SELLING NEW IDEAS IN ICONIC PACKAGES

LEGACY BRANDS ARE LEVERAGING NAME RECOGNITION TO INNOVATE IN NEW REALMS.

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timate the power of an American brand. “The brand is the most indispensable thing,” says David Aaker, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley’s Haas business school and author of more than a dozen books on branding strategy. “If you pull out the brand, you don’t have a business.”

American institutions such as Nasdaq, Radio Flyer, and Ralph Lauren are demonstrating how a storied brand can use that power not just to extend their businesses into adjacent markets but expand into emerging ones—and bring both existing and new customers along with them. Radio Flyer, the 106year-old maker of children’s wagons and toys, has made a big bet on e-bikes, its first adult offering in its history. The $2,000 Flyer L885 cargo e-bike and its follow-up Flyer Folding Cargo Electric Bike connect to the company’s heritage with their family-friendly design flourishes. In introducing their new line of e-bikes, Aaker says that Radio Flyer is leveraging the visibility, likability, and nostalgia associated with the brand.

The move puts the company in an enviable position to pioneer electric bikes for family use.

Similarly, since Nasdaq, the electronic stock exchange, acquired a majority stake in the carbon-removal platform Puro.earth in 2021, it has transformed Puro’s CO2 Removal Certificates into a public, verifiable product. Anyone can now search via the Puro Registry to see if a company has purchased credits. In addition, Nasdaq created the first index family focused on tracking the price of carbon removal. These financial features create a larger, more transparent market. Nasdaq’s brand has also helped attract 45 new carbonremoval suppliers in 20 countries to Puro’s platform.

Ralph Lauren’s clothing, meanwhile, has always had a timeless aesthetic, which has allowed the fashion house to reinterpret its classics consistently, now with an environmental edge. Ralph Lauren redesigned its signature cashmere sweaters to receive certification from Cradle to Cradle, a nonprofit that helped the company meet C2C’S standards for using safe materials, employing fair labor practices, and enabling the garment to be recycled into a new one. “Having a legacy brand,” says UC Berkeley’s Aaker, “gives you credibility” to push into new spaces. —GC