Does heritage matter in marketing?
Friday, November 27th, 2009 by Jon Clements
At the risk of turning this into booze week on PR Media Blog, it’s hard to find a better example of “heritage marketing” than Jack Daniels.
Its sepia-photo-laden advertising, depicting a tradition of distilling going back more than a century imbues the brand with an authenticity and sense of quality that has stood the test of time. And, importantly for the brand maintaining its backstory, its founder was a real person called Jack Daniel. So far, so good, if you conveniently set aside its reputation as rock stars’ ruin for a moment.
But how crucial for a brand is having a genuine history? Or, conversely, how damaging is a hokey heritage?
A recent BBC story , investigated by its consumer affairs programme, “You and Yours”, revealed that the US fashion brand, Hollister - currently expanding its UK presence and which claims a history stretching back to 1922 - was in fact founded only in the Noughties.
If not suspicious enough, add to that a character called John Hollister - “adventurous traveller” and supposed company founder - branded “fictitious” by the BBC and a curt comment from the company itself when approached to explain its claims: “Due to our policies regarding press, we choose not to provide any comment on your questions.”
Despite the stubborn secrecy of the company and the aura of exposé in the BBC’s story, its vox pop of “teenage shoppers” found they really didn’t give a damn about Hollister’s historical fabrication.
Friend of PR Media Blog and marketing consultant at Goldsbrough Consulting, Matthew Goldsbrough, is phlegmatic about the issue: “When establishing a brand, it’s more about what it does and what it delivers rather than whether you can take it back through a lineage. Do you really care if there was, or wasn’t a “Mr.Volvo”?
He adds: “Any brand that underestimates the buyer is a fool. But I don’t think that a fake history matters greatly as the brand is not making a promise which it then breaks. At the younger end of the customer spectrum, people are much less reliant on complete provenance with a brand. Overall, the real test is ‘does it deliver?’”
Orson Welles once put together a film about the nature of authenticity called “F for Fake”. But for the modern shopper, is it more “C for couldn’t care less”?
