In the past, whenever I would get anxious about whether a marketing plan would work, I would always think about New Coke. If ever you think that someone who is smarter, has a bigger research and marketing budget, more personnel and resources could do a better job, all you have to do is look at new Coke to realize having these benefits at your disposal are no guarantee of success.

Now as we watch Bears Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, AIG Insurance, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Washington Mutual encounter troubles we are basically provided with more contemporary examples of how this is true.

Of course, even if your marketing budget is 1/100,000,000,000th of Coke’s, the stakes and disappointment if your plan fails are not equally exponentially less than they experienced. In fact, since there are fewer people to distribute blame around to, your experience may be greater.

It can also take far fewer and far less severe mistakes and mismanagement to lay your organization low. The events of the last few months have brought an all to familiar reminder of organizational mortality. If there is one realization most non-profit arts organizations embraced long before the for-profit world, it is that there is no such thing as “too big to fail.” A great many arts organizations have experienced “donor bailouts” and come back strong while the cash infusion allowed others to linger awhile longer before finally closing.

The reminder for many arts organizations is that they don’t have any intrinsic right to exist. There were far more people invested in the continuation of the aforementioned corporations than have ever willed the continuation of an arts organization. As a result some of these companies have been bought out or merged. But as of the time of this entry, it doesn’t look as if anyone is going to step forward to save Lehman Brothers. There have been some merger partnerships between arts organizations in the past to save one or the other of them (first that comes to mind is Asolo Repertory Theatre and Sarasota Ballet circa 1997). But for many arts organizations, that option doesn’t present itself.

As many organizations of every type are wont to say, a organization is not the physical presence as it is the people and ideal that it represents. If anything is going to remain of an arts organization after its demise, it is that. If an arts organization is smart, they will devote a lot of energy to cultivating and sustaining their image and ideal throughout their existence.

Pam Am Airlines once spanned the world regularly serving every continent except Antarctica. The airline failed in 1991 and subsequent attempts to resurrect air service under that name likewise failed. However, the cachet of the name is still powerful and currently appears with the familiar logo on the side of railroad freight cars. The company even named their quarterly reports (of hopefully their success) Pan Am Clipper, the terminology the airline used for their planes. And people still hold hope that the airline will fly again. In a Forbes article last year, a Miami attorney was looking to license the name for an airline flying internationally.

Few arts organizations have that sort of name recognition on a national level. But it is possible to generate value for an arts organization on a local or regional level. Given that it is quite possible we are in a transitional stage for the way the arts are presented and experienced, many arts entities may go out of business over the course of a few years. The name may re-emerge as with Pan Am, with a different physical manifestation altogether but with intangibles like the core identity, quality and values transferring intact.

The Asolo Theatre moved operations from a theatre that originated in Asolo, Italy into a theatre that originated in Dunfermline, Scotland. Arena Stage moved across the Potomac River into Virginia and no one doubted they were the same organization. Identity is not tied to physical places. Now if either went out of business and reemerged as a video game developer or communications company, their new customer base would probably have few overlaps with their old one. But there would still be a association with quality entertainment experiences lingering in people’s minds which can have positive results for the new companies.