Brand Archive

Thanks to if!, I've just stumbled across a fantastic article from NPR about brand archives. In short, the article talks about the rise of the 'public museum' like brand archive and how it helps businesses learn from past mistakes. Nike, for example, has 23,000 pieces of sports memorobilia in their archive.
This piece got me thinking - if brands are now building physical archives, shouldn't they also be building intellectual archives? One of the things that continues to strike (and scare) me is the degree of job turnover, particularly in the marketing department, which often leads to a degree of corporate amnesia about the brand - in fact, often it's down to the agency to provide the instiutional memory. I'm sure some of these 'intellectual archives' exist already, but there should be more. And we as planners and strategists can help more, I believe, by providing better short cuts to this memory - brand story books and videos that really capture the brand rather than the normal practice of a detailed, thick but uninspiring and two dimensional powerpoint deck and brand guidelines book.