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 and 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.