S5E6: History Versus Heritage: Demystifying Brand Storytelling

Transcript:

Jason Dressel  0:11  

Today, on The History Factory Podcast, we talk about the role of heritage in brand building for consumer brands. 

 

Hello and welcome to the History Factory Podcast, the podcast at the intersection of business and history. I’m Jason Dressel, and today I’m with my co host, Erin Narloch, History Factory, senior director of business insight and performance, to talk about heritage and brand building for consumer brands. And this is a conversation that is a manifestation of a white paper that Erin led the development of and authorship of, called “The Role of Heritage in Brand Building for Consumer Brands”, and for anyone who is interested in how history, heritage and archives apply and are applied in brand building and brand stewardship. We hope you’ll find this to be a really interesting conversation that we’re about to have. So there is a link to the white paper in the show notes. So check that out. And Erin and I hope you enjoy our conversation and this episode of the History Factory podcast. 

 

So Erin, let’s start with I think it would be really interesting for you to share a little bit of your background, how you got to History Factory, and the experiences you have that you bring to the table as we start this conversation about brand heritage, heritage brands, and specifically the role that heritage plays pertaining to consumer brands. 

 

Erin Narloch  1:50  

Yeah, happy to so I’ve been at History Factory for just about two and a half years, but before that, I spent the better part of a decade working in house for some really well known multinational brands, and helped them position their history, their heritage, their archive, as something of a dynamic resource within the business, so going from the periphery to being a participant. So for me, I think some of the things I think about is, how do you leverage and really utilize an archive and institutional memory that is, is finite, right? It’s ever growing, but it’s finite as more of a strategic asset and a kind of a Pandora’s box where everything is open to everyone. 

 

Now don’t get me wrong, I believe in democratizing the knowledge, the institutional memory of an organization, but I think the true magic is in that curation of what is available and how it reinforces and helps position a brand moving forward. So for me, I always say it’s where memory meets imagination to fuel the future. And at History Factory, as you know, we start with the future and work back. So being able to do that, both in in Europe, in Germany, working at Adidas or leading a Reeboks global brand archive in in Boston was, you know, lit me up as a professional lit organizations up because you could curate and manage a brand’s Heritage in a way that made it dynamic and relevant, not only for consumers, right and fans of the brand, but also for internal audiences, for newly joining C-suites and, you know, senior leadership members, there’s just so much you can do when you position a brand’s memory in a way that is in service to the growth of an organization. 

 

Jason Dressel  4:05  

Yeah, that’s great. You know, that’s great context and and not that you need to be be credentialed or qualified for this conversation, although that does also help affirm why you unquestionably are probably have some of the best footwear of any of our History Factory colleagues, although there are a couple of, can maybe give you a run in the sneaker category, but that’s also a really good setup, Erin, because one of the as we kind of nerd out together on this topic, how do you distinguish between history and heritage?

 

This has always been like a little kind of picky knit for me, because, and I won’t name any names, but we have a former colleague, and I always used to tease him, because I always felt like he used history when he should use heritage and heritage when he should use history. But for our listeners, how do you distinguish the difference between?

 

I mean history and heritage. 

 

Erin Narloch  5:02  

So, history, to me, is a record, it is dates, it is time, it is events, it is people, chronologically, everything included. Heritage is a curation of the most significant events that have defined a company, a brand, a period of time, a product, and the most important thing, it’s that curation. So it’s not all of it, but most importantly, it’s the elements that will reinforce where a brand, company, enterprise is going. So, when I was in house, we often reflected on our brand story. So think of a brand’s history, all of it in periods of 18 to 24 months, knowing where a company is going, the aspirations like, what are our KPIs? What are our brand ambitions, knowing that information and then being able to go, Okay, what do we have? What is important for us to reinforce? Where can we find those proof points, those red threads, those pieces of our DNA that then, in turn, provide us with credibility, authenticity, and a reason to believe that that’s it. That’s the difference. So rarely, if ever, does a brand truly talk about brand history, right? They’re talking about brand heritage, and they’re doing this in the best way. They’re doing it skillfully, with sophistication, and it almost feels inherently evident in a brand’s, you know, persona, because they’re doing it in such a dynamic way.

 

Jason Dressel  6:50  

Yeah, I love that. I always for folks who struggle with the distinction, or admittedly, you know, for the 99.99999% of the population that ever think about this as a topic. I always kind of use the parallel if you were to think about your family, and if you think about your family as a brand, and I’m not suggesting that you have to come from a, you know, a family like, you know, the Kennedys or anything, but any family, right? If you just think about your family, your family history is everything. It’s all those events. It’s the births, the deaths, the marriages, the divorces, and everything in between. And when you think about the heritage of your family, it’s the touchstones of the things that really bring clarity to kind of the identity of your family. So it may be a beach or another destination that is associated with where your family vacations, or you know, a room where you know, you celebrate holidays together, or whatever. Those are symbols of heritage that give a sense of the traditions of your family and give context to that history. It’s really almost the difference between sort of history is content and heritage is context, in a way, right?

 

Erin Narloch  8:03  

Yeah, for sure. It’s funny, as you mentioned, that like, what once was your family’s heritage? Is it bad that, like, as a Midwesterner, my mind immediately goes to a casserole and something called heavenly hash, like food, but right? Your family, your family’s heritage is a hassle, but its history is steeped in mayonnaise. So yeah, there we go. No, and ranch. Well, you know, well, you know, my triggers are on mayo. So we’re going to move this conversation forward. But so while we nerd out together on these, these distinctions of history and heritage. The other one that I’ll ask before we move forward is the distinction of a heritage brand versus brand heritage. You know, when you hear heritage brands, I think all of us probably think about some specific brands that come to mind, like a Harley Davidson, but all brands have heritage, so how do you articulate that distinction? Well, I think you’ve done a good job of illustrating it for us, right? There are these tried and true heritage brands that we as consumers identify heritage as being a key component of who they are, right? And that so to your point, Harley Davidson, a Carhartt, a Red Wing shoes, a, you know, these, almost totems and our culture that we can look to as, as being representative of, of heritage. However, all brands have heritage, right? And that’s, I’m going to say, it’s agnostic of age. It doesn’t matter as soon as an important decision and event has happened that you reinforce your brand heritage. So that’s where I see the distinction.

 

Erin Narloch  10:00  

It’s like, how you how it’s positioned, both from a consumer standpoint, the difference between a heritage brand and a brand with heritage and I would say there, there’s a nuance in a conversation there, right? In many cases, like, if we think of luxury and luxury brands, you know, of course, they’re all about going to the future and imagining fashion or luxury, or all of these, you know, aspirational kinds of brand needs. But they all also are about their heritage. They reinforce it. They position it as something that’s intrinsically important when it comes to craftsmanship, or, you know, the elevation of the item, the good the experience. So it’s an interesting conversation.

 

Jason Dressel  10:51  

Yeah, and you just touched on that, Erin, with your point about craftsmanship, but as you think about heritage, and you wrote about this in a white paper History Factory recently published, which we’ll link to in the notes. But as you think about heritage, and what that stands for is there a specific set of attributes or characteristics that brands typically associate or use heritage to reinforce or convey? 

 

Erin Narloch  11:17  

Yeah, I think that’s a great question. I think it depends on how it’s deployed. It can reinforce, you know, a sense of innovation over time. It can reinforce authenticity. I always think that the utilizing heritage is, you know, not to say a shortcut, but it’s a direct indication of what’s authentic to a brand trust, right? Using heritage oftentimes helps to reinforce kind of attitudes about the brand. The trust you might have credibility, like the credibility a company might have in a space, is oftentimes demonstrated by their use of brand heritage and quality, right? So a quality, both of product, quality of experience. And I know that in this white paper, we talk a lot about consumer brands, right, purposefully. However, I would say in many service businesses, service enterprises, healthcare, financial institutions, those, those, those attributes are also evident when they utilize their brand heritage.

 

Jason Dressel  12:31  

Yeah, and it’s interesting, because we have a mindset at History Factory, and this kind of came from our founder, Bruce Weindruch, who has a great saying, which is, you’re not good because you’re old. You’re old because you’re good. And we always like to focus on the things that have enabled an organization to essentially become old and have more history and have more heritage.

 

But having said that, there is an inherent value in just having history and that message of stability, if you’ve been around a long time, we’ve seen this in our research. We saw this in the heritage gap report that we published last year that consumers, employees, potential employees, do see inherent value in just the fact that an organization has demonstrated that they’ve been able to survive and be around for a long time. What do you see as some of the biggest misconceptions that companies have when it comes to sort of leveraging their history and heritage? Is there something that you feel that marketers or communicators or brand managers are sort of missing as they think about the role and opportunity of what heritage can be? 

 

Erin Narloch  13:46  

Yeah, sometimes I think that the perception is they hear the H word like they hear history, and automatically they like they’re they’re transported in time to what they perceive to be old, right? Where, in fact, I’ve never met a designer, I’ve never met a creative, I’ve never met a marketer who hasn’t been a student of the world, really, and who hasn’t gone and looked at what’s been done before, or where they get inspiration, or all of all of that, and kind of made that part of their alchemy into to how they kind of future cast for for a brand. So I would think that, or I would say that one of the kind of the pitfalls is the idea that just because you’re referencing what’s happened will default the the use of that reference into something that stayed, that isn’t dynamic, that is an inspirational when, in fact, I think it is, in many cases you know, that fuel it really helps, helps us strive for for something better, something that’s next, and then. Hate to do this but i’d love to hop back to you know, the comment you just made about, that you’re not, you’re good. Tell me again?

 

Jason Dressel  15:14  

Yeah. You’re not good because you’re old. You’re old because you’re good. 

 

Erin Narloch  15:17  

Yeah. So I think that’s so resonant for me, because so many times being in house, right in brands, in organizations and multinational companies, there’s a reinforcement of who we are. This is what we’ve always done. This is who we are. This is a part of the fabric of our company. And when things go awry, oftentimes, and this is where you have the benefit of, you know, sitting in an archive, maybe looking at that horizon line and being able to identify those patterns over time. You might have deviated from your reason for being, right? And I’ve, I’ve heard it described by different different sweets C suite people as it being, you know, chasing a trend instead of kind of reinforcing who we are. And I feel like that is something that, you know, brand heritage can do is amplify and put a spotlight on and reinforce why you exist. And I think that’s one of the most critical reasons to think of brand heritage and heritage management as a part of, you know, business discipline.

 

Erin Narloch  16:37  

So sorry, I wanted to deviate from that one.

 

Jason Dressel  16:39  

Yeah, no, it’s a great point. And I think you know, to your point about the optics of quote, unquote history, and how it becomes, just instinctively and intuitively interpreted as something that is from a long time ago. I always talk about the distinction of if you replace the H word with the E word, which is essentially like, oh, is our experience not important? And, of course, it’s important, right? And the other interesting thing about that is there are no sort of specific rules, like, when does something become, quote, unquote, history? Does it have to have, you know, an expiration date of 20 years. We have a rich heritage here at History Factory of doing zooms together, right?

 

So, you know, there are no rules for when something becomes history or becomes heritage. The other thing that this conversation kind of prompts, though, I think, is also, again, if you think about this through the lens of a creative or a marketer or communicator. And if you work in an organization, whether you’ve worked there for a long time, or perhaps it’s an organization that you’re just joining, and you’ve joined an organization that is, what we’ll say, is either a heritage brand, or is a brand that has heritage, and they’re very aware of that. You know, they have a genuine history. The organization is, let’s say, been around for 40, 5060, or 100 years, whatever the company’s been around more than a minute. What? How can you tell what an organization is? Sort of, what I’ll call, sort of passively, just kind of leaning into that kind of lore versus the organization is really kind of as you as you use the term, actively curating its heritage and really proactively using it as a strategic asset. You know, how can you tell the difference between an organization both organizations are using it as an inherent strength of the brand, but are there markers or signals that you can tell the distinction between an organization and maybe a team this is essentially just inherited something that they’re using, versus a team that has embraced something and they’re proactively cultivating it, nurturing it, and truly leveraging it in a more strategic way? Does that make sense?

 

Erin Narloch  18:59  

Yeah, I think it does. And that was one of the questions kind of in going into this conversation that I had the most kind of pause about and reflection on. I think when something is actively utilized in an organization and an enterprise, I think of it and of behaving differently, right? It is. It is ingrained in the vernacular of the company. There’s a sense of what it quotes, unquote it means. Whereas there’s a lot when, when you have a company heritage, that you’re inheriting, and it is more passive, there’s a lot of questions and assumptions about what it might mean to an organization, and uncertainties, and I would say, trepidation around how to deploy it. But when it is actively managed, it is reinforcing behaviors. It is reinforcing business units, or, you know, you. Objectives, and it is ingrained in the vernacular I would, I would say some of the best organizations that understand who they are and why it’s significant to where they’re going. I think of being a part of their their their pitches, their sales pitches, their business development, and if the language of the people who are on the you know, the the the far pioneering, you know, you know, places in that organization, have a clear understanding of how to use their story in a way that convinces people of their credibility, why they should trust them, how they how they’ve made a difference over time. Why? In fact, then engaging in a relationship with this organization, partnership, for instance, would reinforce some of the brand’s heritage. I think that’s a great indication of the people furthest from the nucleus, maybe furthest from the C-suite, furthest from the CEO and president. Can articulate the value of a brand’s heritage, then it’s actively being utilized, managed and cascaded, and that like, let me tell you, that is powerful. That’s the difference between a mainstream brand who’s been around for a long time and an iconic brand that you want to identify with.

 

Jason Dressel  21:30  

Yeah, that’s really well said, Erin, and I think it’s also the difference between, again, going back to the the topic, the question we’re talking about is that distinction of brands that are using their heritage in a really passive way versus an active way is it’s really permeated into the behaviors of the organization, and they have clarity for why they’re using it. So an example of sort of passive use is all the time. You’ll see, you know, really beloved brands, and people gravitate towards just the vintage element of it, saying, you know, since 1850 or an old logo. And that, in my view, if you would, I’m curious if you’d agree, is kind of passive use. It’s just back to that kind of idea of you’re old because you’re good, you’re good before you’re good because you’re old, or you’re old because you’re good, they’re just kind of resting on like, Yeah, we’re good because we’re old. See, we’ve been around since 1850 as opposed to, to your point, organizations that are actively saying, No, we know more than the fact that we’ve been around since 1850 and maybe the two stories that everyone knows about the founder and some fire that we got through in the 1890s or whatever, we can actually connect this to things that are happening in the current organization that are relevant to where we’ve been and where we’re going?

 

Erin Narloch  22:50  

Yeah, no, I agree. I have a personal story that I think really highlights this, this relationship. When I worked at Reebok and oversaw the global brand archive, there’s someone I partnered with a lot. His name is James Hardaway, and he was a key account manager for some of the largest accounts Reebok had, so wholesale partners, be it shoe palace or Dick’s Sporting Goods, and everyone mentioned to me how watching him present a new line of shoes, for instance, was a master class and how to do brand storytelling, because here he is. He’d been with the brand for, you know, 30 plus years, but he understood what made Reebok different important he could articulate that brand heritage in a way that animated buyers from different wholesale partners, that gave them a clear understanding of the credibility Reebok had in the space, the connection to consumers, the quality in the product and And as you know, at that time, heading up the archive as essentially a brand archivist. For me, it also helps me understand how I could be a more effective storyteller internally, because James could do this to legions of people who are essentially, you know, every every few months getting pitched products that, by and large, might look function similarly. So what was the key differentiator, the emotional connection that he could make between buyer and product, between consumer and product, and that, I think that is a skill that brand heritage really helps kind of enable.

 

Jason Dressel  24:47  

Yeah, no, I love that. As you know, I am a huge fan of making history and heritage a tool for business development and sales. Um asset. It blows my mind that more talented business development teams don’t lean into it, because, again, if you take that word and you and you replace it with experience, it makes a lot of difference, right? And that connects to one of the other things I wanted to touch on, is this notion of when we think about, you know what, why do Why do brands matter? Right? Brands matter because it’s all about building loyalty. It’s all about building a set of characteristics that you associate with this entity, ie a brand, right? I mean, that is literally the origins of what a brand you know was, when you look at the kind of agrarian origins of what a brand was in terms of identity, and ultimately, it’s about building, you know, trust in that brand through those perceptions. And then ultimately, you know, ideally, of course, creating, creating loyalty. And that’s something that you know you focused on quite a bit in the authorship of the authorship of the white papers. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about that sort of relationship between heritage and how it can affect and influence perception, trust and loyalty.

 

Erin Narloch  26:13  

Yeah, happy to think you’ve started the conversation right. You’ve set it up in a way that when we you know, inherently, as humans, we want to have personal connections within our life, and that comes down to the brands we buy associate with. I also want to say it comes down to where we want to be employed, and that, like employee loyalty, and I think there’s something to be said about utilizing a brand’s heritage to reinforce these ideas of stability, longevity. You know, you can trust us. We’re dependable. We’ve delivered, you know, similar or better experiences over time. And I think that dependability stability builds both trust as well as loyalty and then the perception of a brand that, you know, utilizes brand heritage. I just gave an example of, you know, James, doing essentially a sales pitch utilizing brand heritage to create that emotional connection that differentiates kind of in the vanilla valley of everything that exists in our life, what makes things different and more interesting and opens up that personal connection to the brand.

 

Jason Dressel  27:39  

Yeah, great point. So to shift gears a little bit, one of the other themes of this conversation is nostalgia. And we have learned so much about nostalgia as an emotion, as a real driver of emotional behavior, you know, and we’ve had several podcasts and other content that we’ve published that delve more into the fact that one things that fascinates me about nostalgia is that there are different kinds of nostalgia, and I will go all into that on this, but I encourage listeners who are interested in this to take a perusal through our feed of other content that we’ve that we focused on in that regard. But I’m curious to get your take on that sort of relationship between heritage and nostalgia, you know, how do you see them working differently, yet they’re obviously related to one another, particularly as we think about how brands use history, heritage and nostalgia.

 

Erin Narloch  28:47  

Yeah, so I think, you know, when I think of nostalgia, I think of it as kind of a collective memory that I can tap into with, sometimes my peers, sometimes it’s something that I can share with my children or people of a younger generation, they’re, in fact, having an nostalgia for for a time they weren’t alive for, right? So I think there’s that aspect to nostalgia is like tapping into my own personal memory, and it being part of a collective memory of a generational cohort, and then how do younger audiences kind of tap into that and like, make it their own? So that’s what I think.

 

Jason Dressel  29:29  

You’re just definitely, by the way, hit on three of the four major areas of nostalgia, historical nostalgia, personal nostalgia and collective, community group nostalgia. So well done.

 

Erin Narloch  29:40  

Thank you, thanks. I’ve read a book or two on it, yeah. However, I don’t think that. You know, sometimes there, there are, there are moments and trends where nostalgia is quote, unquote hot, right? And then a brand can, can kind of enter the chat right through a different kind. Of a different entry point than maybe they would normally, you know, utilize, right? I think it’s a way to kind of pulse into pop culture in a very interesting and different way. And that could be everything from, you know, I think of Clippy showing up and being kind of a figure that you know, makes us talk about a, you know, the nostalgia we might have for early, you know, Microsoft suite to to like CDs as being something that, you know, we think of distractive drivers today is looking at their their cell phones, but recently I saw kind of the distractive drivers of the early 2000s and like late 90s, flipping through their their CD books. So thinking about the companies that kind of intersect with that collective moment, I think brands can play a part there. I do, however, think that nostalgia in general, as we know from a lot of our research and talking with experts, it starts to, you know, it starts to be selective in memory and repositioning of the past in a way that can exclude audiences, that can change, you know, the the overall sentiment and takeaway from a different area. I think that there’s when we think of brand stewardship, right, which is really protecting the brand, and I think it’s definitely related to brand heritage throughout time. And heritage management is understanding when you need to kind of flex and and be a truth teller, right and transparently, kind of own the missteps in a brand’s past, which I think is a very important role that heritage management can play and in negotiating that, because we’re all humans. We’ve all made mistakes. Don’t tell me about a time that taps into nostalgia and then not kind of transparently own kind of the roles that businesses played in that, or brands played in that. So I think that’s a nuance that needs to kind of be measured. But yeah, that’s, those are some of my thoughts immediately.

 

Jason Dressel  32:29  

Yeah, and you touch on a really interesting and salient point there, which is nostalgia, by its nature, is not authentic, actually, it’s not actually often and typically associated with the truth. It’s nostalgia is all about emotion. It’s all about feeling. It is very much at that sort of intersection of heritage. But nostalgia, in a lot of ways, is in contrast to history, right, which is a really kind of interesting way of thinking about that role. And I think that a lot of organizations, as we were talking about before, they sort of sell short the value and role and importance of what history and heritage can do, and in a way, nostalgia reinforces that, you know, because, but at the same time, I think the power of nostalgia is also very much underestimated, and it can be sort of written off as kitschy or, you know, just sort of fun things that one may see in their social feed or whatever, and that’s quite different than actually what a lot of science is saying about what nostalgia can do, not to go down the politics route, but just as an example, like the Make America Great Again movement may arguably be the most powerful nostalgia campaign in The history of civilization. It’s all about nostalgia, right? And so it’s really interesting when you think about nostalgia really as a powerful emotion, and an emotion that can be used in persuasion in a really powerful way. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s rooted in truth? 

 

Erin Narloch  34:21  

Oh, most definitely. I mean, we are students of history as well. So we, we know, we know and encourage folks right to know where that idea of nostalgia to a past that never existed can be, can be used as, quite honestly, propaganda, right? And we know that, I think, in the last 100 years, you can look at regimes that have utilized a kind of nostalgia to something that didn’t exist as a powerful and, you know, divisive tool that you mentioned, to control masses and to get them to believe in something. Okay, you know something different, yeah.

 

Jason Dressel  35:05  

So we’ve talked a lot about heritage as a branding tool, and a lot of the conversation may be inherently inherent and interpreted as external applications. You’ve used some excellent examples in sort of case studies, airing of the tool of or the sort of heritage management as a tool for internal operating and I’m curious if you could, you know, maybe talk a little bit more about that in terms of the way heritage can be used to influence brand identity, influence, employee loyalty or Ambassador behavior. Because I think one of the things that we’ve seen is, in many cases, our clients will come to us and they want us to use their history and heritage as a way to authenticate something they’ve already come up with. And certainly, from our experience, there’s that that’s, again, sort of selling it short in terms of what, what this resource can do for you.

 

Erin Narloch  36:08  

Yeah. I appreciate that. I think, you know, I can reference my own experiences in house and then talk about how these, these threads of brand heritage bubble up through engagements we have with clients where we’re, you know, talking with people who have long tenures at at different organizations, we are researching in archives, both internal archives and third party repositories, to look for indications of brand brand truths and brand heritage that can be kind of utilized internally. So I often think of some intrinsic, you know, human needs. We have a need to belong. This is like part of who we are as humans, right? We want to belong to a place, and in order to use heritage in a way that can activate internal audiences, you think of brand storytelling that looks for multiple entry points. You look for proof points in a brand heritage that talks about innovation and engineering, and you know, it looks for the contributors from finance and business strategy and creatives, right? Because when you activate a brand’s heritage internally successfully, people within the organization identify with those who came before them. They identify with the power an organization has. They identify with the fact that they are contributing to a legacy that they are making change themselves, that they see themselves as you know, these these Mavericks, these change makers, these innovators, right? So inherently, I think that when done right, brand heritage is a mirror to your employees, so they can see themselves as being an active part of the story. And it also inherently provides a sense of pride, understanding, critical thinking, you know, the compass, like, where are we going? Direction it is. It is something that when done, when done successfully, internally, it becomes, it becomes itself an elevator pitch for anyone in the organization who can start to peel the onion on what it means to be, you know, a coworker, a teammate, a whatever it might be, at any level of the organization, leadership can be shown when they know a brand’s heritage and can speak to it.

 

Jason Dressel  38:54  

And to play devil’s advocate, Is there an argument against heritage and history and heritage management, are there downsides to overdoing it or align too heavily on what we’ve been talking about? Can it hold a business back?

 

Erin Narloch  39:18  

So, if done successfully, I don’t think it can hold a business back. I think it needs to be tempered amongst other business objectives and understand how it, in fact, can reinforce but not be. It’s not a one act show, it’s not a single note. It, in fact, is very nuanced, and it’s the lens you drop in front of brand heritage that allows it to push forward and reinforce the messaging of today and tomorrow, right? It is never about looking back for the sake of looking back. It is really about reinforcing where an organization is. Going and giving it that future fuel to get there?

 

Jason Dressel  40:05  

Yeah, that’s an interesting take. I might add to that, that when it’s done badly, because you qualified your answer by sort of conceptualizing when it’s done well, right? And I think when you look at where organizations may misstep, and you see this referenced or in terms of how they’re using their history and their heritage, is when they lean into too much of a we’ve always done it this way, and therefore you know that maybe they’re less receptive to adapting and less receptive to being agile and innovating. So I can see an argument of saying we’re resting too much on our laurels or but I think that to your point, the counter argument to that may be that you haven’t actually always done it that way. You’re not. You’re misinterpreting what actually is the truth of your organization. Because in all likelihood, had you always done it this way, you would not still be here. So it’s an interesting nuance to how you continue to use your history and heritage as a forward looking tool, but not again, kind of coming back to this one of our themes, just sort of passively, you know, kind of depending on it and not actively using it, really, as a as fuel, as you say, to move the organization forward. 

 

Erin Narloch  41:25  

Yeah. So, I sometimes think of it so in the product world, I often reference an infinity sign, like, if you think of an infinity sign, and kind of how it loops back and forth on one side of the infinity sign. You’re feeding it lifestyle and heritage, and you know, all of the the times, especially in performance footwear, where a shoe no longer is a shoe to run a race, such as shoe to, you know, to wear when you’re going the grocery store, or or to, you know, be influenced by fashion and culture. And on the other side of the infinity sign, you’re, you’re, you’re feeding an innovation and what’s new and what’s next, and over a period of time that that arc kind of feeds into the lifestyle, and lifestyle ultimately will feed into innovation, but you can’t over index on either side of that in infinity sign. If that makes sense, then it’s not in this kind of, this kind of galvanizing momentum in it, where the the two sides crossed is like, that’s, that’s, that’s your brand right in the middle. It’s not just the past and it’s, it’s the future, but you have to be doing it in a way that you know you’re making history. You’re reinforcing brand heritage every day, every time you release a new product, every time you enter a new market, every time you kind of go into a new vertical, you are influencing how your story will be told over time. And that that balance is really important. And it’s, there’s, there’s some alchemy in it, and there’s some magic. And I think that’s what’s, you know, kind of, that’s the velcro. That’s maybe kind of staying in this place for a long time.

 

Jason Dressel  43:25  

Yeah, science and art, baby. Science and art. So are there any heritage management best practices that you would recommend to any consumer brand, regardless of their industry, regardless of their age, whether they’re five or 500 you know, what are? What are some things that really every brand should, should adopt immediately, like, like, call us tomorrow.

 

Erin Narloch  43:53  

So I have a list of a few things I’m going to start and then we’ll continue on. I think having a cohesive brand story is incredibly important, understanding who you are, why you are, who you are, and how that has changed and evolved over time, having that written down somewhere, having that authenticated, having that evidence bound, having that be something that anyone at the organization can reference to and feel kind of empowered by, I feel like it’s incredibly important to onboard C-suite and high potential audiences within an organization with those key aspects of a brand story. I feel like any new, you know, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Strategy, Information Technology, whomever, like CEO, whoever it might be, giving them that kind of the story and the why it matters and why it matters to them is so important, as well as the high potential group within an organization, equipping them, I think, to be those brand advocates within an organization. Organization and outside incredibly important, I would say, actively using evidence to illustrate the abstract. So use the evidence of your past that helps you articulate the most abstract business objectives you’re going after, like we can do this. We’ve done this before, or here’s an example of when we did X, Y or Z, I think, using evidence to illustrate the abstract. And I mean self serving, activate that, you know, activate that heritage. You know, give it a chance, like let it, let it sing, because it really can for you, both for internal audiences and consumers. And I mean, I would be remiss to say if I didn’t see the value in investing in a brand archive. Because it is, you know, you said the E word. It is your inventory of experience. It is the place in which you can commune with the real, the authentic, that you can stand on the shoulder of giants. It is an important, you know, hippocampus for any organization going further into the 21st Century.

 

Jason Dressel  46:08  

Amen sister. Whoo, yeah. No. Great, great points. And it’s the word story, just like, just to put a pin on this, the word story is so overused, and the number of times you know, you hear an organization say that they have their brand story, or their brand narrative, and it’s basically a set of bullet points and like, to your point of like, every organization should truly have that brand heritage story, not heritage brand brand heritage story that connects, essentially, you Know, that origin to how they’ve evolved today, it’s the best ideas are always the most obvious, right? And so many organizations just don’t have that. And it is absolutely foundational to who you are as an organization, what your identity is, and ultimately, that’s what brand is all about, right? Is identity?

 

Erin Narloch  46:57  

Yeah, you think about joining a new organization and getting the benefits package right. You’re looking through your benefits. You’re electing what makes the most sense for you. You’re figuring out your login, your, you know, all the different systems you need to have access to and use. I would say your brand story is one of the key onboarding, you know, documents to understand. Okay, I’m sitting in this part of the organization. Why is it that this is significant to me, and how do I use it in my everyday kind of work life?

 

Jason Dressel  47:35  

Yeah, well, Erin, if nothing else, two evangelists have evangelized one another. So I hope others have enjoyed the conversation as much as I have. Again history factory with Erin’s leadership, we published a white paper a couple of months ago on this topic of the role of heritage for consumer brands. We’ll link to that in the show notes, and we encourage you to check that out if you are interested in delving further into this topic, but let’s leave it there. So for everyone listening, thank you so much for listening to this last episode of the History Factory Podcast. I’m Jason Dressel.

 

Erin Narloch  48:23  

I’m Erin Narloch. Thanks for being with us today.

 

Jason Dressel  48:26  

Be well. Thanks everyone. We’ll see you next time.