Surely a legacy brand like Crayola has done all it could to grow, right? Wrong.
In this episode of the Marketing Vanguard podcast, recorded live at Brandweek in Atlanta, Victoria Lozano, then-CMO of Crayola, proves that the growth work of even the most iconic brands can and should never stop.
From how nostalgia can be leveraged to the advantage of expanding into unexpected categories, this conversation covers it all.
What you’ll learn:
- How to merge nostalgia with future-forward relevance
- Why a CMO’s role with high-awareness brands requires category expansion
- The framework for segmented messaging across stakeholder groups
- How to unlock hidden revenue streams in plain sight, like recognizing that 57% of Crayola purchases are made by adults without children
- The power of branded sensory identity as a defensible competitive advantage
- Why ecosystem thinking matters more than individual business unit performance
Victoria Lozano, former CMO of Crayola, is renowned for her expertise in brand strategy, category expansion and omnichannel marketing across iconic consumer brands. With a career spanning Fortune 500 CPG companies including HBC, beverages and confectionery, she has built a diverse track record in product innovation, location-based entertainment, and educational strategy.
Her work at Crayola demonstrates how legacy brands can evolve, redefine brand categories, unlock new consumer segments, and build enduring marketing strategies that transcend traditional product boundaries, all while maintaining emotional resonance.
Episode Highlights:
[00:26] Merge Nostalgia with Cultural Relevance to Stay Top-of-Mind — Victoria articulates the strategic tension facing iconic brands: leverage the emotional power of nostalgia while simultaneously showing up in current cultural conversations and proving relevance to today’s consumers. Nostalgia alone creates brand warmth but risks positioning the brand as a historical artifact; relevance alone without emotional resonance feels opportunistic and inauthentic. The solution is to actively design products, experiences, and content that honor the brand’s heritage while addressing present-day consumer values. In Crayola’s case, that’s creativity as essential skill, wellness, self-expression and mental health.
[06:18] Redefining Your Use Case, Expand Revenue — Victoria highlights a counterintuitive but telling statistic: 57% of Crayola purchases now come from households without children, a massive untapped segment driven by adult wellness and self-expression rather than childhood nostalgia. By repositioning coloring from a kids’ creativity tool to an adult therapeutic escape (competing against wine, meditation apps, and wellness products), Crayola unlocked an entirely new growth category that’s expanding three percentage points year-over-year. This insight reveals that growth for mature brands lies not in market share cannibalization but in redefining what problem the product solves for new audiences.
[07:50] Craft Differentiated Value Promises for Each Audience Segment — Victoria demonstrates that premium brands must make fundamentally different promises to distinct audiences, whether it’s kids, parents, teachers or adults. In Crayola’s case, for example, for kids, the promise is simple joy and fun; for parents, it’s skill development and childhood enrichment backed by research. CMOs can operationalize this by mapping each audience segment’s core motivation, then reverse-engineering messaging and channel strategy from that single, clear promise. The result is messaging that feels authentic to each group while maintaining consistent brand identity, increasing conversion likelihood across the entire customer ecosystem. This approach transforms competitive pressure from a distraction into a reinforcement of positioning, since each segment’s promise is so precisely calibrated to their unique needs.
