Stanley didn’t manufacture Lionel Messi’s connection to its brand. It discovered it.

Messi, the Argentine soccer star widely considered one of the greatest players in the sport’s history, had been drinking mate from Stanley products since childhood. Mate is a traditional South American caffeinated drink typically sipped from a small cup through a metal straw.

When ESPN captured Messi drinking it from a Stanley product as part of his pregame ritual, the brand found itself in the kind of global cultural moment marketers spend millions trying to create. The difference was that this one was real.

For Kate Ridley, chief brand officer of Stanley 1913, that distinction matters. Ridley is now helping guide Stanley through its next stage of growth. The strongest brands, she believes, don’t force their way into consumers’ lives. They earn a place there.

During her session at the Women in Retail Leadership Summit earlier this year, Ridley shared three lessons from Stanley’s evolution that apply to any leader trying to grow an established brand without stripping away what made people care about it in the first place.

1. Cultural relevance starts with listening.

It’s tempting to think staying relevant means reacting quickly to every new platform, trend or cultural moment. Ridley offered a more disciplined approach: Pay close attention to what consumers already value and find credible ways for the brand to meet them there.

That requires leaders to look beyond how the company talks about itself. How do customers actually use the product? What rituals have formed around it? What does the brand represent to them that may never appear in a positioning statement?

Messi’s relationship with Stanley worked because the product was already part of his life. Stanley recognized the connection rather than inventing one. Because Messi commands a global audience, that authentic, highly visible ritual gave the brand a level of exposure and credibility that a traditional celebrity campaign would struggle to replicate.

For leaders, the takeaway is to treat consumer behavior as more than data to validate a campaign. It can reveal where the brand has earned relevance, sometimes in ways the company itself hasn’t fully recognized.

2. Protecting loyal customers cannot become an excuse to stand still.

The customers who built a brand matter. However, they may not be the same consumers who fuel its next stage of growth.

Ridley noted that Stanley invested deeply in consumer insights to understand who that next customer could be. The goal wasn’t to walk away from its existing audience. It was to expand the brand’s relevance without weakening the trust it had already earned.

That is a difficult balance for any leadership team. Established brands can become so focused on protecting what has worked that they miss how the market is changing around them.

The question isn’t simply, “What do our current customers want?” Leaders also need to ask, “Who should see themselves in this brand next, and what would make that connection feel authentic?”

3. Be uncompromising about the purpose, not the playbook.

Perhaps Ridley’s most useful distinction was between a brand’s “why” and its “how.”

The “why” is the value the brand has always delivered and the reason customers trust it. That should remain intact. The “how” includes the products, partnerships, creative choices and channels used to bring that purpose to life. Those elements should be allowed to change.

For leaders, defining that boundary early can make growth decisions clearer. It gives teams room to experiment without turning every new idea into a debate about whether the brand is losing its identity.

Brand heritage should be a foundation, not a limitation. The real work is knowing which parts of the brand are essential and having the confidence to reinvent everything else.

Ridley’s message wasn’t that brands need to choose between history and relevance. It was that leaders must understand their brands well enough to know what deserves protection and what’s ready to evolve.