I am digging through old archives of our store. One of the Core Values of our business is Nostalgia. We are putting together a display of old pictures and old advertisements from the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Tim Miles wrote a great post on whether or not you should use how long you’ve been in business as part of your advertising. You know, phrases like “serving your family since 1979.”

My answer to that is… only if your start date has something to do with the Core Values of your store. What happened in 1979 that got you to start serving families? Why do you serve families? Why does 34 years of history mean anything?

Nostalgia is part of our culture. We sell toys and baby products, so we get customers for the birth, the birthdays, and Christmas. We’ve been selling toys for over 60 years so we have multiple generations of customers. Not a week goes by without at least one customer telling me about visiting the old store (we moved to our current location in 1967).

There are better ways to show Nostalgia than simply saying when we opened.

For instance, here is a radio ad we ran back in 2006 about an event that happened in 1965…

True story? Check.
Speaks to the heart? Check.
Consistent with our Core Value of Nostalgia? Check.
Lets people know we’ve been in business a really long time without just saying the date? Check.

Roy H. Williams said branding is every single interaction a customer has with your business plus how she feels about it. Control the interactions, build them around your Core Values, and you control the feelings.