This recent Harvard Business Review article entitled “The Power of Old Ideas” sparked some thoughts about how you can build on your organisation’s heritage and your marketing team’s ideas to create more powerful communications and ultimately, therefore, enhance the performance of campaigns.

The Harvard article argues that great ideas and innovation do not involve reinventing the wheel. Instead, it suggests, your corporate history and its ideas/inventions are often the greatest sources of innovation. It even goes so far as to argue that most companies already know how to innovate and use their historical understanding to their advantage, but that few do because it would cause too much disruption to their profit models and established structures and processes.

As Mark Twain once said, history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes. How often, in the melee of day-to-day marketing activity, do we really have the time to stop and examine how far we really got with that brilliant idea from the last team day out? Or take an hour or two to delve through the corporate archives?  For example, I recently came across the very first presentation we ever gave to a client about The Marketing Practice. It’s 7 years old and absolutely focused on what the core of the business is all about today.

I think this is especially relevant at the moment, where innovation from old ideas and nostalgia are thriving. A determination to hang on to what’s “really important” have become psychological imperatives. Hot water bottles and lunchboxes are experiencing record sales, “make do and mend” is making its way into the technical lexicon and everyone’s growing their own. A great example of this, which The Guardian has christened “the pin up of our age” is the Keep Calm and Carry On poster which adorns everything in the UK from shop windows to deckchairs, T-shirts to mugs.

The “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster - never officially released, was designed to be put up if Britain was invaded during the second world war. As Alain Samson, a social psychologist at the London School of Economics, says ”in times of difficulty people are brought together by looking for common values or purposes, symbolised by the crown and the message of resilience. The words are also particularly positive, reassuring, in a period of uncertainty, anxiety, even perhaps of cynicism.” The poster chimes in with a general feeling, and whilst we are clearly not being invaded, it’s the echoes of the feelings brought on by the current crisis that make the slogan so popular now. It’s a beautiful example of history rhyming – during times of perceived national crisis we revert to what’s comforting.

So if you make time to do one extra thing this month, take a look a long way back in your corporate history and see what’s always been there but hasn’t been implemented? What stems from a similar era or has a fond place in people’s memories of your firm? Whether used for innovating in internal or external communications tactics, taking those great ideas forward right now makes a lot of sense.