Why We Trust Old Brands - with Phill Agnew

Should your brand talk about its past, or bury it to look future-focused?

Most marketers spend their time trying to reinvent. New campaign, new message, new look, every quarter. In this episode, Oliver Atkinson welcomes back Phill Agnew, host of The Nudge, the UK’s number one marketing podcast, to make the opposite case. As Casual turns 20, Phill argues that a brand’s history is not baggage to hide. It may be the most valuable asset it owns.

For over a decade, Casual has told the same origin story: two friends drove an old Mini Cooper across Mongolia and produced a film with a battered camcorder and a laptop. Oliver admits he has sometimes wondered whether to retire it. The science says he should not. Audiences reward age, and the evidence is stronger than most brands realise.

The Guinness lease that means nothing, and everything

Phill starts at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. Walk in and you stand on the original lease for the building, set under two inches of bulletproof glass. The tour guide makes a point of it: Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease, so confident was its founder in the brewery’s success. The date is etched into the side of the harp in the logo. It appears on beer mats, billboards and ads.

Here is the twist. The lease is legally invalid. Guinness outgrew the site in the 1900s and bought the land outright, so the lease serves no practical purpose at all. They promote it anyway, because age itself persuades. As Phill puts it, if a company has been around for 266 years, “it is natural to assume that that company, that store, that product must be of extremely high quality to have survived all of that time.” It is a shortcut, and it is not always true. Plenty of things have endured without being good. But the shortcut works.

Older tastes better: the history heuristic, proven

Phill walks through a 2010 set of studies by Eidelman, Pattershall and Crandall. In each, the only thing that changed was the perceived age of the thing being judged. The results are consistent and striking:

• Acupuncture described as 2,000 years old was rated 16.6% more favourably than the same practice described as 250 years old.
• An identical chocolate was judged 16.2% more flavourful when framed as a 1950s recipe rather than a three-year-old one.
• A German Expressionist painting was rated 15.2% more beautiful when believed to be over a century old.
• A Louisiana oak tree was rated 15.9% more beautiful when aged up from 500 to 4,500 years.

History does not just build trust. It changes how something tastes, and how beautiful it looks. That is why whisky advertises its years, why tawny port leans on its age, and why beer brands put their founding dates front and centre.

Why you’re wearing an 1800s gold miner’s jeans

The effect even shapes fashion, which should be the opposite of history-bound. Buy a pair of Levi’s, the world’s biggest denim brand, and the leather patch proudly states the style was first patented on 20 May 1873. You are, in effect, wearing the jeans of a 19th-century gold miner. It sounds ridiculous, and it works. Fashion moves in cycles precisely because old styles carry a quiet pull, and Levi’s benefits from both heritage and social proof at once.

Heritage in B2B: stop hiding your past

This is where it matters for brands with real history. Oliver notes that in B2B brand films, clients often resist dwelling on the past. They want to look future-focused, not like they are resting on their laurels. Phill’s answer is that both can be true. Guinness is the UK’s number one pint and leans into history to an extreme degree. The O’Neill’s pub chain, headquartered in Birmingham rather than Dublin, runs old Guinness ads on its walls and even calls itself a “purveyor” of whiskey and stout, archaic language doing deliberate work. No SaaS company would call itself a purveyor in a pitch meeting, yet it is selling to the same humans who respond to those cues. The lesson is not to abandon the future. It is to combine it with heritage: the tech firm that mentions its NASA-alumni founders is doing exactly that.

Coca-Cola’s ridiculous logo is the point

The second force in the episode is the mere exposure effect, from Robert Zajonc’s 1968 study. Participants were shown made-up “Turkish” words, some many times, some once. Words seen 25 times were rated 48% more positively than words seen only once, despite meaning nothing at all. The more we are exposed to something, the more we like it.

That is why Coca-Cola keeps a logo no rebrand would sign off today, and spends enormous sums putting it on every billboard, umbrella and shirt. The logo is so burned into our brains that Coke can run ads in green and white stripes with no red at all, and we still see red. It is also why nostalgia sells, and why political slogans about returning to a better past recur across decades.

New Coke and the lesson of the Pepsi Challenge

Phill unpacks the New Coke disaster. The Pepsi Challenge showed people preferring Pepsi in a blind sip test, partly because Pepsi is sweeter and sweetness wins over a small sample. Coca-Cola panicked, reformulated, and launched New Coke, only to face a furious backlash and bring the old recipe back. The real lesson was hiding in plain sight. People did not prefer Pepsi when they knew they were drinking Coke. As Phill says, “as soon as it is served in a glass bottle with a Coca-Cola logo on it, people prefer it.” Taste is not objective. The brand is part of the flavour. The same effect shows up in the Nike putter study from the book Blindsight, where amateur golfers sank more putts simply because they believed the club was a Nike.

Bringing it back to film

Film understands history better than almost any other industry. In 2019, 82.5% of Hollywood box office revenue came from remakes, reboots, sequels and spin-offs. Producers are not just being lazy. History draws audiences in, and an older story is presumed more beautiful before a frame is seen. Oliver connects it to Casual’s own work: a film for GSK that used a grainy Super 8 texture to carry nostalgia, separating it from the slick digital landscape and giving it an analogue warmth that helped it land. As AI makes everything instant and uniform, that textural, time-worn quality only grows more valuable.

The takeaway

The thread running through the whole conversation is a warning against constant reinvention. If something is working, if you have tested it and proven it gains traction, stop flip-flopping. As Phill puts it, “stop bouncing around on different ideas.” Marketing’s instinct to change the message every quarter may be the most expensive habit in the industry. Consistency beats cleverness.

Who should listen

If you are a marketer, brand leader, or anyone building a brand with history to draw on, this episode will change how you think about your past. Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Audience Connection Podcast is presented by Casual, the video partner for global brands trying to build trust with their audiences.