Some brands have the problem every marketer says they want: people already love them.
That sounds like a gift. And it is until that love becomes a reason to stop earning attention.
That was the tension at the center of my conversation with Meenakshi Trehan, Chief Growth Officer at Just Born, the company behind MIKE AND IKE, PEEPS, HOT TAMALES, and GOLDENBERG'S PEANUT CHEWS. These are not brands trying to prove they belong in the candy aisle. They already do.
The harder question is what happens next.
Because heritage can be powerful. It can also be sneaky. It can convince a brand that being remembered is the same thing as being relevant. It can make teams confuse consistency with sameness. It can turn a beloved brand into a museum piece with distribution.
Meenakshi's advice: respect the history, but do not live in it.
Legacy brands love to talk about heritage. They should. A century of trust, memory, flavor, and family rituals is not nothing.
But heritage is not a permission slip to keep doing what worked yesterday.
As Meenakshi put it, the job is to understand what made people love the brand in the first place, then bring those truths forward in a way that matters now. The purpose and values can stay steady. The packaging, innovation, storytelling, media behavior, and cultural role may need to change.
That distinction is important. A lot of established brands say they are protecting equity when what they are really protecting is comfort.
MIKE AND IKE did not need a new platform because people had stopped liking the candy. The opposite is true. Consumers already love the chewy texture and fruity flavor. The team knew the functional equity was strong.
So the brief could not just be, "Tell people it tastes good."
The better question was: where does this brand fit in people's lives now?
That is where “We Got'Chew” came from.
Curiosity and Just Born built the platform around a very real Gen Z tension: life is always on, always visible, always a little awkward. The unanswered text. The social pressure. The tiny work stress that somehow becomes your whole afternoon. The small stuff that should not be a big deal, except of course it is.
MIKE AND IKE cannot solve the internet. It can, however, help you chew through the moment.
That is the kind of role a legacy brand needs. Not a forced trend. A relevant emotional job built from something true in the product.
One of my favorite parts of the conversation was how honest Meenakshi was about risk.
This campaign introduces Mike and Ike as characters for the first time. For a brand with that much history, that is not a tiny decision. There were real conversations about whether characters were right, whether animation made sense, and whether personifying the candy would stretch the brand too far.
Her answer was not, "We knew it would work."
Her answer was closer to: we took a calculated risk because the consumer work gave us permission.
That is an important distinction. Marketers love to talk about boldness, but boldness without consumer truth is just personal taste with a budget. The strongest risks are not reckless. They are grounded. They are debated. They make people a little uncomfortable for a reason.
And if the internal team is any signal, this one landed. Just Born brought the campaign to life for employees and production teams before launch, characters and all. That matters. The people making the candy should feel the ambition of the brand, not just read about it in a recap deck.
When I asked Meenakshi what has stayed consistent across her career at Campbell's, Organic Valley, and Just Born, she gave four answers: purpose, people, curiosity, and fundamentals.
Purpose, because people do better work when they understand why it matters. At Just Born, that purpose is about creating joyful moments and stronger communities.
People, because strategy does not execute itself. Meenakshi talked about getting the right team in place, creating clarity, and then stepping back enough to let people lead. Her measure of leadership is not just whether the work performs today, but whether she is building the leaders who can keep raising the bar tomorrow.
Curiosity, because autopilot is where relevance goes to die. The MIKE AND IKE work started from a very familiar place: we have the best flavor, so let's talk about flavor. But curiosity pushed the team to ask a better question. Not "how do we say we taste good?" but "how do we fit into their lives?"
And fundamentals, because the basics never go out of fashion. Understand the consumer and customer. Build distinctive brands. Innovate with purpose. Execute well.
None of that sounds especially flashy. That is the point. Growth is not usually one magical swing. It is the discipline to keep asking better questions, then do the work well enough that the answers can matter.
The episode also gets into MIKE AND IKE's partnership with Knicks star Josh Hart, who now holds the very serious, very unserious title of President of Candy Operations.
This is where a lot of brands get influencer partnerships wrong. They find someone famous, hand them the product, and hope proximity looks like relevance.
Josh Hart is different because the connection was already there. He is a real MIKE AND IKE fan. He eats them, talks about them, signs boxes for fans, tours the factory, and shows up like someone who genuinely wants to be part of the brand's world.
That is the filter more marketers should use.
Does this person already make sense inside the story we are telling? Does the partnership deepen the brand, or just spike the metrics? Are we building long-term equity, or renting attention until the next famous face comes along?
The best partnerships do not feel pasted on. They make the brand more believable.
Near the end of the episode, I asked Meenakshi what agencies misunderstand about what CMOs and growth leaders actually need to get done.
Her answer should make every agency sit up a little straighter.
In a ten-hour day, she estimated she may spend about an hour with an agency. That is the reality. The work we obsess over is a meaningful part of her world, but it is not the whole world. She is leading marketing and sales. She is thinking about consumers, customers, internal alignment, investment cases, brand equity, ROI, household growth, culture, and execution.
So no, she was not looking for a supplier. She was looking for a growth partner.
That means an agency has to care about more than whether the creative is interesting. It has to be equally invested in business outcomes. It has to bring strategy, not just ideas. And yes, sometimes it has to make the client uncomfortable in exactly the way they hired you to do.
That may be my favorite kind of client relationship: enough trust to challenge each other, enough shared ambition to keep going when the answer is not obvious, and enough curiosity to admit the first question might not be the right one.
If there is one idea that stuck with me from this conversation, it is that legacy brands do not stay iconic by preserving everything.
They stay iconic by knowing what to protect, what to question, and what needs to earn its place all over again.
For MIKE AND IKE, that means protecting the product truth people already love, while building a brand world that can move with culture. For Just Born, it means thinking generationally without moving slowly. For marketers, it is a reminder that relevance is not a one-time achievement. It is a practice.
And for agencies, it is a challenge: if you want to be treated like a growth partner, you have to show up like one.
Want to hear the full conversation with Meenakshi Trehan?
Catch the episode of Question Everything on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
Part interview, part therapy, part Price Is Right, the Question Everything podcast puts your favorite CMOs and marketing leaders in the hot seat. While they face off against our game board, you’ll learn from the wins, mistakes, and hard-earned lessons of the best in the business, all daring enough to be curious.
