Helping change perceptions of an underdog soft drinks brand
Lipton Ice Tea
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Ultimate responsible and relationship owner
Site strategy
End to end user experience design
Design look & feel lead, collaborating with a brand designer, an animator & a creative director
Co-creator of all product copy, collaborating with an event producer
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Lipton Ice Tea faced a unique challenge in the UK: low penetration driven by lack of brand affinity and negative taste perceptions. Compounding the problem, their comparatively small media budget made it impossible to compete on reach with larger rivals like Coke and Sprite. Despite attempts at product-focused communications, the brand had failed to drive meaningful business results.
The UK market was stagnant, and among our target demographic of young Londoners, Lipton was viewed as irrelevant and unappealing. To change perceptions, we needed to give consumers a compelling reason to reappraise Lipton—not just as a product but as a brand. The task was to find an innovative and low budget way to connect with audiences and bring to life the product’s core truth: that tea refreshes mind, body, and soul.
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We hypothesised that re-engaging with this audience through experiences, rather than pure product communications, could vitalise the brand’s perception and drive growth, something that a nimble round of qualitative audience research bore up.
As part of a small team, I led the development of the “Extend Your Weekend” campaign to break through the monotony of young Londoners’ routines. We designed a series of innovative, exclusive Monday-morning events to refresh how people saw both the city and the brand, and borrowed from festival language to add credibility.
The event hub had some heavy lifting to do: it needed to quickly and effectively convey what the brand stood for, give a sense of refreshment, as well as drive sign ups to capture valuable first party data as well as fill the event venues.
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The campaign proved incredibly successful, setting all-time UK sales records for Lipton Ice Tea.
Penetration hit a historic high of 2.5%, and we achieved a 70%+ reach among the London target 18-34 audience, with significant gains in brand equity metrics: "refreshing & great taste" (+8%), "brands I love" (+8%), and communications awareness (+3%).
PR coverage was extensive, with high-profile influencers organically amplifying the hub and adding nearly 1M additional organic impressions.
The hub:
Succeeded in increasing trial in London
Succeeded in driving event sign up, with an total of 800% event over subscription
Became a model for other markets to replicate, with Lipton's French and Dutch teams being the first to repurpose the structure and design
The homepage made use of some key devices to quickly land key product associations around refreshment, as well as drive event specific interest.
A count down widget in the top right corner was included to drive urgency to take action.
The manual play masthead contained a london-centric manifesto animation, playfully setting out the brand stance before a directional cue led the user to the event blocks themselves.
Festival line up design language was heavily borrowed from to land credence for the event series, and we differentiated card layouts in order to clearly visually separate the three hero events from five, smaller scale events.
Once an event was tapped into, a unit expanded to show the key information - from map location to visually orient the user, to information around the ticket application mechanic. For the hero events we opted for a randomised ticket giveaway rather than a traditional ticketing mechanic, to help drive interest, anticipation and social noise.
Event blocks remained on the page at all times to lend weight to the overarching series, and were updated with UGC content from the event itself as further amplification.
Where to now?