Across the world, family businesses credit legacy with anchoring identity, guiding long-term strategy, and sustaining performance. Global research from the STEP Project and KPMG finds a strong link between the strength of a family's legacy and superior business and sustainability performance.
A leading synthesis describes legacy as a co-constructed process: motivated "senders" and "receivers" jointly build, interpret, and use values, norms, knowledge, and beliefs from the past-transmitted directly or via verbal, symbolic, physical, and visual artifacts-within a particular family, industry, and country context.
Recent summaries of the STEP/KPMG work outline few key components.
Each one of them shapes outcomes differently across generations.
Family businesses preserve legacy through intentional storytelling and carefully crafted historical narratives that help balance continuity with adaptation. Generational stories—rooted in lineage, myth, reinvention, and critique—legitimise strategic decisions and communicate long-term vision, influencing how firms interpret tradition and respond to societal change. The way history is narrated becomes as important as the events themselves, shaping how future generations understand identity and purpose.
Legacy is also embodied in archived artifacts—physical objects, shared experiences, and emotionally significant symbols—that translate abstract values like resilience and integrity into tangible, memorable forms. Digitizing documents, images, and records ensures institutional memory remains accessible and accurate over time.
Legacy archives in large family businesses are powerful strategic tools. Beyond safeguarding heritage, they enable success by enhancing brand equity, protecting legal interests, enabling innovation, strengthening culture, and sustaining reputation. In an age where authenticity and trust shape market value, archives function as a unique competitive advantage - turning history into a commercially potent asset.
Archival stewardship is ultimately a forward‑looking practice: by preserving histories, curating narratives, and safeguarding artifacts, family firms strengthen identity while enabling renewal and navigating succession and strategic transformation with clarity and cohesion.
The Pirelli family’s business, operating since 1872, maintains the Pirelli Foundation, an institutional archive that preserves historical records, technological evolution, cultural initiatives, and product heritage. These archives are actively used to inspire innovation, strengthen corporate identity, educate stakeholders, and support brand credibility.
The Peugeot family (in business since 1810) runs the Musée de l’Aventure Peugeot, which documents over 200 years of industrial evolution—from tools and household products to motorcycles and automobiles. This archive and museum support Brand protection through controlled historical narratives; Media and marketing through curated heritage exhibitions; and Cultural significance within France’s industrial history.
The Amarelli family, makers of liquorice since 1731, created the Giorgio Amarelli Museum to preserve generations of artifacts, documents, tools, and family history. The museum serves as both a cultural archive and a strategic business asset.
The Heineken family, whose brewery was founded in 1864, runs the Heineken Experience, an immersive museum in Amsterdam that preserves and narrates the company’s multi-generational story through artifacts, interactive displays, and brand history. The archive supports global brand storytelling, tourism-driven revenue; and media engagement around Heineken’s heritage.
Owned by the Kristiansen family for four generations, LEGO preserves its history through LEGO House, which includes dedicated historical exhibits. Their archives protect design rights, support product innovation through access to past sets and fuel global marketing narratives around creative heritage
Milton Hershey’s legacy is curated through Hershey’s Chocolate World and associated museum archives documenting company evolution, founder philosophy, and iconic product development. These resources enable reputation building via community storytelling; brand loyalty through heritage-focused experiences and; marketing and tourism revenue.
Families that define their legacy (values, knowledge, relationships, societal contribution) and preserve it (stories, artifacts, rituals, archives) are better positioned to navigate succession and societal change without losing their core identity. Global evidence links strong, future-oriented legacies with superior performance and sustainability.