Heritage as a brand asset is often confused with nostalgia. You show old photos, a founding year and a few archive pieces and hope the history speaks for itself. It rarely does. A long history is at first just a fact. It only becomes an asset when it explains why a brand is different from its competitors today.
Today I lead a marketing team of 22 people across 21 markets, and before that I was responsible for more than thirty brand partnerships at a department store, many of them with brands that have a long history. Along the way I saw how differently brands treat their past. Some manage it like a museum. Others use it like a tool. Only the second group wins with it.
- Heritage as a brand asset only emerges when history answers a question people ask today.
- Not everything in the archive belongs in communication. Selection is the real work.
- Origin has to show in the product, otherwise it remains decoration.
- Keeping heritage alive means you may retell it, but never reinvent it.
Table of contents
What heritage as a brand asset really means
A brand with history has an advantage nobody can copy: it was there when others did not yet exist. But that advantage loses its power when it is only claimed. Customers do not ask how old a brand is. They ask what they get from it. Only when history answers that question does it become an argument.
That is why I understand heritage as a brand asset as an attitude that has proven itself over time. A particular way of making things, a quality that was never negotiated, a feeling a brand has always created. Those are the parts of history that still hold today. Everything else is memory.
Selecting instead of exhibiting
Most archives are full of material. The temptation to show as much of it as possible is strong. Yet a brand that tells everything about its history ends up telling nothing. The real work lies in finding the few elements that carry today’s promise, and deliberately leaving the rest in the archive. A good test question is: would this element still fit the brand if nobody knew how old it was?
This selection is closely tied to positioning. Anyone who knows what a brand stands for today quickly sees which parts of its history fit. How hard and how important this leaving out is, I described in the article on brand positioning.
Heritage as a brand asset shows in the product
A story that only appears in the campaign quickly feels staged. It becomes credible when you find it in the product: in a cut, a material, a detail that has stayed the same for decades. Then communication does not need to claim anything. It simply shows what is already there.
This matters especially in difficult market phases. McKinsey describes a slowdown in the luxury industry, with a weakening value proposition to customers among its causes (see here: McKinsey, What’s next for luxury?). For me this means: origin does not replace value. It only makes an existing value more visible.
Partnerships help here. Working with another brand forces you to sharpen your own history, because you have to explain it to a counterpart. What comes out of that, and what kind of tension a good collaboration carries, I described in the article on collaborations.
Retelling without reinventing
A living heritage needs renewal. Every generation sees a brand’s history with different eyes, and the story has to take that in. New images, new voices and new contexts are allowed, as long as the core stays the same. Inventing a history that never existed, on the other hand, gambles away exactly the trust heritage rests on.
The line between renewal and rupture is often thin. Before a brand retells its history, it is worth asking whether it only wants to refresh its look or change its promise. That difference decides how much heritage as a brand asset survives. More on this in Brand refresh or rebrand.
What I would do differently
I would work with the archive earlier, not only when a campaign is due. Anyone who knows their own history well finds the elements that carry in quiet times. Under time pressure you reach for whatever is quickest to hand, and that is rarely the best.
What remains open for me is how much history a younger audience actually wants to hear. I believe origin matters to them too, as long as it is honest and says something about the product. Heritage as a brand asset is then not a look back, but a reason to trust a brand today.