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In 2022, Coach reached a critical inflection point. Despite near-universal brand recognition, the 85-year-old legacy brand faced a daunting reality: A new generation of consumers didn’t feel like Coach was for them.
The diagnosis was clear. The brand was operating within a marketing model built on optimizing performance, chasing efficiency, and rewarding loyalty, treating the brand itself as an afterthought. “You can’t performance-market your way into relevance,” says Joon Silverstein, CMO at Coach. As she points out, performance is merely a mirror that reflects existing demand rather than creating it.
To change its trajectory, Coach moved beyond transactional relationships to build an approach where emotional relevance — not just chasing efficiency — was the primary driver of growth.
You can’t performance-market your way into relevance.
Replacing the traditional model with a new playbook
Coach rewrote its strategic playbook, focusing on three shifts that challenged its traditional dogma:
- Prioritizing relevance over loyalty to win a new generation of customers.
- Generating desire rather than just chasing performance, knowing that storytelling makes conversion more efficient.
- Leading with purpose instead of product features and sales.
Those three shifts led Silverstein to one core realization: “Brand is no longer the top of the funnel. Brand is the funnel.”
To scale this approach globally, Coach leveraged YouTube as its strategic anchor. Now representing nearly 50% of the brand’s media investment, the platform offers a full-journey ecosystem where long-form storytelling, creator culture, and commerce intersect.
Redefining creators as cultural collaborators
Coach’s Explore Your Story campaign is a powerful example of its new playbook in action. Developed in collaboration with Gen Z communities, the campaign leans into the younger generation’s interest in storytelling and the written word. By pairing its iconic Tabby bags with readable book charms, Coach invited Gen Z on a journey of self-discovery aligned with its “Courage to Be Real” campaign. The brand built a content ecosystem around this narrative. It started with long-form films on YouTube designed for emotional depth and extended them into real-world experiences that were brought back into the platform to create a flywheel of engagement.
Central to this approach is the understanding that creators are not a distribution channel, but collaborators building in their own worlds. This strategy allows the brand to cocreate with them and how they naturally express themselves — whether through fashion, music, sports, or book culture.
Creators are not a distribution channel, but collaborators building in their own worlds.
This collaborator-first model is best seen in the long-term integration with creator and author Haley Pham. Rather than forcing her into a corporate calendar, Coach integrated itself into her milestones, including her own book release. By cocreating across fashion and book culture, the partnership lived on YouTube as one connected system from organic content to Shorts to paid amplification. This shift ensures the brand’s presence feels like a natural part of the creator’s community rather than a traditional advertisement.
Proving that culture drives relevance — and performance
Author and YouTube creator Haley Pham writes herself an inspirational letter in a video for the Coach “Courage to Be Real” campaign to reach a Gen Z audience.
Coach’s shift to a system built on emotional resonance and community delivered measurable results across brand objectives. The “Explore Your Story” campaign sparked over 15 million organic engagements and 450,000 user-generated posts. Brand impact was equally significant. Coach’s Gen Z marketing strategy helped drive global top-of-mind awareness by 60% and consideration increased sixfold.
The Haley Pham partnership also proved the efficiency of this model. Her videos reached 4.7 million unique users and delivered double the retail benchmark for consideration lift while achieving nearly 2X more efficient cost per lifted user.
Your brand isn’t what you say. It’s not even what you make. It’s what you mean to people when they’re becoming who they want to be.
These cultural investments, anchored by the decision to double its brand investment on YouTube, fueled sustainable business growth. By making the platform its primary engine for storytelling, Coach saw sustained acceleration in Gen Z marketing acquisition. This strategy proved that brand and performance work in tandem. Even as Coach scaled its YouTube investment, it drove a step change in performance ROAS and achieved 29% top-line growth.
Building real connection to drive brand and performance
Ultimately, Coach’s transformation proves that even a legacy brand can transcend its physical products. “Your brand isn’t what you say. It’s not even what you make,” Silverstein said. “It’s what you mean to people when they’re becoming who they want to be.”
Coach’s evolution provides a new blueprint for the industry: When you build real connections, you get both brand and performance. To apply this model, start by shifting focus from chasing existing demand to creating it through purpose-led storytelling. By leveraging YouTube’s full-journey ecosystem, from long-form films that build emotional depth to Demand Gen campaigns that convert customers, brands can turn cultural relevance into consistent business growth.