Invented corporate heritage brands

Abstract

This article examines the phenomenon of invented corporate heritage brands, i.e. heritage that is made up, exaggerated or far-fetched, to an extent that stakeholders may challenge its accuracy. Along six empirical cases, three dimensions characterizing invented heritage are identified, namely facticity, historical connectedness/disconnectedness, and temporal expansion/contraction. Companies draw on three different strategies to build invented corporate heritage brands: The appropriation strategy builds a heritage brand by leveraging the past of organizations that are forerunners of the present firm The forgetting strategy omits or tones down parts of the past that are deemed as not being useful for the brand. Eventually, the fantasizing strategy constructs a brand based on a purely invented past. Overall, the article provides evidence of the high degree of pragmatic flexibility (Burghausen and Balmer in Corporate Communications: an International Journal 19: 384–402, 2014a) inherent in corporate heritage. It also demonstrates how young brands can be infused with heritage, by appropriating the past of historical forerunners that are meaningfully connected to the brand.