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If you’re looking to engage discerning customers and stand out in a competitive market, how you tell the story of your brand is essential to success. Contrary to popular belief, low prices are not the main thing that will attract customers from the competition. Rather, your ability to tell a compelling story and evoke expertise, trustworthiness, and quality is the key to dominating your market niche.
One of the most effective ways you can do this is to utilise the history surrounding your brand to evoke these exact attributes. Even if your business is new, you can still use history as an effective marketing tool. Here’s how.
Photo by Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash
Marketing your space
One common way for newer companies to evoke history in their marketing is to emphasise the historic roots of the space they operate in. There are countless examples of this in action. For example, new high-profile hotels and restaurants will choose to occupy a historic building to enhance their brand prestige.
Contemporary hotel brands such as Cheval Blanc or Bvlgari have been buying up prime historic properties in the ritziest postcodes of Paris and London, in order to make the historic surroundings a part of the appeal of staying.
Meanwhile, some of the hottest new restaurants, such as London’s Sessions Arts Club or Rome’s Mercato Centrale have opened up inside well-known historic buildings, making the experience of dining there all the more memorable.
Leveraging a historic brand name
Some newer ventures might also choose to piggyback on the prestige of a historic brand name, gaining greater authority in the process. One standout example here is the new Hippodrome online casino. Thought by some to be the best online roulette casino, this entirely digital venture is based inside the 19th-century Hippodrome Casino in London’s West End.
While the gaming on offer is more suited to the 21st century, this decision to trade on the reputation of one of the oldest casino establishments in London could help to attract a more prestigious clientele, familiar with the original brick-and-mortar establishment.
Photo by Katie Smetherman on Unsplash
Emphasising continuity
When people seek quality, they often seek continuity. The thinking behind this is that if a business has been run by the same people in the same way for generations, it must be doing something right. Companies of every shape and size will often market the fact that they have been family-run through the generations. Some of the larger examples include the likes of Comcast, Walmart, and Koch Industries.
These companies emphasise their family roots to distinguish themselves from equally large competitors, implying that they are more than just faceless corporate entities. This same marketing tactic has been utilised to great success within smaller companies as well.
There’s the Château de Goulaine hotel in France, which has been in the family for more than 1000 years! Then there is the Italian jewellery-maker Torrini Firenze, which has been totally family-run since 1369. While your company does not have to go this far back, simply emphasising any family-run aspect of the brand can imply warmth and trustworthiness.