Corporate Heritage Management: An Empirical Study of Time-Honored Firm’s Brand and Performance

This study discusses how the multidimensional functions of corporate heritage reinforce a firm’s brand equity and performance. Data from 208 heritage firms inform on how managers’ inheritance mechanisms operate on heritage culture, entrepreneurship, and proprietary knowledge. This study establishes managerial precision over the quantifiable factors of differentiated corporate heritage that can be used to empirically study branding effects. We use inheritance mechanism to a new disciplinary context and our results suggest that proprietary knowledge and heritage culture, accrued across generations, help build robust brand equity. Firm inheritance-based entrepreneurship positively influences performance in state-owned firms. In privately-owned firms, entrepreneurship significantly increases brand equity, but exercises little effect on performance in present day businesses