This has been going on for almost two decades both in Europe and the USA.
Some of us have been researching, writing, and talking about  the heritage
industry for 15+ years.

Yes, analysis of heritage/folklore/tradition as a brand and as a marketing device has been in full swing for more than twenty years, especially in Great Britain.  Robert Hewison's The Heritage Industry:  Britain in a Climate of Decline (1987) and Corner and Harvey's anthology Enterprise and Heritage (1991) could be considered as being in the first generation of this brand of analysis and critique.  The literature that has developed on this topic since the '80s is voluminous as it takes in not only marketing but cultural tourism, commodification, objectification, fetishism and so on.

I do think it's useful to distinguish between marketing that is based on indirect social relations and the projection of an "imagined community," and marketing that is embedded within genuine (i.e. experienced) patterns of association and belonging.  Regarding the latter, in the 1980s', I had the pleasure of working with a team of ethnographers on a family business project in Philadelphia, sponsored by the Philadelphia Folklore Project. Within the setting of a family business, the idea of family as a continuous, stable, traditional, personable, and even soulful associational entity (that is, absolutely not corporate in any way similar to Wal-Mart, which began in fact as a family business) was and is very much a strategic move on the part of many family businesses.

In a piece published by PFP, I called this melding of family lineage with product the "curatorial production" of goods and services.  What I found so fascinating about family businesses, having grown up in a family business myself, was the specific historical and generational lineage that infuses a business' products/services with a particular identity.  And these family/business identities were performed and branded in the most ingenious ways.  In this context, marketing was a kind of vernacular performance that opened and extended the idea of "family" to employees and customers, but again, in ways that referenced particular family identities.  The sociologist Ewa Morawska has written very insightfully about the social aspects of marketing within family businesses in her book Insecure Prosperity:  Small-Town Jews in Industrial America, 1890-1940 (Princeton, 1996).

In any event, as folklorists, I think it's useful to ask who is doing the marketing, under what conditions, to what social effect.

Jim Abrams

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There's also Foulkeways, the first Quaker Continuing Care Retirement Community in the country in Gwynedd, Pa. (http://www.foulkeways.org/).  But there's kind of a pun here, because it may be named after the Foulke family.  The first resident when it opened was Eliza Foulke.  I first heard about it once when I went to give a lecture, and an elderly couple came up to me and introduced themselves telling me, "We live in Foulkeways," which I had never heard of at the time.  So you can imagine the confusion in my head when I heard such a sentence out of context.  I had always thought of them as something you practice, not inhabit.