Corporate Museums: Heritage as a Brand Value

Tradition cannot be inherited, and who wants it, must conquer it with great difficulty.
(T. S. Eliot)

The Heritage, in a business context, is nothing more than a managerial construction of a narrative which has as its object the history of the company. The transmission of an 'organized memory' of the company is the result of an intentional and selective process of construction and representation of the company's history, starting from the aspects that the leaders of the company are interested to hand down over time. Organizations create and use its own history and autobiography, through a dynamic process of conservation, rewriting and selective cancellation of the past. In terms of communication, the heritage is expressed in the strategic development and the public celebration of the past.

The brand according to Kotler is "a name, a term, a sign, a symbol, a design or a combination of these, intended to identify the goods or services of a company or a group of companies to differentiate them from those of its competitors," but in addition serves also to describe the value judgments expressed by customers about the product or service in question. All brands have a history, but only a few have a heritage. Apparently the difference between the heritage and history may seem minimal, but as explained by Lowenthal, the history explores and explains what is often an opaque past, on the contrary, heritage clarifies and makes the past relevant to contemporary contexts and purposes. Some companies have made of their heritage a valuable corporate asset, while for others this potential remains hidden. Find and understand the heritage of a brand could be a useful path to unlock its value for the company, allowing the past and the present to become an asset for the future.

With the brand heritage, we mean a brand whose "legacy" strategically connects the past, the present and the future, and so differs from other types of historical interpretations, as the historical brand, the retro-brand or the iconic brand. A heritage brand is a brand with a positioning and added value based on its heritage. For example, in the watch industry, both Patek Philippe and Tag Heuer are historic trademarks. However, we can only consider Patek Philippe as a heritage brand, because he has chosen to emphasize its history as a key component of its brand identity and positioning. Tag Heuer has not made the same strategic choice, and for that reason we see it as a brand with a history, but not as a heritage brand. Any brand, but especially those who are in difficulty, can benefit from a return to roots by identifying what made them special and successful in the very beginning.

The brand heritage projects are related to communication programs on different occasions: anniversaries of the company and/or the product, internal communication programs and team building, vintage product launches, enterprise mergers and reorganizations, stock quotes and promotions of the corporate museums. The brand heritage is therefore a marketing project that revitalizes and strengthens or even recreates a real economic asset, and that translates into communication projects or ad hoc events, both on special occasions in long-term operations, such as in the case of corporate museums or permanent cultural initiatives. The heritage management has as its goal to develop strategies and practices to preserve, organize and integrate into company's activities the set of tangible and intangible assets that are part of the cultural heritage of the company.