Heyyyy legacy brands, how you doin’ these days? Bet it feels like a bit of a minefield out there watching your brethren attempt big swing rebrandings, with extremely varied results (from Clearly Canadian to Tropicana to Jaguar, oh my!).

But you, you’re still looking to not just survive but thrive here as we approach 2025. The only issue: there are so many choices, so many ways to try to appeal to the youths, or at least get some semblance of eyeballs on your tried-and-true RTBs, that it’s tough to even know where to start.

So, what’s a legacy brand to do? Here are five ways to bring your brand into modern consideration, while keeping your wits, and your best bits, about you.

1. Make the Call: Reinvent or Reinvigorate

It’s time to take a good, hard look at your brand and ask: do you want to go all in on something new (reinvent) or gussy up a few key elements to better fit consumer needs today (reinvigorate)? Try this three-step process to AID your consideration:

A: Assess: Plaster a board room (or a virtual space) with everything about your brand, past and present: origin story, product lineups, advertisements, the whole shebang. See what speaks to you, what you can’t imagine living without, and what you wish was different. Hear from others on your team, from all levels. (Got a branding agency partner you trust? Now would be a good time to include them, too.) Dig into the work of your competitors, to see how they’re breaking through (or breaking down). Put it all out there and get messy—it’s the best way to get inspired.

I: Invest: Do some consumer testing with your current brand assets. Talk to life-long fans as well as new. What do they love/hate, find iconic, think of when they think of you? Additional points for supplementing testing with social listening and/or going down a Reddit-hole or two.

D: Decide: Take in all these inputs (both internal and external) and use them to make your choice—reinvent or reinvigorate. By this point, your gut will tell you what to do. Listen to it.

2. Fun with Form 

If you’ve been around Gen Z, you know one thing: they’re wild for Nerds. Well, one very specific Nerds product—Gummy Clusters. The 40-year-old brand delivered $500 million in Gummy Clusters-specific sales so far this year (compared to $40 million in total brand sales in 2018, wowza!).

To achieve this sales bonanza, Nerds didn’t branch into body lotion or set fire to their visual identity—they innovated through form. By attaching their classic crunchy candies onto a soft, chewy blob, Nerds made a new type of multi-sensorial candy (perfectly catered to Gen Z’s chocolate-eschewing sweet tooth). This new offering expanded the Nerds universe while maintaining the core equities of the brand. Of course, their Addison Rae-starring Super Bowl spot helped, too.

The market is peppered with myriad “fun with form” examples, from Dawn Powerwash turning liquid dish soap into a super-versatile foaming dish spray, to Olay Cleansing Melts tossing out the face wash bottle in favor of water-activated cleanser mini-pads. Who knew soap could take on so many different forms? P&G did.

From candy to cleansers, fun forms can work wonders to introduce brand benefits to new fans—especially when doing so applies some sort of novelty and/or makes your product into more of a “wow!” experience. What could you try with your product portfolio?

3. Know Your Fandom 

As a legacy brand, you have the enviable attribute of built-in fans—both long-term loyalists and new-school admirers. The tricky part is balancing attention and interest for them both.

The good news: they’re more interested in each other than you may expect. Newer fans want to know why older fans have been using products for so long, and if they should follow suit. Ivory Soap, Pond’s Cold Cream and Peter Thomas Roth skincare have all used their more mature fandom to draw in younger generations via product tutorials and torture tests (turns out, stunning septuagenarian skin makes for an excellent demo).

And older fans are benefitting from the sustainability and nostalgia values of younger fans, like Gen Z’s creative Coach usage sparking the brand to create “Coachtopia,” a circularity program that fights waste and produces new goods with old materials. Meanwhile, Old Navy, GAP and ESPIRIT all recently returned to their roots with nostalgia collections from their early days—and shoppers of all ages gobbled them up.

As wistful sentimentality for very recently bygone years (sob, the 2000s) continues to trend, it’s an excellent moment to consider bringing back past fan faves to stoke both interest and sales.

4. Cautiously Approach Collabs 

In this age of oversaturation, we can debate for days if collaborations have finally reached their zany zenith (yes, I’m looking at you, Dove + Crumbl cookies). It’s never been easier to jump on the bandwagon, especially when it garners your brand such quick and immediate buzz. But collab fatigue is real, and doing them the right way has never been more important.

A sweet spot for collaboration comes when two branded entities can use a partnership to right-size and reveal, as seen with Charlotte Tilbury x Formula 1. Earlier this year, the makeup mainstay became the first female-founded company and first beauty brand to sponsor the F1 ACADEMY™ program. This pioneering partnership gave a much-needed jolt to a very male-driven sport and is helping to usher the nearly 75-year-old premier motorsport brand into a more equal era.

But when it comes to collabs, no one does ‘em like Stanley. In the last month alone, they have released special edition tumblers with fashion brand LoveShackFancy, rolled out cup holder add-ons made for e.l.f. lip oils and taken a starring role in the Starbucks 2024 holiday lineup. These collabs have turned the Stanley tumbler into the iconic canvas of our times, reflecting art, desire and virality in a form that is quickly collected and universally toted. What brand wouldn’t want to pay to play on such a ubiquitous billboard?

When seeking your own collab, carefully consider the partner and the moment in culture—with emphasis placed on how your brand will benefit both immediately and over time. Don’t be afraid to get creative, but also try not to let the flash overwhelm the impact.

5. Let Your Consumer Lead 

This popular marketing maxim is popular for a reason, and it’s especially true now—as we’ve never seen anything quite like our current industry landscape. Consumers are being inundated 24/7 by disruptors promising cheaper/better, non-traditional ad buys breaking through every screen, and a groundswell of exhaustion and even distrust of big brands just like yours. They are seeking solace, clarity and a brand that moves with them, not against them.

When modern needs are included in brand stories, consumers feel seen and heard—and that can come to life in many ways. Mountain Dew’s newest rebranding has moved its product positioning away from hard-hitting performance hype juice and into a more cheekily “powered by the outdoors” social drink, with “Do the Dew” now referring to stepping away from screens and onto rolling greens (“The Mountain is Calling”). In a similarly modern take, the new Kleenex brand world explores the numerous reasons you need a Kleenex (“for whatever happens next”), with universal iconography making each sweet, sniffly or sad story feel relatable and real.

These examples show the incorporation of today’s modern needs (to get outside, to be cared for) into the revitalized offerings of well-known legacy brands. Mountain Dew and Kleenex didn’t stray from their core beliefs—they just moved with the times, followed their consumers and deepened their brand stories along the way.

There you have it, five (incredibly non-exhaustive) ways to keep your legacy brand in the mix of modern consideration without losing your special longevity sauce. However you approach what’s next, here’s to your continued success—whether through form, fandoms, collabs or some magical combination of all of the above.

Margaret Russo is Group Creative Director, New Media, at Chase Design Group.