To kick off the summer season, powdered hydration brand Liquid I.V. debuted a new visual identity accompanied by a new summer brand campaign, a Formula 1 sponsorship, festival activations and a 360 marketing campaign across social, influencers, retail media and beyond. We spoke with Brittany Shaw, Liquid I.V.’s Senior Brand Director, about the strategy and tactics behind the company’s first-ever brand refresh.
Chief Marketer: This is the company’s first brand refresh since its founding. Why is it happening now, and what are its goals?
Brittany Shaw, Senior Brand Director, Liquid I.V.: Our brand has evolved over the past two years, so it’s important that our look and our feel evolves with us. This is the first time our visual identity is changing since we launched 12 years ago. This refresh includes everything our customers see when it comes to our brand. A modernized color palette, new benefit-driven packaging, new merchandising, and an entirely new look for our website.
Why are we doing this now? We chose to do a brand refresh for a few reasons that all stem back to our consumer. We’ve been having some conversations and we learned from them that there was an opportunity to better communicate our true-to-fruit flavor on the front of pack, to highlight our science-backed product design through more detailed claims, and to bring the vibrancy of the brand to life at the shelf. The goal of this refresh was to optimize to modernize and evolve our brand without disrupting shopability at shelf. And with summer being one of our most active times of the year, we thought that the start of season would be a perfect moment to introduce this refreshed and reenergized brand identity.
CM: How are you getting this out to consumers?
BS: The official rollout of the new visual identity [was May 1]. So our website now reflects this new look and feel, and we’re starting to roll out our other brand assets on social media. Our new packaging has already started shipping, so our customers will start to see those on shelves throughout the year.
CM: What will make this a success?
BS: Our goal of this brand refresh was to provide clarity and understanding to our consumers and just make sure that we’re easy to find in stores. It’s about making sure that our product still contains the same benefits that consumers know and love, but we wanted to make it easier for them to find us in the stores. We have some metrics, like brand awareness and household penetration, but it’s really about our customer feedback. We do some surveys through our consumer insights team and also through community management on social media channels as well.
CM: What’s the next step after the rebrand?
BS: Our goal here at Liquid I.V. is about elevating the vitality of people and the planet and ensuring that our product is front and center. So we do have a lot of new innovation and new launches coming out to make sure that we’re constantly designing hydration solutions for everyday life.
[We also launched] our summer brand campaign, “Tear. Pour. Live. More.” With this creative we were focusing on showcasing and highlighting the transformative power of Liquid I.V. hydration benefits… Not only is it a beautiful creative asset, but it’s also supplemented by a robust 360 marketing activation to bring the campaign to life across social, influencer, partnerships, retail marketing—just to name a few. Our campaigns have always been full of energy, fun and exciting, but this one takes it to a whole new level with visual effects and overall production value. We brought in some amazing partners to help bring this campaign to life, such as Anomaly, who helped pull in Blacksmith for visual effects and Magna Studios for production.
CM: How will your experiential strategy factor into this?
BS: We have a content and media strategy [toward] our target consumers and we aim to show up where consumers are and show them how Liquid I.V. fits into their life. For example, festival is a huge one for us. We recently just came back from hydrating the desert as the title sponsor of Neon Carnival, one of the biggest after parties of the festival season. We [also did] the Formula 1 Crypto.com Miami Grand Prix [May 3-5] … celebrating our first year as the race’s first-ever functional hydration partner. And we’ll be announcing some additional activations in the upcoming months, but you can expect to find us at a variety of different events where hydration is needed the most.
CM: How do you set the brand apart from your competition in the functional hydration space?
BS: Our angle is our no compromise hydration solution. It all comes back to our product. With so many products in the market today, sometimes you have to make a choice between being healthy and something tasting good. With Liquid I.V., you don’t need to choose. We believe that we are reinventing hydration and are in touch with our consumer and addressing their needs with our product, as well as showing up in relevant occasions with compelling messaging on hydration.
Another differentiator is that our impact program focusing on providing hydration aid, expanding access to clean water and reducing our environmental impact. We believe as a brand that we have a collective responsibility to positively impact people and the planet.
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