Can brands borrow heritage?

As The Value Engineers celebrates its 40th birthday, we’ve been thinking a lot about heritage. What does it really mean for a brand? When does it add value, when can it become a constraint, and perhaps most interestingly, can brands that don’t have decades of history behind them benefit from someone else’s?

Few places bring this question to life quite like Wimbledon.

The Championships have been running since 1877 and, over almost 150 years, Wimbledon has built an extraordinarily rich set of associations around tradition, excellence, prestige and a very particular kind of Britishness. It is, of course, one of the world’s great sporting events, but the brand has become much bigger than tennis. The grass courts, all-white dress code, strawberries and cream, royal patronage and even the inevitable conversations about the weather have created something culturally distinctive and instantly recognisable.

When two heritage brands meet

Ralph Lauren’s long-standing partnership with Wimbledon is perhaps the most natural example. Since becoming the tournament’s Official Outfitter, the brand has dressed umpires, line judges and ball crews, bringing together two names with a shared language of timeless style, quality, heritage and understated luxury.

It’s one of those partnerships that feels so right it’s almost difficult to image it not existing. Ralph Lauren doesn’t need Wimbledon to give heritage credentials, nor does Wimbledon need Ralph Lauren to make it feel prestigious. Instead,  the association allows both brands to reinforce qualities they already own.

Our sister agency, 2CV, has spent years helping global brands measure the impact of sports sponsorships like these, looking beyond visibility to understand whether a partnership actually builds awareness, changes brand perceptions, reaches new audience and ultimately influences future behaviour.

Their work has repeatedly shown the particular power of Wimbledon as a brand platform. Compared with the other tennis Grand Slams, Wimbledon perform exceptionally strongly around perceptions of heritage, prestige and luxury, giving partners access to a set of associations that have been built and strengthened over generations. But what happens when a brand without that history steps onto the same stage?

Can a challenger brand borrow the credibility of Centre Court?

Castore was founded in 2015. By the standards of global sportswear, it was barely out of the starting blocks when Andy Murray walked onto Centre Court wearing the British challenger brand.

Think about the company it was suddenly keeping. Nike. Adidas. Lacoste. Ralph Lauren. Brands with decades of history, huge marketing budgets and deeply established relationships with elite sport.

And then there was Castore.

Its partnership with Murray didn’t simply generate awareness. It immediately changed the context in which the brand was seen. Here was a young British sportswear company, worn by a two-time Wimbledon champion, competing on Centre Court at arguably the most prestigious tennis tournament in the world.

That moment gave Castore something that would have been extraordinarily difficult to build through advertising alone: the right to play with the big boys.

By appearing in that particular context, the brand was able to benefit from associations that already existed around both Murray and Wimbledon: elite performance, British sporting excellence, quality, credibility and prestige. The stage itself became part of the brand story.

Of course, association alone can only take you so far. A sponsorship might open the door, but the brand still has to deliver once it walks through it. Yet for a challenger trying to establish credibility in a category dominated by giants, choosing the right partner and the right stage can dramatically accelerate the journey.

Heritage, in that sense, doesn’t always have to be owned. Sometimes it can be borrowed, although the fit needs to be credible enough for people to believe you belong there.

The trick isn’t preserving tradition. It’s keeping it alive.

One of the reasons Wimbledon remains such a valuable partner is that, for all its traditions, it has become remarkably good at finding contemporary ways to express them.

The Overheard at Wimbledon social series is a brilliant example. The concept is simple: capture snippets of the funny, eccentric, posh and occasionally completely bonkers conversations taking place around SW19 and share them with the world.

It works because Wimbledon isn’t trying to pretend it isn’t traditional. Quite the opposite. It is taking the very quirks and characteristics that make the experience distinctive and finding a modern, culturally relevant way to celebrate them.

The content doesn’t undermine the heritage of the tournament; it brings it to life. A younger audience might never have attended Wimbledon, owned a pair of tennis whites or developed strong opinions about the correct way to serve strawberries and cream, but they can still enjoy the wonderfully strange world of SW19 through their social feeds.

The character of the brand remains intact. The way it is communicated continues to evolve.

And then there’s The Queue

Perhaps the most impressive example of Wimbledon’s ability to turn tradition into brand value is also the most unlikely: a very long queue.

For most brands, making customers wait hours to buy your product would be considered a fairly serious customer experience problem. At Wimbledon, The Queue has become part of the product.

It has its own etiquette, its own culture and, arguably, its own personality. People arrive early, bring picnics, make friends with their neighbours and proudly collect their queue cards. For some fans, securing tickets this way isn’t the unfortunate alternative to winning the ballot. It’s the experience they actively choose.

That’s quite an achievement when you think about it. Wimbledon has taken what could easily have been seen as an annoying barrier to entry, quite literally, and allowed it to become one of the most distinctive parts of the brand experience.

This hasn’t happened because someone decided to manufacture a quirky activation called The Queue. Its value comes from the fact that it has grown organically over time, shaped by the behaviour of fans and embraced by Wimbledon rather than designed out of the experience in pursuit of efficiency.

There is an interesting lesson here for brands, particularly at a time when so much energy goes into removing every possible friction from the customer journey. Not all friction is bad. Sometimes the rituals, quirks and peculiarities surrounding a brand are exactly what make it memorable. The challenge is knowing the difference between something that frustrates people and something that creates belonging, anticipation and a story worth telling afterwards.

“Heritage is more than history. Perhaps that’s why Wimbledon remains so interesting from a brand perspective. Its heritage isn’t simply a collection of traditions preserved from the past. It’s a living system of distinctive assets, rituals, associations and behaviours that continue to create meaning today.”

For established brands such as Ralph Lauren, standing alongside Wimbledon can reinforce values they already own. For younger challengers such as Castore, the right association can help accelerate credibility and give them permission to compete on a much bigger stage. Meanwhile, Wimbledon’s own continued relevance shows that protecting heritage doesn’t mean protecting everything exactly as it was.

As we celebrate 40 years of The Value Engineers, this is a question we’re thinking about a lot. Four decades of experience should never be an excuse to stand still, but nor should evolution mean discarding the things that made a brand distinctive in the first place.

The interesting work lies somewhere between the two: understanding what is genuinely valuable about your past, finding new and relevant ways to bring it to life, and occasionally recognising that even something as apparently inconvenient as a very long queue might be worth keeping.