Vans' New Kick Turn: Attract More Than Just Millennials and Gen Z

Back in October, legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk posted a video to Instagram showing Hawk on his skate ramp in Vista, Calif., challenging gravity. Hawk speeds to the top of his vertical ramp, turns his back, then slides the front truck of his skateboard on the rail while the rear truck hangs in space. A split second later, all four wheels—and Hawk—are effortlessly zipping back down. “Backside nosegrind has eluded me until today,” Hawk wrote in the post. It’s not that Hawk—hailed as the most influential athlete to travel through space on a skateboard—didn’t know how to do a backside nosegrind. What made the feat impressive is that, earlier this year, Hawk was attempting to do a McTwist when he fell, snapping his right femur like a matchstick. (“I rolled over and my leg didn’t,” was how he put it to The New York Times.) Doctors said Hawk might need a cane for the rest of his life. Yet there he was before his 7.5 million Instagram followers, landing the move as though he were in his teens. For the record, he’s now 54. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Tony Hawk (@tonyhawk) Hawk’s not just old enough to be a member of AARP, he’s also a guy who’s invariably associated with Vans, the waffle-grip sneaker that took root in SoCal’s nascent skateboarding scene in the late 1970s. These two facts are not mutually exclusive, either, because Vans’ global CMO has been doing a lot of thinking about older Americans lately, plus other new customers she’d like to attract. Some 19 months into her tenure, Kristin Harrer has quietly been tweaking Vans’ mission, and by extension, its future marketing. Among the changes is a more expansive view of who a Vans customer is, which isn’t just skateboarders who idolize Tony Hawk but also the everyday people who are as old as Hawk. “We’re often perceived as a young person’s game,” Harrer told Adweek, “but we are a multigenerational brand.” All the young dudes For years now, it’s been easy to read Vans. It’s worked hard to position itself not just as the brand of choice for skateboarders but also for artists, musicians and style bloggers. As the company’s vp of global integrated marketing Nick Street told Adweek in 2019, “We don’t just talk about creative expression—we actively enable it.” (Street left his post late in 2021.) Almost by definition, that market positioning sent Vans scurrying after younger customers. Global vp Doug Palladini himself called Vans “the global icon of youth culture” when he spoke to Adweek in 2017. (Palladini departed the company earlier this year.) Harrer, however, wants to pull Vans off that narrow track. To that end, she recently reworked the company mission statement from the brand “fueling creative self-expression” to one that “empowers everyone to use creativity to discover themselves.” To the average ear, there’s probably not a ton of difference there. But for Harrer, the semantics are plain: whomever you happen to be, Vans is for you. “We wanted to write more people into the brand,” Harrer said, “to invite people in, versus speaking [only] to people who are involved in the creative arts.” And so far as advertising and creative goes, “you’ll see us execute along those lines in the next year,” she added. Time to pivot But why now? Why toggle with a perception that’s been in place for so long? Part of the shift arose from what Harrer said was “a backlash to performative culture.” As social media has evolved, the notion of a creator has drifted away from its democratizing origins toward being a coterie ruled by influencers with massive followings. The creator economy, some might say, can sometimes feel a bit exclusionary. “The act of creation for young people has different connotations now than it did 10 years ago,” Harrer said. The way she sees it, creativity today should be “less about an act of making something than to use it as a path to self-discovery.” Group Black’s Travis Montaque Debuts a New Network to Shape a More Equitable Creator Economy Vans’ new approach “doesn’t exclude self-expression—we’ll continue to serve the skate and artist communities,” Harrer said. “But [the new mission] does allow us to connect with a broader community.” Are creators polarizing? It’s hard to fault a brand for wanting to be more inclusive, of course, but branding and marketing consultant David Deal observes that while now might be a good time to update Vans’ mission and image, he doesn’t see a downside to a brand associating itself with creators—it’s just a matter of finessing. “Not everybody is a famous creator, but everybody creates, even if your idea of creating is to scratch the back of an envelope,” Deal said. “I'm not suggesting that Vans position creators as people we would like to be like, [but] they can certainly tap into the power of creators to challenge us to be ourselves.” As for broadening its appeal to people in middle age or older, Deal believes that’s a smart move. “Nobody who's baby boomer wants to feel old,” he said. You can throw Gen X into that group, too, which would include Tony Hawk. He slipped on his fist pair of Vans in 1978 as a scrawny kid skateboarding the irrigation ditches of San Diego. Pioneering boarders Tony Alva and Stacy Peralta, both now 65, also helped legitimize Vans. It’s that kind of brand authenticity Harrer wants to keep. The gray whiskers are okay, too. “Let it be a badge of authenticity,” she said. “But as we grow the brand … the access point needs to be broader.”