The Relevance Challenge for Heritage Brands

Burberry’s Bond Street takeover, when it renamed the West End tube stop Burberry Street for London Fashion Week, baffled some commuters. But its host of associated activities, including a roving food truck fuelling the fashion crowd for the event’s duration, highlights the relevance challenge such heritage brands now face.

Heritage brands – seen as those that have been around for several generations and nurtured over time, with character and history that often speaks of status and sometimes social class – have many advantages. 

Heritage can summon feelings of nostalgia, a known supercharger of emotional connection. It can create opportunities for storytelling. And, in luxury, it can be elevated to evoke a sense of mythology and exclusivity. In short, it can be a powerful differentiator. But at the same time, heritage can also be a challenge. 

In today’s world, every brand owner’s priority is to make their brand come alive for their consumers. For heritage brands, this means presenting themselves as meaningful, relatable and relevant – both in terms of what today’s consumers want, and how today’s consumers behave. 

Yet consumers have changed. 

For a start, they now want and rightfully expect the brands they buy into to align with current concerns and priorities such as diversity, transparency and accessibility. They favour brands with purpose, a sense of social responsibility and a commitment to making things better – for those using and producing their products and services, wider society and the planet. 

Today’s luxury consumers, meanwhile, are a younger demographic with new money to spend. They are driven by access, collaboration and cultural relevance, and are less interested than past generations in excess and showing off. 

All of which means a heritage brand that doesn’t remodel itself for this new customer profile, fast-forwarding its heritage to the present, risks being seen as a relic and, as such, irrelevant.

This is the heritage brand’s relevance challenge, and to tackle it, there are a number of approaches worth considering. 

The first is to reassess the need to reorientate how the brand presents itself to the world. 

This could be by breaking away from the slick, elite premium-feel of a conventional visual identity in favour of more challenging, bold, contemporary visual cues – an approach successfully adopted by champagne brand G.H. Mumm. 

It could also involve transitioning from a closed-off, elitist tone of voice to a voice that’s more inclusive and peer-to-peer.

The second is to engage with cultural change and show an understanding of it.

In luxury, for example, the modern consumer is a cultural wavemaker on the lookout for values they have that brands also share. This isn’t to say that brands should feel the need to always comment on current affairs; more so, they should endeavour to be aware of what’s going on in culture and how their audience feels about it.

Another way to supercharge cultural relevance is through partnerships and collaboration. 

Gucci’s tie-up with Luke Nicholson a.k.a. Francis Bourgeois, an engineering student whose GoPro trainspotting adventures have become a TikTok sensation, is just one example of how heritage brands are working with modern influencers and artists to be innovative and interesting. 

Finally, a heritage brand can – and should – make sure it provides value to its most loyal consumers in ways that are regarded as adding value by such consumers today. 

One way a brand might do this is by developing comprehensive loyalty or membership schemes that provide tangible value to today’s new luxury consumers. For example, The Macallan harnessed data and digital experience to enhance how its most valued customers continually interacted with their brand, so that they felt a sense of belonging and personalisation.  

Once, it was enough for heritage brands simply to lean into their history. Now, the race to relevance is on, and the challenge is to translate heritage for today’s consumers in ways that are relevant, meaningful and valuable.

As brands like Burberry, G.H. Mumm and Gucci show, tomorrow’s winners won’t be those driven only by their past or, indeed, brands tempted to ditch it altogether, however, but by brands best able to remodel their heritage in relevant ways that power them forward.