Mixing legacy with relevancy: How challenging the norm helps heritage brands evolve

When marketing leaders join a heritage brand, they don’t inherit a blank slate. Legacy companies come with brand equity, traditions and assumptions, which can be both a roadblock and an asset; it all depends on approach.

In this episode of the Marketer's Alchemy podcast, our host sat down with the Chief Brands Officer at Tailored Brands, Inc., the parent company of long-standing brands like Men’s Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank. The conversation focused on his pragmatic approach to the work that’s needed to transform a legacy brand; it starts with understanding what consumers believe today, pressure-testing internal narratives within the company, then blending insight with creative instinct to move the brand forward.

What’s inside this episode

Consistency, courage and listening to customers — looking at Matt’s approach to marketing legacy institutions, these are the ingredients it takes to transform a brand. The marketers who command engaging transformation have a few things in common: they treat data as discipline, instinct as skill and experimentation as habit. That’s the alchemy of it all.

Matt described marketing as a kind of practiced mixology, combining logic with finger-on-the-pulse instinct. This framing legitimizes two truths at once: First, a brand strategy without evidence is fragile, and second, a brand strategy built only on dashboards often misses what people are feeling, sharing and even joking about in the here and now.

Going where the action is

In this conversation, Matt described how two of the brands he manages — Men’s Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank — serve distinct customer bases with differing needs. For the latter brand, suits are a part of everyday life. For Men’s Wearhouse customers, the need for a fancy outfit accompanies key dates, specifically weddings and prom.

Rather than attempting to expand the Men’s Wearhouse brand into other key moments, Matt’s team decided to go where his target audience was spending time. For the wedding crowd, this meant investing in testing on a platform filled with wedding planning behavior, i.e., Pinterest. For the younger crowd planning their prom night, the brand needed to pressure-test promotion on teen-heavy platforms. Rather than chasing the next shiny object, Matt asks his team to build a habit of asking, “Where is our audience moving, and what’s the smallest credible test we can run to learn?”

When a legacy brand wants to be “reconsidered” in the market, media choices will need a shakeup. As Matt explained, this started by auditing the current mix against the audiences the brand was trying to reach.

In one example, results showed a wedding-focused spot resonated differently in the funnel than the others; as a result, the team overweighted it during key planning periods. In another example, early results looked great but as time passed, a deeper look revealed which assets were truly pulling their weight.

“You put something out there, and if it's not working, kill it,” Matt said. “Just because you spent the money on it doesn’t mean it’s worth continuing.” It takes discipline to make these kinds of decisions, but it’s worth it for long-term ROI. As Matt explained, it’s about “staying super close to the data throughout and not just taking that first path and that first win and walking away.”

Weighing data: In theory vs. in practice

Matt’s definition of “data-driven” is broader than performance reports. It includes formal research, social listening and direct customer conversations, especially in the places where the brand is experienced.

“I'm a huge believer in going back to that data-driven part of the alchemy: the insight,” Matt shared. “And really, the first thing I do is start to dig into what the consumer is saying about us. Some of that is through research, some of that is through social listening, a lot of that is through going into stores and just talking to customers and really assessing the landscape.” With these insights, his goal is to answer two questions: Where does the brand live in the consumer’s mind today, and what’s the distance between that perception and where the brand needs to be?

Matt also noted his belief that not all data deserves equal weight. Through his experience in the consumer retail space, one metric Matt has learned to trust less than others is self-reported willingness to pay.

In the case of Men’s Wearhouse, the self-reporting data comes from research where consumers declare what they value in theory versus what they choose in practice. People often say they’ll pay more for domestic manufacturing or sustainable production, but saying and doing are two different things, and this desire often falls short at the shelf.

But that doesn’t make the data useless by any means. It simply means this feedback needs to be weighted differently, with the more meaningful question being: what conditions, messages and tradeoffs move stated values into actual purchase behavior?

“It's not unimportant, but I probably give it a little bit less weight than other things,” Matt said of the data. “I’ve learned that's a set of metrics that’s more directional.”

Don’t start playing inside baseball

Part of this conversation was a reminder that legacy brands aren’t always fighting dislike, but more often are fighting drift. For example, Matt noted how Men’s Wearhouse testing showed very high overall favorability, in spite of the fact that people still thought of the brand as “dated.” That dichotomy changed the strategy. If the brand is already broadly liked, trust has already been accomplished; the next step is to reintroduce people to what’s new, so they’ll give the brand a second look.

Legacy brands can struggle with misalignment, where the company’s perception of the brand differs from how the market perceives it.

“A phrase I use often with the team is, ‘This seems very inside baseball,’” Matt shared. “I think it's so easy when you're touching something every day to [think], ‘This is what it is.’ And as soon as you step outside of that, you realize the public at large actually thinks about it very differently.

Matt advises marketing teams to be on the lookout for inside baseball, aka the internal language and assumptions that make perfect sense to employees but don’t map to the consumer’s lived experience. Essentially, the more time teams spend close to the work, the more likely they are to mistake internal familiarity for external clarity.

Transformation through reflection

Transformation work gets romanticized as bold creative reinvention, but Matt points to something less glamorous and more effective: questioning the routines a brand has simply gotten used to. He uses a simple analysis to test these routines, asking: is this still doing the job it once did for today’s audience? If not, it’s a candidate for retirement, regardless of how beloved it is internally?

“Don't throw out your heritage,” Matt advised, “Figure out what still resonates with the consumer and modernize it. There's no reason to walk away from it.”

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