Heritage is an advantage only when it is translated. A hundred-year-old house holds craft, archive and trust, three assets a new entrant cannot buy. None of them are propositions. They become propositions when someone decides what they mean for a customer living now.
The failure mode is reverence. Teams protect the archive so carefully that nothing leaves it. The brand becomes a museum with a payment terminal, admired by people who no longer purchase.
The opposite failure is amnesia: a rebrand that discards the codes that made the house recognisable in the first place, in pursuit of a customer who was never going to arrive.
The productive path runs between them. Identify the few codes that are genuinely non-negotiable, a silhouette, a material, a standard of service, and give the organisation permission to modernise everything else without apology.
In a hundred-year-old business, I found the strongest asset was not the archive but the belief among long-serving staff that the work should be done properly. That conviction, redirected at contemporary standards of service and speed, was worth more than any campaign.