Editorial services - Centrum för Näringslivshistoria

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A company’s history is the force behind its brand, organization, and business. When used properly, it becomes a strategic asset that creates value. All businesses can use its heritage to grow – and it’s called history marketing when they do.

Every company has a story. A heritage that is a unique to that organization. You find it in photos, meeting notes, drawings, marketing material, ad campaigns, business deals and internal memos. It can be 1, 10 or 100 years old. Regardless, it is a narrative that builds trust and creates new business, a leverage that we like to call history marketing.

A professional corporate archive gives almost unlimited opportunities to discover and use your own unique heritage. But even if your historical material is spread out and unordered, we can still help. We blend storytelling, technology and design with archival and historical expertise to tell your story. Our archivists and editors are professionals in business research, fact finding and context building. They know what turns a good story into a great one – all while staying true to actual facts and events. We tell engaging and confirmed corporate stories, narratives that are based on authentic source material.

Our history marketing-projects typically build on three steps:

1. Why tell our history? – Formulate the strategy

An organization’s history is a strategic asset – if it’s used well. Good narratives are rich on engaging stories and telling examples. What makes them telling is that they reflect and support today’s goals. Strategic use of history therefore starts with establishing today’s situation and ambitions. In fact, starting with their future ambitions help historical storytellers to sharpen their thinking on why their history should be told and to whom.

If you want help setting the purpose and audiences for your strategic history use we can assist with for exampel a historical storytelling workshop. Once a strategy has been formulated, it’ll be much easier to identify the events of the past that best support (or contrast with) today’s goals.

2. Map your past in a history sheet

Finding stories in an organization’s history is normally not a problem. Every company is filled with them, rich in fact and with exciting details. To be able to choose the ones that best serve your strategy (from step one of our process), you need to create a broad overview of the company’s full history. We normally map an organization’s past in a history sheet. That’s where we place all events and developments from the organization’s life span across a time line. For an easier overview, we often tag the events according to themes that are important to the organization today, themese that we often also defined in step one.

3. Make a book, site, movie, exhibition – or whatever works best for you.

The history sheet now has all events and stories from before. You can now choose the stories that are the most telling for today’s objectives, following the strategy you set in step one. And then you just choose the best way to bring them to your intended audiences. Sometimes this is as a book, sometimes as a magazine. or as a pod, exhibition, movie, musical or any other form. Perhaps you choose a combination of products. Again, it depends on why you’re telling the story and for whom. We help you produce your storytelling producs, regardless of what you choose.