CNAP COMMENT: In fairness to those who hate the taste of coconut water, all but one that I’ve tried has a distinctive off-putting taste/flavor that’s hard to like. Lucky’s Espresso brand and flavor of coconut water is the only one I’ve tasted with that off flavor masked. I will definitely try this VITA COCO coconut water to see if I can detect that off-putting feature of other coconut waters.
Last Wednesday, Vita Coco maker All Market Inc. began the day by launching its new Impossible to Hate campaign — a summer marketing drive to promote its pressed coconut water line.
By 3 p.m. their social media coordinator was standing in the bathroom holding a jug of urine and asking for an address where she could mail it.
While associating its products with pee is something most beverage brands tend to avoid, Vita Coco’s risky tweet has been a major success, the company said — one that it’s proud to stand behind. A week later, the viral moment has received more than 4,500 retweets, 32,000 likes, and free media exposure with write-ups in Vox, New York Magazine, Fox News, and Business Insider.
So, as Mashable’s Morgan Sung asked, “How the hell did we get here?”Speaking with BevNET this week, Vita Coco brand director Allison Finazzo and community coordinator Lane Rawlings (the woman in the photo) said the moment was improvised and authentic, but also tied to the company’s broader Impossible to Hate campaign.
Conceived in coordination with creative partner Interesting Development, Impossible to Hate is focused on promoting the company’s Coconut Water with Pressed Coconut SKU by reaching out to “haters” online and urging them to try the product in order to prove that the drink can win over even the most hardened skeptics. The company used an algorithm to scrape user reviews from Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and other websites to find users with the highest amount of negative reviews — identifying nearly one million people with more than 40 million combined posts — whom they could try and convert to fans of the pressed line.
“We felt that if we could get a mediocre review from people who are giving one star to the Grand Canyon or a teddy bear, or writing that Chicago ‘is not worth it’, then it would show pressed is truly impossible to hate,” Finazzo said.
On Wednesday, Rawlings was tasked with using the official Vita Coco Twitter account to reach out to users who had in the past tweeted about hating coconut water and engage them directly about the pressed line. That’s when she encountered amateur mixed martial arts fighter Tony Posnanski.
On March 8, Posnanski had tweeted a list of “unpopular opinions,” including that “Candy Corn is absolute trash,” “The Beatles are very overrated,” and that “Coconut water is disgusting.” Rawlings responded to the tweet, telling the fighter there was “such a thing as too many eggs.” After a brief exchange, Posnanski — who had coincidentally written about his hatred of coconut water in The Huffington Post in 2013 (something Finazzo and Rawlings said they were unaware of at the time) — ultimately said the magic words…
FINISH READING: Inside Vita Coco’s Bathroom Breakout – BevNET.com
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