The Heritage Discount: The Story Behind the Price

Have you ever been to an estate sale or scrolled through Facebook Marketplace and noticed a seller drop the price? Sometimes it’s not about hard bargaining. Instead, the seller offers a discount because the buyer “really gets it”—maybe the buyer went to the same school as the seller, grew up in the same town, or has a family connection to the item’s past. In these moments, money isn’t the only thing being exchanged; something deeper is at stake: whether the item’s heritage will be honored and carried forward.

A recent Journal of Marketing Research study by Katherine L. Christensen and Suzanne B. Shu explores exactly this phenomenon. They call it the heritage discount: the tendency for sellers of sentimental or heritage goods to accept lower prices from buyers who share a meaningful connection to the goods’ past. Surprisingly, this happens even when sellers believe the buyer would have been willing to pay more.

They call it the heritage discount: the tendency for sellers of sentimental or heritage goods to accept lower prices from buyers who share a meaningful connection to the goods’ past. Surprisingly, this happens even when sellers believe the buyer would have been willing to pay more.

How the Heritage Discount Affects Markets

The implications of this research extend far beyond individual sales, shaping outcomes for consumers, marketers, and policymakers alike. Heritage value plays a role in massive industries—from the $58 billion self-storage market and the $43 trillion U.S. housing market to the $200 billion secondhand sector and the $450 billion collectibles market.

For marketers, these insights open the door to designing new products and experiences that help consumers maintain a connection to their heritage, whether through family heirlooms, brand storytelling, or collaborations like 23andMe’s partnership with Airbnb’s heritage travel. Such efforts can create offerings that resonate across generations.

Heritage framing also carries weight in the policy sphere. Conservationists, for example, may increase support for protecting natural resources by highlighting their ties to past generations, reducing the public’s willingness to lease or sell them for short-term gain.

Curious about the bigger picture, we asked the authors to share additional takeaways from their study:

Q: Your research uncovers a surprising “heritage discount,” whereby sellers are willing to accept lower prices from buyers with shared heritage. What emotional or psychological dynamics might explain this? Were there any reactions or patterns that genuinely surprised you during your studies?

Dr. Shu: From a more theory-driven perspective, I’ve done other work on the endowment effect and psychological ownership. What intrigued me about this project and what Kate brought into it was that you usually put more value on it when you own something. That’s the endowment effect.

But with heritage, we were proposing something different: you might be willing to accept a lower price. That’s the opposite of the endowment effect, and that flip was fascinating. I’m always curious when a well-established finding in the literature is robust across many studies but then you discover a specific context where it reverses.

In this case, the heritage discount shows up when you sell to someone who can continue the story and respect that heritage. For instance, if Kate were selling her teacups to a collector who didn’t care about continuing the heritage, she would ask for a higher price. But if the buyer valued the teacup’s heritage and wanted to keep it alive, she’d be willing to accept less.

To me, that’s the most interesting part: the heritage discount only applies when the buyer is someone who will keep the story and the heritage alive.

Q: How might the concept of heritage connection help brands support sustainability goals, such as encouraging product longevity, reducing waste, or fostering intergenerational value?

Dr. Christensen: One of the significant trends we’re seeing right now is the rise of vintage. While our paper primarily focuses on transactions, we define heritage goods as goods linked to the past, whether historically or symbolically.

The idea that the past carries symbolic value can increase how much heritage buyers value a product. This is particularly relevant when people use vintage items, such as fashion inspired by the ’90s or ’70s. By wearing these pieces, people aren’t just dressing themselves—they are bringing a piece of their past into the present and sharing it with others. This act becomes a “gift,” offering a glimpse into a different world.

If sellers believe that the past carries value, they may also be more willing to sell. The past can be defined in many ways: an era, a community’s history, even a nation’s identity. That’s why we see a rise in vintage fashion and, in some cases, a rise in nationalism. Both are ways people try to connect to the past.

This concept plays out in sustainability and the environment, too. Think about how people connect to the human past and are tied to the land (in meaningful ways). For example, I recently learned that my uncle’s family were Adirondack guides who once took Theodore Roosevelt through the Adirondacks. When I return to those mountains, I experience them differently—I feel connected to that history, which increases the value of the place for me.

Q: How can environmental organizations and policymakers leverage your findings that framing natural resources as shared heritage reduces public support for exploitation?

Dr. Christensen: National parks provide one of the easiest examples of an intergenerational tie to the land. For me, that’s also my tie to the Adirondack Mountains. I was just there recently, and I had this powerful feeling that the trees were changing, connecting me back to my grandmother, even though she’s no longer here. That is why the natural landscape holds tremendous value to me.

I think that’s something you see often in regional marketing: how it ties people to the past. You also see it in the national parks. Their retro branding, for instance, emphasizes the idea of connecting to your ancestors. In a way, the parks themselves are marketed as a type of heritage good.

There’s also this initiative where fourth graders get a free national parks pass for a year, and their whole family can enjoy it. That’s positioned almost like a gift parents can give their kids—something that connects to what they did as children while creating new memories for the next generation.

So, the parks are marketed as timeless destinations, where parents, children, and even grandparents can share a sense of continuity and connection across generations

Q: Your research touches on the power of heritage in shaping value, but heritage can also be a sensitive area, especially regarding things like Indigenous crafts, national symbols, or traditional foods. What can marketers learn from your findings about why some communities push back against the commercialization of culturally significant goods?

Dr. Christensen: If you look at almost any nation’s history, there’s usually an original group that owned it, and then there was a loss of ownership. So, when another group comes in, and it’s not the original group, not the Indigenous group in your example, it can feel like a massive loss of heritage connection. If the transaction is viewed as purely about money, then that sense of loss and disutility is very high.

Often, when we see cultural trends that borrow from historically disempowered groups, there’s a sense that the practice isn’t really connected to the past. It’s just being used as a visual signifier. And that disconnect leads to tremendous backlash.

One of the most interesting examples I’ve seen in the work of some wonderful colleagues, focuses on restoring heritage to people who have lost that connection. The forced relocation of many Indigenous communities has had a lasting impact. In their new locations, these communities often lose traditional access to vital resources, such as water needed for growing crops. Unlike those who were not forcibly moved, they may lack the resources or the ability to maintain a connection to their ancestral lands and history.

Rebuilding that connection strengthens the whole ecosystem. It’s not just the consumer. The producer makes the food and knows how to cook it, and then the consumer eats it. When all those layers feel connected to heritage, I hypothesize that the value increases for the end user and everyone along the line. Everyone who opts in wants to maintain that link to the past.

But it also matters who is doing it. Sometimes, groups want to separate from others’ histories because, in a sense, it’s not theirs, and that creates complications. Heritage can become competitive, and tensions around commercialization often emerge.

Q: In today’s digital world, consumers express their identities through social media memories, digital collectibles, and even AI-generated family stories. Do you see a heritage connection evolving in these virtual spaces?

Dr. Christensen: The growing digital world may increase our need to connect to the past. In terms of how it happens technically, social media makes it much faster and easier. Right now, you can create a virtual person or save your mom’s phone messages from the human desire to preserve memories. As people contemplate how to connect with and share their own memories, they find value in these digital artifacts. These things give us value as human beings, and I believe we’re losing some of that, which is why I think there’s a growing need for heritage in the digital world. It’s now easier to create products that resurface those connections. For example, how do we bring back memories from childhood? They’re there, just buried.

Do we want to preserve the ideas of our grandparents? For some, that might feel weird or even like a violation. But for others, it’s a powerful sense of connection to the past, something they’d likely pay more for not just for themselves but to pass on to future generations. I think that at moments when the future becomes present, the past becomes especially valuable. For example, that intergenerational link suddenly comes alive when you have a child. You’re both giving something to the future and wanting to preserve the past.

Q: How might this shift influence how people assign value or feel a sense of ownership over digital goods, and what could this mean for brands trying to build emotional connections online?

Dr. Shu: For some reason, my social media feeds have been filled lately with stories about people doing DNA testing and trying to trace their ancestors. It’s fascinating how technology makes it so easy now. People say, “I have a grandparent I know nothing about, and I don’t know how to trace them,” but DNA testing opens that door and gives them access. They can then do a bit more searching and find previously impossible connections.

That ability to rediscover heritage is powerful. It also opens space for brands to build emotional and heritage connections. Kate had a great example, but it didn’t make it into the paper, of Airbnb offering heritage-based vacations. Imagine someone whose family was originally from Turkey but lived elsewhere for generations. A descendant might say, “I wish I understood my connection to Turkey.” A trip could then be designed to take them back to their ancestral hometown.

We live in a society where people move around much more than in the past, when several generations might have stayed in the same small town. Today, companies can help people reconnect with their roots and their history. That’s something consumers respond to. They lack that connection and search for it, and brands can help fill that gap.

Source: Katherine L. Christensen and Suzanne B. Shu (2024), “The Role of Heritage Connection in Consumer Valuation,” Journal of Marketing Research, 61 (3), 571–86. doi:10.1177/00222437231182434.

References

Absolute Reports (2023), “7.5% Growth in Self Storage Market by 2023−2028: Exploring the Growing Trend Regional Analysis Competitive Scenario,” GlobeNewswire (March 14), https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2023/03/14/2626474/0/en/7-5-Growth-in-Self-Storage-Market-by-2023-2028-Exploring-the-Growing-Trend-Regional-Analysis-CompetitiveScenario.html.

Credit Suisse (2020), “Collectibles: An Integral Part of Wealth,” research report, Credit Suisse Research Institute and Deloitte (October).

Market Decipher (2023), “Collectibles Market Size, Statistics, Growth Trend Analysis and Forecast Report, 2023-2033,” https://marketdecipher.com/report/collectibles-market.

ThredUp (2023), “Resale Report,” (accessed August 9, 2023), https://www.thredup.com/resale.

Go to the Journal of Marketing Research