UBA028 - Modernising Heritage

Crafting Cultural Relevance Without Sacrificing Authenticity

This week I travelled to London for work and had an enjoyable meeting with the team behind a brand that has a very long heritage and is seeking to grow over the coming years. After the conversation I couldn’t stop thinking about the concept of modernising heritage brands, and how many brands I’ve worked with that needed to leap forwards in time.

I’ve been fortunate enough to work on numerous anniversaries for brands and products, and to be a key team member in evolving brand strategies for brands with really rich inspiring origins and histories. It has always struck me as an enjoyable and rewarding challenge to be asked to modernise brands while honouring their authenticity. These projects need to be approached with confidence but also sensitivity.

Brand Evolution

There are various different challenges that show up when evolving or updating a brand.

We have noticed a lot of brand reset projects coming through towards the tail end of the pandemic and afterwards. Forward-thinking marketeers have recognised that culture is now fundamentally different than it was before, and that a rethink of the core ingredients of their brand is necessary.

Some brands have engaged with us because they wanted to reinvent themselves to attract a younger audience. They maybe found a successful formula and so carried on doing what they were doing to achieve short term success without recognising that their audience was ageing year-on-year.

Every brand challenge is different but there are some themes that come up again and again. The particular challenge that got my mind whirring this week was around heritage brands - brands that have been around for 50+ years and want to engage with their audience, but want to avoid sounding like someone simply retelling stories of how great life was back in the day!

The Essence of Heritage Brands

At their core, heritage brands are more than just businesses; they are storytellers of history and craftsmanship. Defined by their longevity, these brands have weathered decades, sometimes centuries, of cultural and economic shifts. Their appeal lies in their unwavering commitment to quality, attention to detail and a deep-rooted sense of identity. Yet, in a marketplace that has often favoured the fast and the cheap, these traditional values have sometimes felt more like a niche appeal than a recipe for mainstream success.

Time can be a double-edged sword for a brand. Here’s a thought experiment: are the Nike Swoosh and their tagline ‘Just Do It’ inherently powerful? Or are they powerful because you know about the determination of Michael Jordan, the innovation of the waffle machine and the hundreds of other stories we’ve heard and conversations we’ve had?

Time can enable a complex understanding to develop in an audience but can also pigeon-hole a brand, reducing their ability to adapt and evolve.

Shift in Consumer Values and Market Trends

However, the tides are turning. Today's customers are increasingly seeking authenticity, sustainability and products that promise not just style but substance. They are looking for products that might last them for a large part of their life, and looking for products that can be repaired, reused or resold via Depop, Vinted or StockX.

This shift has a huge alignment with the ethos of most heritage brands. The once-perceived Achilles' heel of focusing on craftsmanship and durability is now their strongest asset in a market fatigued by the transient and the disposable.

But understanding this shift is just the beginning. The challenge for heritage brands lies in harnessing these values in a way that resonates with a modern audience, all while staying true to their past.

The Revival of Craftsmanship and Quality

In recent years, we've witnessed a renaissance in the appreciation for craftsmanship and quality. This revival is more than a fleeting trend; it's a cultural shift towards valuing the time, effort and skill that goes into creating something truly enduring. From the resurgence of artisanal food markets to the growing demand for handcrafted furniture, this trend is a testament to the modern customer's craving for authenticity and sustainability.

There were moments in the past (and maybe this still rings true for some people) where the intention was to keep possessions looking pristine, and new. But more and more people value the stories that are embedded in imperfections, the history that is encoded into their products that reveal unique insights about a person or a product’s previous life.

During 2022, the resale market grew 5x faster than the broader retail clothing sector, and some are projecting that the second hand market will reach $350 billion globally by 2027. Traditionally brands wouldn’t benefit from resale but some are starting to solve how they can play a part in this growing sector - rather than focussing on ‘built-in redundancy’ - ensuring people need to continually buy new things. If this is where things are going then products that can last many years may do far better with customers.

Challenges for Heritage Brands

Adapting to a modern market presents both challenges and opportunities for heritage brands. The digital age has transformed how consumers interact with brands, making a strong online presence, digital marketing and e-commerce not just advantageous, but essential. I would argue we are even moving past this stage to a point where brands critically need to engage with a multithreaded physical-to-digital customer journey to succeed today.

Modernising requires careful navigation to ensure that the brand's core values aren't diluted. Rather than creating a new story or a new brand, heritage brands need to be experts at intersecting the past with the future to succeed equally in authenticity as well as relevance.

At a brand level, brand stories and origin stories need to be reconfigured - not rewritten - the content should remain the same but the key messages or values that are prioritised need to shift to be relevant to today’s audience.

At a marketing level, brands may need to play along with today’s ways of showing up - working with collaborators, influencers, metaverse, A.I. and whatever else comes along. This is the level where, if not careful, a brand can lose its soul and homogenise with the rest of the marketplace.

Sweat It

The solution to these challenges that heritage brands face are not easy. There is no cookie-cutter solution - each brand will have its own set of deep roots that can be used for strength. Solving this modernisation can be tough, taking a strong team, a good amount of time, internal and external expertise and more importantly, a willingness to evolve.

Some people will try to pull the brand backwards while others try to pull too far forwards, and the perfect balance will relate to the brand itself, current culture, funding and sometimes a bit of unexpected magic.

This process should take time, if it doesn’t take time then its worth asking yourself whether you are respecting the heritage enough.

The Good News

If you have the right mindset for this then the fact that it is hard will draw you towards it rather than scare you off. One thing we can be sure of is that if something is hard then there are far less people doing it than if it was easy.

When done right, a modernised heritage brand is an absolute joy to see as a brand strategist and to engage with as a customer. If you manage to take the ingredients of heritage and the ingredients of modern brands and concoct a successful brand then you will be far far stronger for it.

I really believe that in light of the climate crisis, and a younger audience’s reaction to it is not going away. The craving for authenticity, desire for products to last and need to buy from brands with a deep meaning to them will only grow stronger in the world. I certainly hold out a strong hope these needs stay anyway.

Written By Russell