Helping shape and adapt a worldwide successful beverage product to the Latin American culture, needs, lifestyle and social dynamics.

Background
Our client is building the foundation for developing a new category in the region, ready-to-drink low alcohol beverages in order to compete fully with beer (which actually holds 90% of the business). However, products and brands need to be adapted to the specific characteristics of the segments for which this new drink is being designed.
 
Objectives
The objective of this project was to help design the product, packaging, value proposition and positioning of this new product by gaining a deep understanding of the drivers, consumption occasions, social dynamics and perceptions of the youth market in Brazil.

Approach
We have an simultaneously on different phases of the innovation process from doing exploratory ethnographic research, co-creation sessions with users, ideation sessions with clients, rapid prototyping, and even usability studies around specific product concepts.

We started by understanding the nascent world of RTD’s, including developments worldwide, the brands and their positioning as well as conducting a comprehensive analysis of RTD’s and their strengths compared to beer in different consumption moments and contexts. This exercise helped us develop research and innovation hypotheses which were shared with the client in a strategy workshop and helped define the most appropriate research methodologies.

Primary research included point of sale and point of consumption observations and informal interviews with both RTD and beer drinkers in order to understand their motivations and expectations in regards to drinks. After mapping out these initial insights, we conducted participatory design sessions in which we invited participants to co-created the ideal RTD drink, packaging and positioning based on the motivations and situations described during the informal interviews and their own experience.

This resulted in a projective exercise of the ideals, which we later transferred into specific implications and recommendations for our client