How a global restaurant used TURF to optimize their mobile offers portfolio  

With over $20 billion dollars in sales and a healthy growth rate, energy drinks is dominated by bold brand personas and intense competition. Historically more of a traditional category with 2-3 established players, the energy drink landscape is evolving with many new players entering the market and category lines blurring with other ready to drink and functional beverages.

Despite strong product fundamentals and known consumer demographics, our client faced a bit of an identity crisis, lacking a consistent voice and brand identity causing legacy users to be more easily swayed by pricing and promotion and difficulties attracting new consumers to consider the brand.

Our client needed more than just brand health data and prescriptive methods; rather they needed Dig to understand their brand at a values level—who they were, who their customer really was, and how to align those personas in a meaningful way to reframe their brand identity for future growth.

Focused on uncovering brand and consumer “vibe” rather than surface-level demographics or attitudes, Dig designed a completely nontraditional research approach by using intuitive, emotionally resonant technology and tools. These included:

• Lens: A projective technology technique using visual metaphors to understand emotional resonance and brand aura.
• Brand Archetyping: To define brand’s and competitive set’s current and aspirational personality as if it were a human.
• Polarity Pairs: Asking unexpected binary comparisons (“Is the brand more like a fancy restaurant or a food truck?”) to unlock subconscious associations.
• Consumer Archetyping: To understand the personalities and values of the brand’s current and potential audiences themselves.

Dig’s use of projective and symbolic techniques allowed us to bypass consumer rationalizations and access emotional truths. In a world where brands built on values over products is increasingly important, we brought the brand to life as a person. We aligned it with a real consumer persona. And we did it all while working under real-world constraints of budget, time, and stakeholder pressure.

The outcome was transformational and touched every aspect of our client’s brand, becoming the brand’s north star informing cross-functional work and embedded in every decision with the consumer at the center.