knew we needed to deal with at least a name change, right away.

"When Stephan Jost came aboard as director, he had experience in branding at his previous museum (the Shelburne art museum in Vermont). We have several smaller things under our wings — all revenue-producing! — such as the gallery shop and the film showings, plus smaller gallery exhibits in places like the Chanel store in Waikiki and the First Hawaiian Center, which we inherited from The Contemporary Museum, plus major sites like the Shangri La museum. These are all good things, but they also tended to cancel out our public identity, weakening our museum brand. It’s not clear the museum is behind them."

At the Mission Houses it’s the finale of a two-year plan. "It began before I even came on board, to position the Mission Houses within the community as a historical site," said Chris Wong, the site’s marketing and public relations director. "It’s a strategy to place more emphasis on Hawaiian values, and in the same spirit of the original missionaries. Our planning committee decided we needed to be more meaningful in that way. There’s value in marketing to newer patrons. Most people in Hawaii already know the site as the oldest houses in the islands, but do visitors?"

Mission Houses Director Tom Woods also arrived after the new strategic plan was set in motion. "I was able to chat about it with the former director so I could be in the loop," said Woods. "And Stephan Jost and I have been able to sympathize and empathize with each other while all this was occurring.

"It got started back in 2007 when a consultant from California started the planning process, working with the museum board and various stakeholders in the organization. There was no conclusion until we began to gather feedback from visitors, from volunteers, from missionary descendents, from teachers, from randomly selected people. There was a telephone survey that dealt with the site name recognition.

"(Kamehameha Schools Vice President) Rod Chamberlain agreed to hold planning sessions for us — we’ll do the same for his organization. We had a two-day retreat for everyone at Central Union church, with Rod facilitating, honing the mission and vision statements into a planning documents for the future."

Mission and vision statements are documents that define a museum’s goals and process for achieving these objectives.

"By this point many things and concepts had been tested already, it was time to work the goals and objectives into programs and management," said Wood. "There was a surprising amount of consensus, but of course, when people disagreed, they said so passionately. At the end of the first day, we thought the mission statement was completed, but when people slept on it overnight, it was reopened the next day. Individual words are important!"

Jost said the museum’s name change, even after members decided it was necessary, created "a raging debate. There was a deep, deep lack on consensus originally. It was hard not to think of ourselves as the audience and put ourselves in the public’s view.

"For example, one camp wanted Honolulu Art Museum, but that would have made our initials HAM, and the Spalding House gallery might have ended up SPAM. And there was a serious discussion whether we’d be the Honolulu Museum of Art or the Honolulu Museum of Arts. Eventually most decided that shorter was better, even by one letter. In the end, two-thirds of the board voted to change the name, and very quickly one emerged."

You’ll note that in the name changes, Mission Houses is no longer a museum, while the Academy now has that label.

Said Woods, "They weren’t being seen as a museum, but as a teaching facility because of the ‘academy’ title, and for us, doing away with ‘museum’ and changing it to ‘historic site’ made the most sense. We really are a historic site, not a gallery of artifacts. That’s a critical difference, and helps define what we do. Also, our library is more accurately called an archive. You can’t check anything out!"

"Ironically, the Academy was originally chartered by Anna Rice Cooke as the Honolulu Museum of Art," said Griffith. "That was actually the first name. Sometime in the late 1920s it was changed to ‘Academy,’ likely to support the center’s education mission. Probably 99 percent of people in Hawaii know that the Academy is a museum, but no visitors do. In every Romance language, ‘academy’ translates as ‘school.’ Ironically, in Japanese translations we’re already known as the Honolulu Museum of Art.

"It was clear we had to do something about the name so it would be inclusive. Stephan began meeting with board members to see how they felt about it. Obviously, for many it was an emotional decision, because their families often went back with the Academy for years. As it turned out, it was Sam Cooke, Anna Rice Cooke’s grandson, who made the motion to change the name to Honolulu Museum of Art.

"People will still call us the Academy, just like many people here think of Macy’s as Liberty House. It’s what they grew up with. And Honolulu Academy of Arts is actually still our official, incorporated name. Honolulu Museum of Art is our doing-business-as name."

"My rule is if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. I always look for what’s working and go with that, build on that, enhance that, improve upon that," suggested Murata, because the process of re-branding can be expensive and counterproductive if not carefully planned. "There is a lot of equity in an old brand. Sometimes it just needs a bit of cleaning up and tweaking, to focus on the good aspects."

While the re-branding change at the Academy is mostly a clarifying simplification of the organization’s many wings, the change at Mission Houses is deeper and more philosophical.

"It needed to reflect how missionaries worked with the royal Hawaiians to create a written language so the culture could continue. Hawaiian, as a written language, was invented on this very site. You can’t say that about any other language, and so the concepts of malama and laulima, the sense of cooperation, are very important, and need to be stressed in our public face," said Wong.

"It was clear from the beginning that this process would be community-centered," said Woods. "The original was too self-centered: We turned it inside out and instead focused on the concept of collaboration with the Hawaiian people. It makes things more equal. After all, the missionaries couldn’t do anything unless they were helped by the alii.

"It’s always a difficult and grueling process, but it’s important to set a tone and direction for the future. And at the end of all this, what we came up with was a two-page document — one that was harder to write than a 100-page document."

Now that the scope and philosophies of the museum re-brandings are settled, there are technical details. It turns out both organization anticipated printing the minimum of business cards and stationery and brochures, just enough to get them through a few months at a time.

"We’re partnering with tour companies and coupon printers to make the transition, which will include a revamped website," said Wong. "The old site will still be up, but it will redirect to the new one."

"Our new Web address is simply HonoluluMuseum.org," said Griffith.

The name change already seems to be working, said Jost. He noted that unique hits on the museum’s website have increased from an average of 23,000 a month to more than 37,000, due to their now-clear identification as a museum.