By ALEJANDRO LÓPEZ and JAMES HARN, PhD
For a while now, Millennials have been steadily retrieving products and labels from a past they barely experienced, if at all. The resurgence of vinyl records, instant cameras or the Moleskein® brand, among many other cases, signals the emergence of a potent cultural current. At LopezMora, we define this current as Legacy Power, an effort made by the new generation to retrieve meaningful objects and stories from another era and to drive them forcefully into their own future. Brands and companies’ attempts to capitalize on their Legacy Power abound. However, many of them fail primarily because of the prevalent tendency to confuse Legacy with Nostalgia. In this and coming papers, we explore the causes, consequences, and opportunities of this new phenomenon. In doing so, we also touch on cultural topics beyond marketing in which the idea of Legacy Power can be leveraged to solve various other problems.
Millennials Are Fueling the Comeback of Analog
Generational conflict surrounds our homes, schools and corporations. Difficulties in employee relationships, teaching methods and brand development slow our endeavors and exhaust our resources. In the midst of these clashes and as the world emerges from the Great Recession, a new marketing concept emerges with it. This concept addresses the attraction Millennials have for such analog products as vinyl, ‘Polaroid’ instant cameras, as well as ‘slow’ practices such as game night, and home cooking, among others. What is curious and of note is why the first generation raised in the digital age would have an attraction for such, seemingly outmoded, analog products. We recognize in these occurrences a celebration of a cultural inheritance that is being actively sought rather than being passively handed down to the new generation. In this regard, Millennials are doing the work of legacy building as they retrieve boomers’ artifacts whose time in the market has expired and propel them into the future with a new direction.
Understandably, some manufacturers and advertisers might respond swiftly to this cultural phenomenon by dragging old products and brands from their vaults and trying to give current relevance to them. Some may be narrowly successful but many fail because they mistake nostalgia for legacy. When legacy is confused with nostalgia or retro its future oriented dimension is missed. Nostalgia is a one way ticket to the past. Legacy is a more encompassing idea with deeper roots, wider reach, which draw upon greater potential.
Legacy Bridges the Generational Chasm
The origins of the word ‘legacy’ stem from the root ‘leg’ meaning "to collect, gather," with derivatives meaning "to speak (to 'pick out words');" that is, to bind together with words. When this root is combined with the Latin legare meaning to "send with a commission, appoint as deputy, appoint by a last will,” we get the sense of passing a meaningful story from generation to generation—much as one might pass a baton—tying them to a common heritage. The identification of something as meaningful is the recognition that it serves a purpose. Neuroscience has affirmed that our perception is an expression of the layered history of these stories. “Our brains’ way of seeing looks to this history … for what is useful, in the hopes of increasing the probability of surviving in the future.” Those who correctly recognized something as a threat, a snake, perhaps, and responded accordingly, survived to tell the tale and to pass on this perceptual pattern as a legacy; those who did not perished and their pattern of misrecognition along with them.
Stated succinctly, the ‘power in legacy’ resides in stitching together ideas, objects, behaviors into constellations that form stories that are meaningful for the navigation of experience and which have the unique power to bind generations. Societies depend on these stories to sustain and, paradoxically, to evolve their cultures. Nowadays, however, the feeling of generational break prevails. With the peak of the digital revolution, the regular flow of legacy has been interrupted. The Millennial generation got shortchanged; a failure of legacy expressed by the well known fact that Millennials are the first generation expected to not do as well as their parents.
It is also well known that Millennials are a notably skeptical cohort. “They identify social policies enacted by Boomers, e.g. increased student debt and a lack of an employer-sponsored retirement plans, as substantial hurdles to entrepreneurship.” More than skeptical the Millennials’ worldview is down right bleak. Putting responsibility for these policies aside, from their perspective, it cannot be denied that following the Great Recession our social and political environment has revealed something crucial: faced with unending military conflict we have little peace to show for it; faced with unending spending on healthcare, we have little health to show for it; faced with unending corporate power we have little shared prosperity to show for it; faced with unending consumption we have little but environmental destruction to show for it. The stories we have told ourselves have not resulted in their expected outcomes, many assumptions that governed past behavior have exhausted their legacy power.
Thinking about legacy as that which binds generations however, legacy should be considered as an effort of remediation, the re-establishment of what is broken between two generations. It offers an opportunity for Millennials to bequeath themselves a legacy not granted. Hence, the power of legacy resides in its capacity for future orientation. After all, a true legacy is not the nostalgic return to the past there to remain but is the issuing of a story whose meaning is useful to build the future. Brand positioning, company missions, and marketing strategies built on the premise of innovating the past as energy for the future have a much stronger potential than laments for the “good old” days, no matter how emotional and well produced they might be.
The Millennial attraction for analog products is the expression of this binding power in material form: game night materializes the intangible moment of social bonding; vinyl materializes the authenticity of the performed sound wave; ‘Polaroid’ snaps instantaneously materialize on paper the aesthetic quality of shared memory. The popularization of these and other similar products and activities can be interpreted as a survival mechanism against the digital dematerialization and fragmentation prevalent in our lives. Harnessing the power inherent in legacy and applying it in our classrooms, workplaces, and markets may very well lay the keystone necessary to bridge the various dimensions of our discontent.
Nostalgia Traps Us in the Past
As we mentioned earlier, there is a trap hiding in this idea that has become quite evident in the marketing world where a nostalgic adoration of the past has at times been exploited as a marketing hook for Millennials. While it is true that Millennials show an interest in analog behaviors and products, nostalgia alone is insufficient, and potentially risky, for developing and maintaining a brand’s positive identity. It is far easier to bring back a long ago retired logo than to create new content. And if this logo carries with it positive cultural memories, activating “emotional attachment” and “a higher possibility that we will act upon a purchase,” all the better for marketers. The power of legacy, however, is not nostalgia alone. To identify a legacy brand one would have to look for one that tells a customary or satisfying story but with an ending open for future possibility. Such brands may offer a familiar and ‘safe-space’ for experimentation suitable for Millennials to construct their own legacy. Products and brands, human resources policies, and educational strategies based on the concept of legacy should hearken to a recognizable past but must remain open to investment with new meaning and purpose.
Moleskine®: A Well Executed Legacy
Moleskine® has orchestrated these ideas to perfect harmony. The Molskine® brand carries with it a storied history going as far back as Vincent van Gogh, Picasso and Hemingway but was created as recently as 1997. The Moleskine® brand story creates the expectation of participating in a legacy of thinkers, artists and innovators in which each consumer can find his or her place. Further, Moleskine® has introduced line extensions bridging analog and digital thereby creating for its brand a future oriented space in which consumers can invest new stories. Last, Moleskine®’s entire range of products mutually support the core story of lettered exploration of life and the world around us which creates a stage for experience that matches its core brand story, a stage upon which any of its consumers can find themselves playing a part.
The Moleskine® model can be applied to not only many other products and brands but also to human resources and educational tools. The power of this approach resides in the fact that its very structure poses a re-meaning of the past in everyday useful ways. Legacy may occasion new understandings that suit their recipients, not providing answers so much as occasioning future oriented experiments, novel stories. And this may be its real cash value…. The power in legacy can occasion a re-turning of the past that is future oriented.
In our next paper we focus on the storytelling quality inherent in the idea of legacy, attend to its positive contribution to legacy building and highlight some of the unintended consequences of over-investing in the technological factor of Big Data and under-investing in the human factor of storytelling.