Abstract
Many heritage enterprises have been struggling with severely declining brands in the digital era and are in desperate need of brand revitalization. Resolving the decline of heritage brands is not only a commercial issue but also a cultural sustainability issue because a living heritage brand can be considered an example of the preservation and even inheritance of a certain culture or history. While the prior literature has largely overlooked the cultural dimension of sustainability and the management of heritage enterprises from a brand revitalization perspective, this study investigates how a heritage enterprise achieves brand revitalization for cultural sustainability in the digital era. Using a Chinese heritage enterprise as a case organization, we identify three key processes of brand revitalization (i.e., redefining the heritage brand, communicating the updated image to consumers, and reconstructing the market boundaries of the heritage brand) for achieving cultural sustainability and examine the detailed mechanisms of each process. Our findings suggest that many brand revitalization efforts rely heavily on the use of various digital technologies. Theoretical and practical contributions are also discussed.
Highlights
Many heritage enterprises have been struggling with severely declining brands in the digital age
This study contributes to the sustainability literature by elucidating the importance of the cultural dimension and investigating how heritage enterprises can achieve cultural sustainability
This paper identifies three key processes of heritage brand revitalization for cultural sustainability and discusses in detail the specific mechanisms involved in each process
Summary
Many heritage enterprises have been struggling with severely declining brands in the digital age. The decline of heritage brands is largely due to heritage enterprises’ inability to adapt to recent drastic digital-technology-driven changes in technology, R&D, product updates, and operational modes. Many heritage brands are still successful (such as Tong Ren Tang in China and Coca-Cola in the USA), the phenomenon of heritage brands’ decline has become more prominent than ever [4] and has even led to the collapse of certain well-known heritage enterprises. The Nanjing Guanshengyuan Food Company of China went bankrupt because, in its attempts to adapt to the changing times, it abandoned the core values of its products. The collapse of the Eastman Kodak Company was caused by adherence to outdated rules and inability to adopt innovations that would enable it to change with the times
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