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STUTTGART, Germany—In 2016, the Zeiss Group celebrated the 200th birthday of its founder, Carl Zeiss, and the 170th anniversary of its founding.

Carl Zeiss strived to understand customer needs. In doing so, he challenged limits in technology and manufacturing, collaborated closely with academia to bring innovation to optics and brought an entrepreneurial spirit to the company—all of which are essential to its identity today. The company’s heritage as a leading optical firm that shaped progress in optics for generations plays a vital role in its sales and marketing activities as well as in its media relations.

“Many consumers remember a ‘Zeiss moment,’ whether it’s a binocular bought by grandparents and still in use, the moment they benefited from Zeiss technology—cataract surgery, for example—or in daily business,” a Zeiss spokesperson noted. “This is the starting point we use to talk with them about Zeiss, its heritage and what it means today.”

Every year customers from all over the world visit Zeiss headquarters in Oberkochen, Germany. They tour the Zeiss optical museum, where long-time Zeissians discuss the history of optics, what role Zeiss played in it and how the company’s contributions lead to the future.

Zeiss also takes its history and museum to events and optical stores around the world. People see and hear how Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin used Zeiss lenses to take photos on the moon. They learn how a piece of technology produced with Zeiss comes into their pocket (e.g. an iPhone microchip), or how Zeiss microscopes helped Nobel Prize laureates make their breakthrough discoveries. To get close to “the moon camera” from 1969 or to see the technology used to manufacture microchips today helps people to get a bigger, colorful and memorable impression of Zeiss.

Zeiss tells its story online and offline, on social media and at events, in marketing materials and at presentations and lectures. “While we adapt the storytelling to different target groups in style and information density, it always remains the one story about one Zeiss,” the company spokesperson said.