The Sound
  • About
  • Work
  • Services
  • Blog
  • Contact

Refreshing a Brand

The Challenge

After a decade of chasing every beverage trend that came around, a stalwart elixir brand of the 90s found itself on tough times — completely unsure of what it stood for (with the lagging sales to match) and without any sort of clear path forward for the future. We were given the amazing challenge of doing interviews and trend treks at the fringes of culture — often the inspiration for tomorrow’s masses — to help this team create a truly future-proof brand strategy.

The Approach

This one … got weird. Like energy-treks-through-Sedona and Japanese-forest-bathing weird.

We wanted our search for inspiration to be broad enough that we got some ‘out there’ a-ha moments, but with enough structure to clearly tie back to the brand’s DNA. To that point, we set out to explore the enormous platforms of Health and Wellness, Reinvention, and Rebellion in hot bed cities for the topics: Sedona, Detroit & Seattle.

In each city, we led our clients through a series of inspiring expert interviews and a full-day city trend trek … diving into every possible angle into each of those macro topics, to get a 360 degree view of what’s going on. After the day, we’d get dinner somewhere and debrief on what we were seeing and hearing — ensuring that the final brand strategy was at the nexus of each individual’s unique observations.

The Impact

The inspiring, out-there films and report that we brought into the building inspired the brand team to think about this beverage in an entirely new way — abandoning a lot of the ‘us too!’ stance that they’d been struggling with, and empowering them to go back to their badass roots, putting a stake in the ground about who they really are. From a product standpoint, the strategy we landed on gave them a clear, compelling route forward for how to shift the actual makeup of the elixir … getting it back to its original magic — with a modern twist.

Case Studies

Keep Reading

Positioning Tech & Food

A food delivery service app wanted to understand what their new offering should stand for and why consumers should believe in it. It was critical not only for the team to understand what makes this new offering different from our client’s main business, but also what value it brings to consumers.

Read More

Breakthrough Innovation

With that, one of the pioneer brands in the kombucha space needed help seeing into the future. To grow the category, and define what the gut health space has the potential to become, it needed to first reimagine its portfolio strategy—from product centric, to needs driven—and then craft its pipeline for success.

Read More

Gatorade: Connecting Brand And Consumer

One of the best ways to practice empathy is to actually experience it with your target. Gatorade signed up to do just that. They wanted to get out of the office and into their consumer segments’ everyday lives... and to really take a walk “in their shoes.”

Read More
View All

Stay Up To Date

The Sound believes in sharing knowledge. If you’d like to stay up to date with our reports on people, culture and brands and be able to watch our documentaries (and even be invited to an event or two) then simply subscribe below. 

Subscribe

Stay Up To Date

The Sound believes in sharing knowledge. If you’d like to stay up to date with our reports on people, culture and brands and be able to watch our documentaries (and even be invited to an event or two) then simply subscribe below.

Subscribe
The Sound

Copyright 2021 The Sound.
All rights reserved.

  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy Policy
Learn More
  • Work
  • Careers
  • Team
  • About
  • Contact
Services
Stay In Touch
Mumbai

604, 34th Rd, Khar West, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400050, India

Tel: +91 93 2439 2908
Vancouver

#268 - 312 Main Street, Vancouver, BC V6A 2T2, Canada

Tel: +1 604 732 1090
New York

45 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10010, USA

Tel: +1 646 490 8387
London

52-54 Rosebery Avenue, London EC1R 4RP, England, UK

Tel: +44 20 3597 2948
Chicago

230 W Huron St, Suite 410 Chicago, IL 60654 United States

Tel: +1 312 265 1775