The MARHER project aims to create new professional marketing profiles: the “Heritage Marketer,” a humanities‑oriented professional with marketing and communication skills who, by enhancing a company’s history and traditions and those of its products, is able to trigger a process of added‑value generation that can increase the company’s competitiveness as well as its reputational and value capital. In addition, the project seeks to improve the employability of young graduates in the humanities, who consistently rank at the bottom of graduate employment statistics.
Goals
- Definition of a new professional profile: the Heritage Marketer.
- Creative and innovative training capable of supporting SMEs in promoting, in terms of marketing and brand reputation, their history, brands, and products: 1. Enhance skills in order to develop the role of the Heritage Marketer; 2. Create a training course on strategies and tools for Heritage Marketing, on the issues and solutions related to this field, and on corporate storytelling; 3. Develop training focused on storytelling and corporate reputation, company traditions, and the enhancement of heritage.
- Improve the employment of people with low skills, unemployed individuals, and recent graduates in order to increase their chances of competing in the labor market.
- Improve the competitiveness of European businesses by enhancing what distinguishes and sets Europe apart from other continents and markets: its centuries‑old history.
Results
- A geographical map of Europe to show users cards describing the best cases of marketing enhancement, corporate storytelling, and the traditions of EU companies, in order to use them as examples of the potential of heritage marketing at local, national, and international levels. The goal is to showcase different practices and support potential participants in their professional development. In addition, the consortium will collect open‑access information on which existing models have been implemented to successfully apply storytelling in SMEs.
- Definition of the guidelines for creating a set of core competencies for the new professional profile of the Heritage Marketer. Core competencies refer to a combination of hard and soft skills that the Heritage Marketer needs in order to work effectively on content aimed at strengthening brands, products, and services. The guidelines for developing these competencies will be based on those identified by the most recent studies on Heritage Storytelling and heritage enhancement for content creation.
- Creation of a learning module defining the fundamental hard and soft skills required for the new role of Heritage Marketer. From a learning‑activity perspective, the module will be based on case studies of heritage enhancement from European companies collected during the project. The final assessment will consist of evaluating a piece of content produced by the students, replacing more traditional evaluation methods (questionnaires, essays, etc.).
