Activating Your Brand's Heritage
Your brand's heritage is an excellent asset that your marketing team already has access to. Thinking back to the beginning of your brand, this journey will illustrate all that you have done, created and produced over years of building. Your past is storytelling that no other competitor can duplicate and that no amount of money can purchase.
We believe it is a top strategy year-round, but it works particularly well when you aren't running live events - for example, in the offseason. Another benefit is that it lets you take a breath from the constant push to "new" and reflect on what has worked in big ways for your brand.
Engage more than one generation
We have seen that heritage themes resonate with old and young customers alike. With an older customer demographic, heritage brings back memories from the "good ‘ol days." They can identify with a heritage theme that brings to mind an earlier life.
With younger generations, it showcases throwback or historical design that is different from the ordinary and offers additional elements of trust compared to new brands with no real track record. Your brand's story is one of the few things that can bring together different generations and engage them in different ways. A DigSite research study found that brand heritage is more important for millennials than you think. Tell your story and use it to establish a relationship because millennials have a harder time trusting a brand they don't know much about.
Additionally, Advertising Week wrote:
The brand is the message, and more often than not, if it is a brand with a history, there is an opportunity to convey it in a way that is naturally more powerful in the eyes of Millennials. If brands can credibly evoke images of the past – because whether it was ten or fifty years ago, these newly minted adults seem to find security and comfort in that sense of authenticity.
If you are a startup that doesn't have a massive length of time to pull content from, sponsorship can associate your brand with a history that brings the traditional together with the cutting-edge.
Sponsorship gives you near-instant access to that heritage if you activate your assets strategically. This becomes particularly important when it is more difficult to host live events and you must rely on other forms of content.
Activate your brand's story
We've compiled some great places to start looking for rich content around your brand's history. Larger brands may even have an archive you can tap into, but a few Google searches of vintage branding will do just fine.
What specific successes and what challenges has your brand faced?
What partners and relationships has your brand been part of?
What are some key decisions and directional changes through the years?