Heritage Marketing refers to all marketing activities implemented by a company to position and communicate its brand through its history, leveraging the symbolic and emotional elements associated with it. This approach is closely linked to the company’s ability to convey its identity and culture to different customer groups, highlighting the experiences that have made the brands and products unique and distinctive.
External Benefits
Heritage Marketing can be a powerful communication strategy with tangible and intangible benefits for companies. External benefits include strengthening brand identity, building a solid reputation, customer loyalty, preserving historical memory, and promoting products traditionally rooted in a specific area.
Internal Benefits
Heritage Marketing is not only a tool for improving the bond with external stakeholders but is also useful for consolidating the sense of belonging among internal stakeholders. It strengthens the company’s identity, demonstrates its solidity, and creates a general sense of trust and belonging among employees and other internal stakeholders (Martino, 2013; Burghausen & Balmer, 2014; Riviezzo et al., 2016).
Strategic Approach
The Heritage Marketing strategy is both a branding strategy and a relational marketing strategy.
As a branding strategy, Heritage Marketing aims to strengthen brand identity, increase brand awareness, and boost customer loyalty.
As a relational marketing strategy, it aims to leverage the company’s historical heritage and the identity it encompasses to establish an empathetic and trusting relationship with consumers. Heritage connects the present, future, and past, making the latter relevant for contemporary activities and goals (Balmer, 2011).
On a strategic level, Heritage Marketing can be divided into four main phases (Garofano et al., 2017; Napolitano et al., 2018):
- Identification of the company’s historical heritage.
- Valuation and communication of this heritage.
- Integration of heritage into branding and marketing strategies.
- Monitoring and evaluation of the results obtained.
Heritage Marketing Tools
Heritage Marketing develops a series of activities aimed at enhancing a company’s image and reputation by leveraging its historical heritage. These activities may include special events, book publications, and the creation of archives or corporate museums to collect, organize, and communicate the company’s culture and values to internal and external stakeholders.
Storytelling is a fundamental tool used to evoke emotions and memories related to the personal history of customers and the company’s history, fostering a deep connection between the customer and the brand.
From a business function perspective, Heritage Marketing tools can be divided into four main categories (Riviezzo et al., 2016):
Storytelling through Words, Images, and Sounds: This category includes both classic and digital tools.
Storytelling through the Product or Brand: This includes product craftsmanship, raw materials, distinctive skills, iconic products, visual identity, packaging, merchandising, and retro branding.
Storytelling through Events and Relationships: This includes anniversary celebrations, temporary exhibitions, workshops, participation in events of other companies or associations, cultural events, sponsorships, and associations.
Storytelling through Places: This includes historical archives, corporate museums, guided tours of factories, industrial archaeology, stores, and historic buildings.
Historical Archives
Historical archives are particularly common among long-standing companies. Through the archive, the company collects and organizes its assets to make them available to the public. The historical archive is useful for promoting the company’s image externally, communicating traditions, values, and corporate culture, and for spreading its philosophy and mission internally.
Corporate Museums
Corporate museums can significantly contribute to preserving the memory of companies and promoting products and activities traditionally rooted in a specific territory. They testify to the social and economic history of a local culture and produce tangible and intangible benefits for a wide range of subjects. Within the corporate museum, the brand can serve as a point of reference in society and as an image of a territory (Chaney et al., 2018; Pulh, 2019).
The Case of Museimpresa
An attempt to identify Italian corporate museums has been made by Museimpresa, the Italian association of corporate archives and museums, with the aim of creating a network of companies that promote their corporate heritage through communication strategies (Assolombarda, 2003; Rossato, 2013). This database, although partial, provides a general overview currently comprising 46 archives and 47 museums divided into six main categories: food and wellness, design, economy and society, fashion, motors, and research and innovation.
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