Heritage Management on TV: Holiday Edition

One thing I love most about the holiday season is the traditions and nostalgia it evokes. We all have our own personal rituals we share with loved ones, whether picturesque or totally corny.

We also, of course, have our whole lexicon of popular culture seasonal touchstones. Only the magic of the holiday season can explain the continual broadcast (and apparent demand for) programs like the early ’60s claymation Christmas specials. These shows have been so thoroughly antiquated and outpaced by our current standards of entertainment from both a content and production-value perspective that they now strike me as outright bizarre. Yet just like our holiday home decorations (which also may not meet our updated aesthetic standards), we anticipate these programs and know that the season is really here when they come out.

This brings me to one of my favorite holiday season TV moments, "Peter, you’re home!" I’ve long admired Folgers’ steadfast commitment to airing this commercial and have been struck by how timeless it is—both visually and content-wise. The story of a loved one coming home for the holidays is timeless and universal, and for whatever irrational reason, this one has always tugged at my heartstrings. And considering the commercial first aired in 1986, Peter’s family, all decked out on Christmas morning in their bathrobes, pajamas, and Norwegian fishermen sweaters, have hung in there pretty well over the years, much like an L.L. Bean catalog.

But in our new high-def world, even I have to admit that the Folgers family has been looking pretty haggard. I recall thinking last year, "Damn, I have VHS tapes that look better than that."

So I was greatly amused last week when, working in a hotel room, I heard the Folgers commercial come on. But wait! It was completely different . . . yet entirely the same. Indeed, Folgers had made over Peter’s family for the 21st century. A Christmas miracle! Or I guess the Folgers folks finally accepted that the centerpiece of their holiday decorations needed an upgrade.

A quick search online provided the backstory. The Folgers brand was acquired last year by J.M. Smucker from Proctor & Gamble. In addition to revamping the commercial, Folgers is apparently bringing back their "Best Part of Wakin’ Up" theme, as part of an overall brand revitalization effort.

A further interesting point was that the new ad, which was created by Saatchi & Saatchi, references that Peter has returned from West Africa. According to the folks at J. M. Smucker, this little detail refers to the true story of a son returning home from doing mission work. While I always liked that the original ad, created by now-defunct agency Cunningham & Walsh, left Peter’s previous whereabouts unknown and irrelevant, this new detail represents the ad agency move toward using more authentic stories to inform their creative.

So while I’m glad that Peter’s family got a makeover and they’ll be around for a few more seasons, it will be fun to see if the new ad proves to be as purpose-built as the last. If you go online you will see that there are already a range of opinions out there. The skeptic in me says it won’t. It’s hard to repeat that kind of success, but maybe that’s the magic and nostalgia of the holidays.
　
　
　

"A Matter of Identity"

When did Apple Computer become just “Apple”? According to The New York Times, shortly after it introduced the iPhone. It’s a matter of identity. Realizing it had a transformational new product on its hands, Apple likely wanted to ensure consumers no longer thought of it as just a computer company. And as The Times emphasizes, identity awareness is paramount to business success. “As the core essence of a company, identity plays a central role in guiding managerial decision-making,” says Wharton School professor and co-author of The Soul of the Corporation, John R. Kimberly.

For Apple, a relatively simple branding tweak enabled the company to make the transition from computers to a wider variety of electronics. But for companies attempting to traverse greater identity landscapes, the move isn’t quite so simple. The article notes that a key ingredient in successful face-lifts of this sort is continuity.

For example, when Fujifilm moved beyond the imaging realm into pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, it helped consumers bridge that wide gap by advertising the links between the two. The company used television commercials to explain “how nanotechnology originally developed for photography helped skin cream to better penetrate the skin.”

Information manager Iron Mountain used its core values of customer service and building trust to ease consumers into the company’s new digital offerings, emphasizing the fact that clients’ records were safe, regardless of the format.

Both of these solutions highlight a common thread of company history, whether that thread lies in products or culture. And it is this notion that speaks to our work at The History Factory. Companies often come to us at this critical point in their history, when they want to turn a corner, change their identity, but aren’t sure how to get there.

A common identity issue we face is a recent merger or acquisition of considerable size, one that can’t easily be rolled into a parent company’s brand. How do you reconcile two disparate personalities—in the eyes of employees as well as consumers? The solution lies in history.

Sometimes it takes a bit of digging, but more often than not, the companies have more in common than they thought. If two companies in the same industry have any history to speak of, they likely share some of it. For example, we’ve uncovered personal relationships between founders of two companies that merged hundreds of years later, thinking they had nothing in common. This shared experience becomes the lifeline for both companies as they come to grips with their new, shared identity.

If identity truly does guide decision-making, it is imperative for companies to be aware not only of who they are, but who they were.

Wear It Well

On a Sunday in mid-September, I flipped on the Jets-Titans game, only to see two teams that looked completely unfamiliar. Instead of the Jets’ green/white jerseys versus the Titans’ navy/powder blue, facing each other at the line of scrimmage were navy/gold and blue/white/red . . . with oil derricks on their helmets! What’s more, the referees were wearing orange stripes!

“They’re throwback uniforms,” my husband informed me. “What’s the occasion?” I asked. I had seen professional sports teams don historical uniforms before, but nothing this drastic, and never both teams at once. The occasion was the 50th anniversary of the American Football League (AFL), which played its first season in 1960 with eight teams, the New York Jets (then the Titans of New York) and the Tennessee Titans (then the Houston Oilers) among them. The league was celebrating with “Legacy Games” throughout the season, in which former AFL teams (the league merged with the NFL in 1970) played each other wearing their historical uniforms.

When I hear of a company celebrating its history, I’m always curious about the manner in which they do it. Professional sports, after all, are a business, and the industry crosses the same milestones as any other. But as we remind our clients at The History Factory, anniversaries are an opportunity as much as they are a reason to celebrate. So, I wondered, was the NFL making the most of its history?

Sure, as a fan, I found the uniforms interesting (although slightly confusing at first), and I appreciated the historical content included as part of the NFL’s weekly programming, but what did that do for the business?

A little research uncovered two avenues. First: the fans. For many, seeing the retro uniforms sparks much more than mild curiosity and philosophical musing. To celebrate their team—and make a fashion statement—zealous fans immediately want to own a piece of football history. As NFL spokesperson Johanna Hunter said in a Knoxville News Sentinel article, “Fans are buying the retro merchandise and appear excited about the AFL Legacy project.” She added, “There has been demand by fans, and with the popularity of the Legacy uniforms we’ll see them (legacy inspired gear) again next year.” The League gets a percentage of the wholesale price of the merchandise, and has reportedly raised its fees over the years. So, generating enthusiasm among fans for throwback uniforms adds to the NFL’s bottom line.

Second: the players. While wearing throwback uniforms does bring mixed reactions from the locker room, even if they aren’t fond of the color and style of their temporary duds, many players still see the benefit in honoring the League’s traditions. “I’m not a huge fan of it, but it’s part of the legacy of the Buccaneers,” said Tampa Bay center Jeff Faine in a PewterReport.com article discussing the team’s decision to wear throwbacks in a recent game to “honor the 1979 team that made the NFC Championship Game, as well as Hall of Fame defensive end Lee Roy Selmon.”

The Buccaneers were 0-7 going into the game (against the Green Bay Packers) in which they donned the uniforms. Hungry for their first win, some took inspiration from history. “Whatever uniform they put on us, we need to go out there and get our first win and represent this man they’re putting in the Ring of Honor [Selmon]. There’s a lot to play for,” said defensive tackle Chris Hovan. The result? Tampa Bay: 38; Green Bay: 28.

For the players, taking part in these traditions can inspire them to live up to the great moments of the past. And for the business, winning never hurts the bottom line.


The Denver Broncos sport throwbacks in a Legacy Game against the New England Patriots. (Image courtesy of Doug Pensinger/Getty Images Sport/Getty Images)

Epilogue:
I settled in this past Saturday to support my husband’s alma mater, The Ohio State Buckeyes, in their traditional, end-of-season faceoff against arch-rival Michigan. What’s the first thing I noticed? The Buckeye uniforms, of course—throwbacks to the 1954 championship team, whose 55th anniversary they’d recently celebrated. By now used to seeing unfamiliar football gear, I didn’t pay much more attention to their attire . . . until the sideline reporter flashed on the screen holding a pair of the Buckeyes’ retro pants.

Apparently these were no ordinary throwback uniforms. While they looked like the originals, the material was far from it. The uniforms were made using cutting-edge Nike technology, were extremely lightweight, and had extra padding to enhance performance.

Ohio State had taken the anniversary opportunity to try an innovative new product, which, if proven effective, could become a replacement for the team’s standard uniforms. By celebrating tradition, Ohio State simultaneously took a step to move its team forward toward a more productive future. Did it work? Final score: Ohio State: 21; Michigan: 10.

History Shock

Change is history, whether companies have been around for 200 years or 20. While we’re not about to rechristen the place, “The Change Factory” (or if we are I didn’t get the memo), much of what we do here is to communicate—to help companies tell their stories—about change. And regardless of how long a company has been in existence, that rate of change seems to be accelerating.

The recent, and for many, continuing, unpleasantness widely referred to as the Great Recession has lifted change in one form or another to the top of every corporate agenda. Companies are coping with dramatic changes in the way they operate and finance their businesses, and attract and retain employees. Ditto for servicing existing customers and attracting new ones.

Lately many companies are moving beyond operating in a state of history shock. They are making change work for them, rather than against them. They are discovering that change is an integral part of their histories. They realize that change is a key element of the narrative arc that describes their evolution. And that change is central to their future.

Core values enable companies to embrace change; they aren’t tossed out with the C-suite wallpaper. In fact, embracing change is likely to be a core value of highly successful companies, even if it isn’t worded as such. Tell that story, and you put your organization back out ahead of the change curve.

Innovative Interpretation

Picture this: A client tells us, “Hey, our CEO would really like to render our organizational history in the form of an 8-minute video incorporating a giant light box, a bunch of sand, and a gorgeous Ukrainian performance artist. Whaddya think?”

Now, when organizations choose to celebrate and recognize their collective histories, there are several tactics that typically come to mind: books, documentaries, exhibits, Web sites.

These are all fantastic and effective ways to explore corporate histories. But what happens when we’ve already produced a book and there’s still more story to tell? What happens when a company wants to move beyond the ordinary and communicate their stories in an innovative way?

We get extraordinary requests—like the one above—all the time. So we tell our client we’ll see what we can do. As luck would have it, I went to summer camp with a Ukrainian sand-artist named Kseniya Simonova, and she was good enough to help us out.

Just watch this video of Kseniya’s remarkable interpretation of Germany’s historic WWII invasion of Ukraine . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cri7aQHRT7k



Quick disclaimer: I did not actually go to summer camp with this woman, and we’ve never had a client specifically ask us for an interpretive historical sand animation. But still . . .

The moral of the story is that there are an infinite number of seemingly outlandish but ultimately highly effective and affecting ways to render a given story. Our thirty years of experience show that when corporations couple content-rich communication vehicles (like books and exhibits) with more impressionistic and imaginative methods, the messaging is all the more powerful.

Forging emotional connections with audiences that matter is not an easy thing. Sometimes, it takes a truly wild idea to really give a message its necessary resonance.

Drafting History

Sometimes Wikipedia gets it right. How right? So right that the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., uses the city’s Wikipedia page as its go-to recommendation for callers seeking information on D.C.’s past, according to the Washington Post.

That’s a touching vote of confidence for Adam Lewis, the Historical Society of Washington, D.C.’s membership coordinator, who also happens to be one of the Wikipedia page’s main contributors. Until recently, his co-workers were unaware of his moonlighting activity—but that didn’t stop them from unknowingly recommending his work.

Thanks to the anonymity of the Web, that Wikipedia article you just checked to resolve a friendly lunchtime debate about who won the World Series of 1962 or when New Orleans stopped being the capital of Louisiana could have been written by anyone. Your doctor? Your daughter? Your co-worker (who was so smugly certain he was in the right)? You’ll never know.

Maybe it was even written by you. And if not—and you’re confident in your knowledge—why not take a stab at it? After all, it didn’t take a Ph.D. for the 22-year-old Lewis to become Wikipedia’s Washington, D.C., guru. All it took was the time to write, the patience to check sources, and a willingness to be called out for being, occasionally, wrong.

And called out he has been. As the Washington Post notes, Lewis originally misattributed the D.C. building height limit as being tied to the height of the Capitol. (Coincidentally, the misinformation was sourced from a Washington Post article.) It took a professional historian to catch the error. But without Lewis’s original, if-faulty, draft, would the correct information ever have been shared? It’s unlikely. Many people are willing to point out errors; few are willing to sit down and draft the initial text. And all history—all writing—has to start with a draft.

2 Soon 2 Tell

It’s five minutes to breakfast on the fourth floor outside of the hotel ballroom, and among the three of us, the Merrill Lynch stockbroker—dressed to the nines but already behind the eight ball—pulls me, the interviewer, to one side while the camera guy is at sixes and sevens choosing shots and makes her confession: “I don’t get the ‘2.’”

Take a number; neither do a lot of us. The Merrill Lynch Wealth Management division of Bank of America made much of bringing back the iconic Merrill bull in its new $20 million campaign to re-brand the brokerage unit, which was purchased under controversial circumstances by BofA at year-end 2008. So far so good. One of the best-known images of Wall Street, great historical resonance, and in step with the Dow’s 50 percent or so rebound from its March lows.

Then the campaign gets 2 cute. It’s as if BofA isn’t satisfied with its name in small type beneath the Merrill bull, and a prominent banner in BofA corporate blue across the top. Enter “2,” or more precisely “help 2.” You could read this literally and conclude that Merrill is going to “help 2” make you rich, financially secure, whatever. Or, you could read this as the latest, uneven attempt to get some leverage out of merging corporate heritages.

Trouble is, BofA brings nothing of substance to the brokerage party, at least as represented in this campaign. The “2” is a reference to the two of them—Merrill Lynch and BofA—but there is nothing in the campaign to suggest that two is better than one when it comes to managing personal wealth, or that BofA has anything to add. That’s too bad, especially since it isn’t true to BofA’s heritage, which is steeped in wealth-building entrepreneurialism. In fact, it was founder A.P. Giannini who hawked loans and helped finance the American dream for thousands of fellow immigrants on the streets of San Francisco.

0 for 2. This attempt to leverage heritage appears to miss with clients and, based on my interviewee’s reaction, with employees as well. Still, too soon to tell, she declares, true to her industry’s optimism. They may get it right yet. Perhaps. We do agree on one thing: It’s not too soon for coffee.