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Last month, coconut water brand Vita Coco reached 1 million TikTok followers, marking a major social milestone for the brand, which has 677,000 followers on Facebook and 137,000 followers on Instagram. Jane Prior, CMO of Vita Coco, attributes much of the brand’s success on TikTok to its playful tone and community-first approach.
“We’ve always had the position that consumers want authenticity, not ads,” she said. “They want to hear it from real people.”
That’s especially evident in the brand’s latest viral moment on TikTok with creator Romeo Bingham, who first gained traction online after posting a made-up Dr Pepper jingle that ended up being used in one of the brand’s TV ads. By tapping Bingham to create a Vita Coco jingle and star in the online Super Bowl campaign, the brand was ultimately able to amass and gain 130,000 new TikTok followers in a month reach 1 million followers and brought Google searches for the brand to a four-year high.
Vita Coco plans a number of brand campaigns in advance, Prior said, but is increasingly focused on finding faster ways to inject the brand into cultural conversations as it looks to further increase household penetration.
“That’s the beauty of it, and the need to be fluent in social skills,” Prior said. “It is often the organic campaigns that generate the most value.”
Hydration nation
In her 17 years with Vita Coco’s marketing team, Prior has seen the brand transition from a start-up to a global, publicly traded company, which required many pivotal moments as new platforms and strategies emerged. Still, some strategies have remained the same, she says, such as the brand’s use of mascots and community-led marketing to increase brand awareness.
In the beginning, community-led marketing largely involved seeding coconut water among celebrities and hoping they would name the product in Us Weekly’s “What’s in My Bag?” section or carry a bottle on a movie set, Prior said. Today, that focus has shifted to encouraging customers to post their Vita Coco on social media.
“It’s the same strategy we had before, just applied on a different day and time on different platforms,” she said.
Anchoring Vita Coco’s approach to TikTok is the marketing team’s commitment to responding to and engaging with the community, Prior said. The quick response has contributed to the brand’s recent success with Bingham, as Vita Coco’s respond to that video was the first step in the brand’s viral moment with them. Bingham’s video — in which they sing about how the brand’s product is “so dang delicioso” — has been viewed nearly 40 million times since it was posted in January.
“I don’t think we could have anticipated the level of engagement and the impressions of that partnership,” Prior said.
Vita Coco has repurposed and posted the jingle multiple times, and Prior said people are not only engaging, but expressing intent to purchase at a level she hasn’t seen before. “If you look at the sentiment in the comments… you’re like, ‘I’m going to Walmart right now to buy this product,’” she said.
On Sunday, the brand sent Bingham to the Super Bowl with a custom “Delicioso” jersey as a nod to the jingle, and its video wearing it has racked up over 5.7 million views and 408,000 likes on TikTok to date. Another, which shows Bingham for a digital billboard with the lyrics of the jingle, has been viewed more than 3.2 million times and has 242,000 likes. In total, Vita Coco received more than 245 million cumulative impressions from the campaign, according to the company.
Answer dude?
Vita Coco’s reply-all strategy goes beyond the comments section. Last year, the brand had one of its most successful marketing moments ever when it responded to outrage over Poppi’s vending machine maker’s Super Bowl campaign with a pop-up event in Washington Square Park, where the brand branded a mobile cart as a vending machine and handed out samples. Prior said the pop-up was organized on one day and boosted both social engagement and UGC, she said.
Vita Coco also has a mascot named Coco Man, a walking box of coconut water that often appears on the brand’s socials. Previously said that having a mascot has allowed Vita Coco to “jump into conversations with other mascots.” When Duolingo killed off its owl mascot last year, Coco Man joined in to grieve and general conversation, which led to some of the brand’s most viewed posts. Prior noted that Coco Man also helped personify the brand in a way that complements the casual tone in the comments section, which is meant to feel human.
Prior said Vita Coco’s internal social and growth teams meet every month to assess what drives the most engagement and are in constant communication with customers. Those teams, she said, are the reason for the brand’s success.
“There’s no time when they won’t respond to a comment or a consumer, or take advantage of an opportunity or spot a cultural trend,” Prior said. “They’re almost always on.”
Overall, Prior said Vita Coco’s social strategy “isn’t static, it’s super fluid and we’re always learning,” and this year she hopes to experiment more with TikTok Shop and TikTok Live. Given the recent uncertainty surrounding the platform, she says the social and growth teams are prepared to transition to YouTube Shorts if necessary, but remain hopeful that the brand’s largest platform will continue to function and perform as usual.
As the team waits for the next opportune social moment, Prior said it’s important to stay ready yet level-headed.
“We sell coconuts, not pacemakers,” she said. “We really don’t take ourselves that seriously.”
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