The new wisecracking character for Vita Coco, Cocohead, is meant to differentiate the coconut water brand from other alternative beverages.
By STUART ELLIOTT
The New York TimesPublished: March 22, 2010
Now, Lippy has found his brand, as Vita Coco coconut water introduces a campaign that features a smart-aleck coconut character who wears sunglasses and has a straw protruding from his head.
His name is Cocohead, not Lippy Coconut, but lippy he is, making wisecracks on posters and signs in stores, like “How ’bout you and me roll down the aisle together?,” “I’m a lean green hydratin’ machine,” “Does this straw make my head too big?” and “Just what New York needs — another nut on the street.”
Some remarks that Cocohead makes are smart-alecky in a salacious way, racy enough that they cannot appear in a newsletter published by a family newspaper. Suffice it to say that most of them involve puns about body parts, which is odd because Cocohead is composed of only one part.
(For those wondering just how over-the-top an outspoken brand character can get, here is one of his japes that is on the borderline of good taste. In an ad about a variety of Vita Coco that adds peach and mango to the coconut water, Cocohead says: “Coconut, peach and mango. That’s my kind of threesome.”)
The Cocohead attitude infuses the campaign, which got under way last week, as a tactic to differentiate Vita Coco from other brands of coconut water, not to mention all the so-called alternative beverages against which the brand competes, particularly sports drinks, energy drinks and flavored waters.
Missing is an entreaty to join “Team Cocohead,” presumably because such an invitation might spur the wrath of the fans of
The Vita Coco campaign carries the theme “Nuts for life,” which is underscored in ads with headlines like “So good for you it’s nuts.”
The campaign has a proposed budget through the end of the year that is being estimated at $3 million.
The campaign is the handiwork of an agency in Culver City, Calif., named Mistress Creative, for which the ads are kind of a public coming-out. Mistress has been keeping a low profile since it was founded last year by executives who had worked together at agencies that include Kastner & Partners and Mother.
Although Vita Coco had been advertised before, says Jeff Rubenstein, vice president of consumer marketing for Vita Coco, which is produced by All Market Incorporated in New York, this is the first “campaign in a holistic, integrated way.” (Previous ads used themes like “Take a hydration vacation.”)
The campaign is starting with posters on bus and phone kiosks in New York, along with signs and displays in stores that sell Vita Coco. There is also a public relations effort led by Gallego & Company in New York.
Plans call for print ads in the summer, in regional and national magazines; a presence on TV screens in retail outlets with in-store video networks; and social media, where Cocohead can “communicate the functional benefits of the brand in our Brazilian, fun-loving way,” Mr. Rubenstein says.
Brazil is the source of Vita Coco’s coconut water and plays a leading role in the brand’s origins story, which dates to 2003 when two men, Ira Liran and Michael Kirban, learned about coconut water from a pair of Brazilian women they had just met in a bar in Manhattan.
Brazil is “on fire,” Mr. Rubenstein says, as a result of publicity surrounding the decision to award the
“New packaging later this year will acknowledge the brand is born in Brazil,” he adds.
Mr. Kirban and Mr. Liran started selling Vita Coco in 2005, in a handful of stores on the East Coast. Since then, the brand, and coconut water as a category, have boomed, fueled by the growing interest in alternative beverages.
Vita Coco is now sold in stores that include Giant Eagle, Hannaford, Shaw’s, Stop & Shop, Super Target,
Those rivals, however, are calling on some powerful players to help them compete against Vita Coco. O.N.E. attracted an investment from the
Vita Coco has countered with a celebrity,
Cocohead is intended as “a third party,” Mr. Jacobsen says, rather than the voice of the Vita Coco brand.
It was said that Madonna wanted to invest in the brand because she is a big fan of its functional benefits. Vita Coco is promoted as low in calories, fat-free and containing electrolytes, calcium, potassium and magnesium.
There is “an exorbitant amount of benefits,” declares Mr. Rubenstein, who even uses the phrase “elixir of life” to promote Vita Coco. That leads to a line that appears frequently in the campaign: “Super-hydrating, life-enhancing. Nuts for life.”
To avoid an educational approach to the benefits, which consumers may have perceived as about as much fun as learning a lesson or reading a laundry list, the campaign brings in Cocohead.
“He’s the manifestation of our brand,” Mr. Rubenstein says, who “speaks with a real edge inspired by the life-loving spirit of Brazil.”
“He’s our Coppertone girl, our gecko, our Mr. Whipple,” he adds.
It is, however, hard to imagine Mr. Whipple, the longtime brand character for Charmin bathroom tissue, talking like Cocohead. But Cocohead’s lippy nature may be what is needed to get noticed in his category.
“Coconut water is a bit of a commodity,” says Christian Jacobsen, a partner at Mistress Creative, and sometimes still has to address a problem “the category had in the early days,” that some consumers confused it with coconut milk.
Cocohead will help convey to potential customers that Vita Coco is “approachable, fun, a fun brand,” Mr. Jacobsen says, that has roots in Brazil and was “started in a bar.”
“We’re talking to people who love life, who party,” he adds, which is “how we ended up with ‘Nuts for life,’ ” as it can also serve as “a statement for the company.”
“We refer to him as the peanut gallery,” he adds, offering his flippant comments from the sidelines.
Mr. Rubenstein compares Cocohead to Mr. Jenkins, a puckish, impudent character who appeared in a popular print campaign for Tanqueray gin from 1994 to 1999. Mr. Jenkins was not presented as a pitchman but rather as a representation of a consumer whose discerning taste led him to embrace the brand.
Cocohead is also meant to embody the nature of Vita Coco as a feisty challenger brand taking on far larger competitors like Gatorade, Red Bull and Vitaminwater. (Vita Coco sales last year were estimated at $20 million; projections for 2010 are for more than $40 million.)
The character is “eccentric, irreverent, personality-driven,” says Arthur Gallego, principal at Gallego & Company, who has worked on Vita Coco with Mr. Kirban, the co-founder, since 2004.
Mr. Gallego likens Cocohead to Wendy Kaufman, known as “the Snapple Lady,” who did so much to popularize Snapple beverages in the 1990s when that brand was getting off the ground.
Snapple became a success during “a different era of marketing,” Mr. Gallego says, but it was “still driven by a genuineness and an authenticity and a personality.”
“We have Cocohead,” he adds.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/
the philippines is the number one producer of coconuts in the world. it took 2 young men from NYC to see the possibilities of selling coconut water to the whole world. filipinos keep talking about industrialization but who wants the low-tech industry of selling coconut water? coco water and sugarcane juice, it takes foreigners to appreciate and stock them in their fridges.
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