I spent a day this week with my pal Bruce and his merry men at
The History Factory in our nation’s capital.
Bruce and I have been friends since the day, about 20 years ago, when he first let me in on what he was up to. He had been working at the Smithsonian where his job was saying “no” to companies who’d asked the museum to pull together historic material to help them celebrate an opening, an anniversary, a retirement, or milestone of some kind. The Smithsonian, big and wonderful as it is, doesn’t do that kind of work. But Bruce saw an opportunity. The History Factory is now a global business.
In our first conversation, Bruce knocked me flat when he said “The past is the springboard to company’s future” at which point a light bulb went on and I said “A-men brother”. So while The History Factory organizes and manages the archives of large corporations, I’m convinced it’s really in the branding business.
Brand stories, after all, are rooted in a company’s past – but for some reason the past
embarrasses some corporations.
My first job out of school was at J Walter Thompson, then the world’s
largest advertising agency. I started there, as a copywriter, and
soon found myself working on Ford advertising. As a car enthusiast, I
knew the history of the company and its cars fairly well. Imagine my surprise, then, when I
learned that 70 years of Ford history, that included cars hobbyists idolized, was out of
bounds. To my amazement I found
that Ford was so rattled by it’s ‘tin-lizzie’ past that the famous Ford blue
oval logo hobbiests revered, didn’t appear on their cars and was forbidden in
their advertising.
Years after I left JWT the blue oval made a comeback and now must be one of the most valuable pieces of intellectual property on the planet. Which proves, I believe, that brands have heartbeats of their own. They grow (or diminish) every day, like the markets they exist in. So instead of the stupid “a-brand-is-a-promise” definitions spouted by the branding gurus, you’d be more correct to say that a brand is a moving average of the market’s opinion – part past and part present – that changes as the world does.
History happens, but Heritage grows – and there’s some evidence that companies with good heritage ‘bench strength’ are better able to cope with the surprises the market tosses their way. Anyone who doubts that the past can provide the resilience to withstand catastrophic surprises, need only consider how years of trust and confidence helped Johnson & Johnson survive the Tylenol scares of 80’s
What puzzles me is why companies ignore their heritage. In our throwaway culture the Fortune 500 tosses their television commercials in the waste bin every 7 years – and they’d do it annually if the law permitted. Believe me, you have a better chance of seeing a favorite old TV spot on Youtube.com than finding it in the archives of the company who paid for it.
Europeans are far more conscious of their past than we are. No matter how brand spanking new a 2010 Mercedes Benz may appear, the logo and dozens of other cues that are part of the Benz heritage are common to cars of 50 and 75 years ago. Same for Audi. Same for Alfa Romeo. Same for Porsche. Same for Volkswagen. In Detroit a handful of car buffs is struggling to save the Piquette Ave. Plant where the first Model T Fords were built. In Europe the building would be a national monument.
Using heritage doesn’t guarantee anyone a pass in the marketplace. Far from it. Heritage creates expectations that a brand must live up to. But it can also create some stability, which builds trust that can sustain a brand in changing times. And times are changing all the time. Faster than ever, by the way.
