For marketers, old can be the proverbial gold if leveraged well. Recently, IIM-Ahmedabad started an unusual executive education programme called ‘Strategic Legacy Management’. The course teaches participants to use history to create business value, employ it for impactful storytelling, branding and communication, as well as navigate the present and future.
“Your history is the best proof point for the promises you keep today,” declares Anders Sjöman, EVP Client Projects at the Centre for Business History, Stockholm, and author of History Marketing, a book that talks about using history as a corporate strategic asset.
Sjöman and Vrunda Pathare, head, Godrej Enterprises Archives, are teaching this corporate heritage course at IIM-A, along with the B-school’s faculty member Dr Chinmay Tumbe
If Godrej has one of the most remarkable business archives in the country, which gives you a sweeping view of the nation’s history through its product evolution story, then the Swedish Centre for Business History is a one-of-a-kind repository of corporate heritage. Stored here are the business archives of thousands of Swedish companies, both living and dead, with information, trivia and pictures lovingly collated by talking to the “squirrels” in the organisation.
“We were founded in 1974 as a non-profit to document the history of dead companies in Stockholm — there were shipyards, ad agencies, mechanical workshops that had gone defunct through bankruptcies or had stopped existing for some other reason, but had been important to the city,” says Sjöman. The oldest document at the centre is from the 1400s, from a sawmill in north Sweden. “After some time, living companies started contacting us to archive their history — so we had paying customers,” he says.
Stories from the past
From Ericsson to Electrolux, IKEA, H&M, Swedish companies have used their history in compelling ways to engage with customers or redefine their products, Sjöman says.
Different companies have different strategies for using their history. For instance, he describes how IKEA has a fantastic museum open to all (for a fee) that is centred around living rooms down the decades. “So there is IKEA furniture from the 1950s and 1960s, and if you walk through the living rooms you get a picture of how your grandmother lived or what it looked like when you were growing up. So it becomes a larger storytelling exercise.”
Volvo has a similar set-up in Sweden for its cars, adds Sjöman.
While IKEA and Volvo have used their history beautifully to engage with their customers, he describes how H&M, which is 78 years old, draws on its archives while crafting new products. “All the H&M annual special collections are archived at the centre and, often, their designers come here to see what has been done before... and look for inspiration,” he says.
Sjöman recalls how Australian film director Baz Luhrmann, who was shooting an ad for H&M, popped into the archives as he wanted to understand the company better.
War and warts
“There’s also a big HR perspective to building your heritage. People love to know the history of the place they come to work in,” says Sjöman.
Apart from Sweden, is there any other country where companies have invested in preserving their heritage? “I think German companies do it well, and they have had to do it for a very tragic reason,” responds Sjöman. “Today’s German companies had to own up to what they did during the Second World War and the Holocaust. And the driver for that was the fall of the (Berlin) Wall in 1989, when East Germany’s archives opened up. So the side effect was that Germany has a very active set of business historians. German companies have a good grasp of their history — the good and the bad,” he says.
He says there’s always the risk that companies may just want to talk about the good stuff. But companies need to talk about the good and the bad, he urges.
Pathare says in India, too, business archiving is picking up. “At least 15 companies are considering archives,” she says.
Start early
How old should a company be to begin history marketing?
“There’s the wish from us. And then there’s the reality,” exclaims Sjöman. “The wish is that they start from day one. In reality, somewhere around the time a company turns 20, the founding people will probably start leaving the company. So there’s some sort of generational shift that normally prompts people to start thinking about their history,” he says.
But in the digital age, he says, that’s changing and a lot of young companies are capturing moments and preserving stuff from day one.
Asked why, if history marketing can boost brand value, companies like Coca-Cola and Mercedes-Benz are being edged out of the top 10 brand valuation rankings by tech firms like Apple, Google and Microsoft, he responds that anecdotally one can note that all these firms have built interesting stories around their creation and founders. “Look at how well Apple has built the Steve Jobs creation story.”
“One way of using heritage is to tie it to a person — the founder figure.”