Legacy brands begin with advantages that most companies would kill for: name recognition, built-in trust, and a proven history of delivering on customer expectations.
But those same benefits often come with a quieter risk. In a landscape shaped by noisy feeds, channel hopping, and brand-agnostic shopping habits, even brands with a century of experience still have to earn customer buy-in.
It’s not that younger generations reject legacy brands. Rather, they simply don’t afford them automatic loyalty. Brands must present themselves in ways that feel current and relevant, not merely inherited.
And that challenge isn’t just creative — it’s operational, too.
Experimenting with new channels, formats, and personalization only works when brands have the systems in place to govern, adapt, and activate content at scale. Without that foundation, even strong ideas struggle to resonate with younger shoppers.
Here are three top examples of legacy brands that connect well with new audiences, including insights from Ashley Herbert Popa, director of product marketing at Bynder, a digital asset management platform.
How Bynder Appeals to New Audiences
Popa believes that reaching younger audiences is both a creative and operational challenge.
“Brands still need to develop new expressions, derivatives, and audience-specific adaptations. But meaningful experimentation with new channels, formats, and personalization only works when there’s a strong foundation for how content is governed, accessed, adapted, and activated,” Popa says.
Popa notes that establishing a source of truth for digital content will help ensure content has structure, visibility, accountability, and is ready to use or is reusable.
“Once this foundation is in place, brands gain the flexibility to adapt how they show up for different audiences, platforms, and regions without fragmenting their identity …. This balance of control and agility is essential for legacy brands that want to evolve without losing what made them successful in the first place,” Popa says.
Refreshing content, she says, doesn’t equate to reinventing your content library. “In fact, the brands that move fastest tend to focus on reuse and adaptation, not replacement,” Popa says.
3 Smart Marketing Tactics From Legacy Brands
Here are three leading legacy brands that get it right when marketing to new audiences.
Stanley: The Rise of the Tumbler
These days, Stanley mugs, tumblers, and cups are everywhere. But it wasn’t always like that — and it didn’t happen by accident.
After the Quencher tumbler took off on TikTok, the 100-year-old brand moved beyond virality alone. It paired that demand with direct-to-consumer (D2C) infrastructure, limited drops, and tightly coordinated retail partnerships.
Stanley then scaled that demand through a Gen Z-native playbook: colorways, limited editions, and high-visibility collaborations with retailers like Target and Starbucks. Those partnerships turned physical stores into drop destinations, while social platforms kept driving awareness and urgency.
Image Source: Stanley
The key was coordinating inventory, timing, and product storytelling in a way that aligned with TikTok interest, D2C availability, and retail shelves.
The strategy led to dramatic results: Stanley’s annual sales reportedly jumped to around $750 million in 2023, up roughly tenfold from just a few years earlier. It’s the kind of meteoric rise that shows what effective omnichannel execution looks like, legacy brand or not. Social drives demand, direct channels validate it, retail scales it, and content keeps the journey moving forward.
New Balance: ‘Dad Shoes’ for a New Generation
New Balance didn’t win Gen Z by inventing a new identity, but by building operational muscle around the one it already had.
The brand’s trajectory from iconic “dad shoe” to sleeker was so slick that it seemed like the 550s suddenly became relevant on their own. But the shift was carefully introduced to the market through a coordinated mix of product planning, partnerships, and execution.
New Balance paired heritage styles with modern cultural signals, including collaborations with fashion brands like Aimé Leon Dore; athlete partnerships like Coco Gauff and the WNBA; and social content that framed classic designs as contemporary rather than nostalgic.
These moves work best when product, marketing, and distribution teams are operating from the same playbook. For New Balance, limited releases had to line up with influencer visibility. Inventory had to be available where demand was spiking. And content had to seamlessly reinforce the story across channels, without fragmenting it.
Ultimately, that discipline led to a significant payoff: In Q4 2024, New Balance delivered an 18.3% lift in brand equity among Gen Z, topping the Harris Poll’s Gen Z Brand Tracker and outpacing every other brand in the category.
Coca-Cola: ‘Share a Coke’ With a Digital Generation
Coca-Cola scored a big win with 2011’s Share a Coke campaign. But when the legacy brand brought it back for Gen Z audiences in 2025, it wasn’t just a simple nostalgia play.
The core idea — putting people’s names on bottles — essentially stayed the same, with a new twist: Personalized packaging rolled out across more than 120 countries, supported by QR codes that linked physical products to digital hubs where consumers could create, save, and share custom content.
Instead of Coke broadcasting a message, the campaign gave consumers a way to participate, remix, and distribute it themselves. Just as important, Coke connected that infrastructure to activation. Influencers, social sharing tools, and in-store experiences all reinforced the same loop: discover, personalize, share.
While Coca-Cola hasn’t publicly broken out standalone sales or brand-equity lifts tied specifically to the 2025 relaunch, the company and its bottling partners have pointed to the campaign as a driver of consumer engagement and transaction growth.
Successful Legacy Brands Evolve Without Losing What Works
“Ultimately, winning over new or younger audiences isn’t just about being more creative — it’s about building the operational foundation that makes creativity scalable, repeatable, and relevant,” Popa says.
Legacy brands that resonate with younger generations aren’t necessarily the ones that try to reinvent themselves from scratch.
They’re the ones that adapt what already works, then execute it consistently across the places younger consumers actually shop, scroll, and share.
Across Stanley, New Balance, and Coca-Cola, the pattern is the same: Trust and heritage still matter, and they permit legacy brands to experiment. It’s not about being louder or trendier. It’s about pairing omnichannel relevance with operational discipline — so that every great idea has a clear path to market, everywhere customers are.
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