Understanding the tea landscape for Pepsi Lipton

Pepsi Lipton is a joint venture between PepsiCo and Unilever, focused on 3 core brands: Lipton Ice Tea, Brisk and Pure Leaf. To drive growth for their brands, Pepsi Lipton wanted to understand better consumers’ food & beverage occasions. Next to that, they wanted to assess how their brands are performing against consumers’ needs and look for growth opportunities within these key occasions.

What did we do?

We set up an insight community (also known as online research community) with 20 consumers per Pepsi Lipton brand and blogged, discussed and brainstormed with them for 3 weeks. We immersed in their daily lives. They shared their food and beverage occasions, which gave us…

  • Clear landscape of key occasions
  • Key needs of each occasion type
  • Tensions in each occasion
Lipton

The results

The project resulted in a better understanding of the tea landscape, the constituting segments, and the bull’s-eye for each brand. We also brought to life key occasions with a specific context, needs, drivers/barriers for RTD Iced Tea and competitive set.
In a closing workshop, we achieved the following objectives:

  • Immerse a mixed group of Pepsi Lipton stakeholders (25 per workshop) in the bull’s-eye target and the key occasions
  • Prioritize for each brand the most strategic occasions
  • Ideated on different insight platforms for each occasion in terms of innovation, communication and activation

How did the client experience it?

“This project brought both granularity and richness to our understanding of key iced tea occasions. By living and breathing snacks and meals with our targets, we were able to dimensionalize a ‘hero occasion’ for each brand and also identify and prioritize occasions where the brand can grow.”

Sarah Maloy, Director Consumer Insights at PepsiCo

“The process of getting underneath the consumer needs, within a seemingly undifferentiated and functional ice tea occasion, helped us understand how we can activate brands with very different positioning in a focused way to drive overall consumption.”

Nivedita Chakravorty, Director Global Innovation at Lipton Ice Tea