Client: Multinational beverage company
Agency: forpeople →
Imagining new viral soft drinks for young audiences in the US.
The business problem
A beverage company with over a century in market had already cracked the collab formula once — previous limited edition collaborations had gone viral and driven real commercial results. Now they needed to find the next ones. The brief was to identify collaboration partners for the coming years that could generate the same cultural momentum with young audiences in the US.
The approach
The starting point wasn't "who would be cool to collaborate with." It was "where does this brand already have permission to lead?" We mapped the cultural territories where the brand had genuine equity — spaces where it wasn't just present but dominant — because a collab only works when both partners bring real authority to the table. A brand borrowing credibility it hasn't earned gets called out immediately, especially by young audiences on social.
Once we had defined those territories, I audited potential collaboration partners across sectors — analysing their social histories, audience demographics, cultural positioning, content performance, and the stories they'd already been telling. The goal was to find leaders in adjacent spaces whose audiences overlapped with ours and whose brand DNA had natural connection points we could build from.
This was fundamentally a social-first research process. Understanding what makes a collab travel on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube — what hooks it, what makes it shareable, what gives fans something to react to — was central to every decision we made.
The strategic shift
We identified the specific connection points between the brand and each proposed partner — not just thematic overlaps, but the narrative hooks that would give creative teams something to work with and give audiences something to talk about.
The output
Each collaboration proposal was developed into a full strategic brief: the territory, the partner rationale, the shared audience insight, the narrative angle, and a visualisation of how the story could translate into campaign creative, product design, and content across channels. The briefs were designed to go directly to creative departments and to the proposed partner brands as the basis for negotiation and co-development.
