Message in a Bottle: The Power of Time and Age
Feature by FerebeeLane
Photo Credit: Julia Volk, Pexels
In the context of luxury branding and marketing, age is a powerful but complicated currency. The impact and effects of time can signify exceptional craft and legacy, but it can just as easily signal neglect and decline. From storied hotels and legacy automobile brands to barrel-aged spirits and heirloom leather goods, there is a nuanced but essential distinction to be made between age and actual significance.
Ignoring that distinction — as marketers do when casually equating longevity with luxury — risks alienating and aggravating the very discerning consumers you hope to engage. Advertisements that indiscriminately position any older resort as ‘historic,’ or describe all established brands as ‘heirloom,’ illustrate how the complexities of time are regularly reduced to spin and semantics. Just as ill-advised are campaigns that try to bully buyers with over-the-top, age-related claims about pedigree and purported rarity.
The problem is that neither path actually leverages time as a valuable aspect of luxury; they simply label it.
Incorporating a founding date into the revised visual identity of a historic resort doesn’t fully harness the power of the past, but this is the predictable outcome of countless recent destination rebrands. Similarly, headlines that celebrate a premium brand’s place as the first in a category stop well short of actually dimensionalizing that fact into something meaningful for the brand’s modern audience.
Today’s astute affluent consumers don’t just want to be told that age alone makes a place or brand exceptional. They want to understand how time and history and age create something meaningful and desirable. Something magical.
Age must be more than a description. It must, if it’s intended to add true value and interest to luxury marketing, represent something more than the sum of its years.
Few professionals understand this dynamic better than master sommeliers. Every time these well-trained oenophiles present an older selection, they offer a masterclass in marketing the luxury of age. In their hands, the simple act of presenting and opening a bottle becomes ceremony and ritual. A candle. A decanter. A corkscrew. A story.
At the heart of this experience is a clear and compelling message: this isn’t just about the year the grapes were grown and crushed or when the vintage was barreled and bottled. It’s about all that has happened since then. It’s about all that the wine has become over time. Even sediment and discoloration, in these competent hands, become so much more than expected degradation. It is demonstrative proof of the powerful passage of years.
Longevity, in this context, isn’t just a label. It’s a luxurious arc spanning decades where tannins soften and bold fruits relax into silky complexity that can be sensed and savored. In these tableside moments, sommeliers teach marketers a valuable lesson. It’s not how you talk about and describe age as much as how you make it real and relevant to your audience.
Making Age Matter
Master sommeliers excel at what luxury marketers often struggle with when it comes to marketing an older brand or destination: storytelling that poetically intertwines poignant history with present-day relevance. No passionate wine lover would ever describe a Bordeaux from the 1980s simply by the number of years it had been cellared. Focusing on age alone in this situation would be unthinkable. Instead — and this is the point most transferrable to other luxury circumstances — attention is emphatically placed on the notable impact and effects of time. The wine in hand is defined by more than its exact year or particular age, it’s the result of a fascinating journey of terroir and craft and metamorphosis. It’s a story of a half-century evolution in a dust-shrouded time capsule where early fruit-forward characteristics give way to earthy notes and smooth, mellow tannins.
It should be noted that the difference isn’t just the sommelier’s infusion of inspired language and theatrical flare. Their narrative approach transforms age from a static descriptive attribute into a dynamic, appealing story — and into a unique opportunity for an audience to fully appreciate and engage the value of time.
The take-away is something more powerful than provenance. It’s resonance.
Beyond the Bottle
Of course some luxury marketers do stand out for the way they apply these sort of principles to position aged products, historical places and various heritage and legacy brands.
Perhaps no industry illustrates this more clearly (or more appropriately) than luxury watchmaking — and among those watch brands none is more celebrated for its expansive, emotional focus on time than Patek Philippe.
The Swiss stalwart’s long-running ‘Generations’ campaign sets the high standard for how time and heritage and legacy can be leveraged by brands by making those concepts real and relevant to affluent audiences. “You never actually own a Patek Philippe,” the now-ubiquitous ads remind us, “You merely look after it for the next generation.”
Leather footwear icon Berluti, is another valuable reference with regard to marketing age and time. Founded in 1895, the revered maison could easily and passively rest on its century-plus history, but instead, they actively celebrate age and wear with their distinctive burnished leather goods.
Photo Credit: Berluti
Patina and age-inspired hand finishing have become their hallmark. Their brand disrupted an industry awash in typical black and brown by introducing classic lace-ups in leathers treated to resemble the effect of age and wear.
The brand’s Italian artisans apply various techniques to achieve unique color variations, tonal depths and textures that nod to a brand with a 230-year history, all while inviting men to create their own stylish story of wear and use.
Photo Credit: The Newt, Somerset
Obviously time, when it comes to communicating luxury, doesn’t always have to be about wear or particular historic dates. Or even about overt or specific age. Consider, for example, The Newt in Somerset. The British country-estate-turned-lavish-resort could certainly have made the property’s 300-year history — and striking Georgian manor — the cornerstone of its branding and marketing.
The celebrated destination, however, did something much more compelling and engaging. Instead of formulating a luxe, old-meets-new brand based on the regal-sounding Hadspen House (its central stone-clad mansion), they launched as ‘The Newt,’ a playful and unexpected name inspired by the area’s tiny amphibian inhabitants. They also didn’t settle for just depicting or describing the estate as ‘historic’ or registered, they incorporated period components like a re-imagined Roman-era agricultural facility, a traditional creamery and a fully functioning orchard and cyder operation. Launched in 2019, the resort made the property’s rich history and pastoral roots truly relevant through its refreshingly atypical branding and immersive stays.
The essence and appeal of history and time are woven throughout The Newt’s guest experience and marketing proposition, without reducing or cheapening those factors to a simple founding date or trite marketing messages.
Age and antiquity aren’t assumed to be reason enough for curious guests to consider a stay in the country. History is part of the fabric of the place, its elaborate seasonal rituals and activations, and its deeper promise of value to sophisticated modern travelers.
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Like that enthusiastic sommelier sharing a fine wine, the most successful luxury brands and those who market them understand that the power of age is about much more than a number. It’s about representing a story, an arc, an accumulation of relevant meaning that only time can provide.
Whether it’s leather that develops character through use, old or new hotels that inspire stories over decades, or bespoke techniques refined across generations, the luxury of age lies not in how long something has existed, but in how beautifully it has changed — and how powerfully it can change those who encounter it.
FerebeeLane is a brand strategy and creative agency that works with premium and luxury brands to engage the discerning affluent consumer. For the past 20 years, the agency has collaborated with beloved brands such as Le Creuset, Blackberry Farm, Miele, The Ritz-Carlton, Baker McGuire Furniture, Vail Resorts, Chimay Trappist Beer, as well as numerous other Relais & Châteaux properties, and other luxury brands throughout the home. To learn more about FerebeeLane or our perspective on the discerning affluent consumer please contact Josh at josh.lane@ferebeelane.com