GoKo: Building and Launching a New Beverage Category

GoKo Energy is a coconut water-based energy beverage that combines the water from coconuts sourced in Vietnam with pure fruit juice and just the right amount of caffeine to naturally power an active lifestyle. The company was founded in 2017 when their founder, Jeff Kirshbaum, inspired by his travels around Asia, set out to create the world’s first all-natural coconut water energy drink. He enlisted the help of Petrol Advertising to help turn his vision into a reality and introduce it to the world.

As the Director of Strategic Partnerships at Petrol, I was charged with leading the development, launch, and growth of not only the GoKo brand, but of the product itself. Our team worked hand-in-hand with the founders of GoKo to create the company’s flagship four products and introduce them to the market over a three-year period, culminating in the brand’s rapid expansion and growing popularity. For my team and I, this represented a uniquely exciting opportunity – the chance to not just introduce a new product to market, but to establish an entirely new category within an industry. It was a challenge that proved to be incredibly deep and eventually tremendously satisfying.

Early Days

When GoKo first came to us it was still just an idea on paper – they were still months away from producing the first recipe samples on their route to finalizing the initial beverages. We engaged in an extensive research program, learning all we could about the relevant markets, products, customers, distribution channels, and everything else that would affect the viability of the venture. Those early insights proved to be crucial in the long-term, informing the company’s products, branding, and distribution strategy, in particular.

Over a six month period in 2017, my team conducted dozens of product sampling sessions with hundreds of people across the full breadth of potential customers, collecting data on over 150 unique recipes and nearly 20 packaging styles. Through that testing, we determined that the market would be receptive to a new category of coconut-based beverage, one that combined the “mouth-feel” of a soda, the sharp tang of citrus, and the perfectly balanced flavor of natural coconut water. We further determined that this new product category necessitated wholly-original packaging, which avoided both the expected tropical imagery that dominates the coconut water market and the overtly bold design common to male-targeted energy drinks. These determinations marked the true beginning of GoKo as a product and brand.

Introducing GoKo to the World

Launching a product is always challenging and requires the coordinated efforts of many individuals across numerous touch points, digital, physical and beyond. Introducing an entirely new category to the market involves the same challenges, while also introducing a breadth of other considerations that must be addressed in order to attain desired levels of success. For GoKo, we needed to not only inform our target market segments about the product while setting the brand’s tone, but also to educate those customers about the beverages’ effects, natural ingredients, and intent.

We began by leveraging our earlier research to determine the three market segments that would be most open to making GoKo a habitual part of their lifestyle. Our original assumption was that “Yoga Moms” would be GoKo’s primary market, but the research revealed that a younger, more urban female responded more positively to the product and brand. This segment, interested in fitness and travel, but most concerned with their daily productivity at work became GoKo’s primary target segment and the focus of our efforts and investment.

With our market segments and prototypes taking form, we turned our attention to determining the mix of channels and content that would most effectively propel awareness and eventual conversions, along with our other KPIs.

Among the available social channels, Instagram was a clear choice - it is visually-driven, the most popular social platform among our primary target segment, e-commerce enabled, and rich with advertising tools. We considered Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, and LinkedIn, but the audience and medium mismatch would lead to less efficient engagement and were therefore dismissed as the primary social channel.

Beyond social, OOH emerged as the second most important channel within the mix. Our team engaged in an aggressive, localized effort to place OOH assets both in areas of potential sales and in places associated with the enjoyment of the product. This manifested in the form of product-centric posters and billboards near grocery and convenience stores where GoKo is available for sale, branded sampling dispensers at locations such as beaches and fitness centers, and discount card give-aways at high-traffic locations near universities.

To determine the success of the campaign, we established a list of KPIs we’d closely track at each level of consumer engagement.

Bringing the Market to GoKo

We engaged a two-pronged approach to GoKo’s distribution strategy to achieve a balance between efficiency and reach. The first element in the plan was to create a wide-reaching, generalized value chain through the use of dedicated distributors with established pipelines to grocery stores, department stores, vending companies, and other brick-and-mortar consumer retailing outlets. The second element was to internally drive a highly targeted distribution program aimed specifically at the youngest members of the company’s primary market - college students. These two distribution strategies, implemented in parallel, enabled GoKo to effectively reach hundreds of thousands of potential customers in a few ideal markets.

The generalized distribution vertical was largely powered through our use of third-party distributors who possessed existing relationships with supermarkets and grocery stores. We directed them to target retail outlets in specific geographies popular among our primary and secondary target market segments. This meant their concentration was west coast, urban centers, near universities, in areas of affluence - Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Portland, and San Diego. After making the initial introductions, it was left to us to negotiate terms and secure preferred placements for new products.

As GoKo arrived at each new retail outlet, we executed a multi-faceted roll-out system that ensured its immediately positive reception. The process began two weeks before launch at the retail outlet, with targeted social ads to likely shoppers and OOH placements around the retail locations. These ads were a combination of brand-, and product-focused ads that each offered a discount to shoppers at that retail location. As GoKo went live at each location, we offered sampling to customers at the location and in areas enjoyed by likely GoKo customer (e.g. the beach, popular hiking trails), while distributing additional promotional offers to encourage immediate conversion. At nearly each of the retail locations, we secured shelf and POS stocking to reach planned purchasers and impulsive buyers, alike, and adjacently placed OOH ads to draw attention to the products. Within two weeks, GoKo was in a dozen 7-11 stores; within a month, GoKo was in nearly 30 locations.

The college-targeted distribution strategy was implemented differently in accordance with the unique behavioral patterns specific to college students and the campus lifestyle. For the generalized distribution prong, marketing and targeting was concentrated around direct product sampling as a means towards creating a funnel to sales at a nearby outlet, however in the college-targeted prong, we instead focused on creating an association between the GoKo and partying. To create this affiliation in the target segment’s minds, we engaged a holistic approach by connecting GoKo with each core location of the college experience - campus, housing, nightlife, and retail. Through these efforts, we were able to transform GoKo from an unknown entity, to a beverage synonymous with the best aspects of the students’ lifestyle.

We began by contacting the college newspaper and local student influencers to establish a foothold on campus through official and unofficial channels with significant reach throughout the student body. Through a mixture of gifting samples, and fostering relationships with the student-journalists, we creating an undercurrent of wonder around GoKo and an inherent fascination in the students to try this suddenly hyped beverage. We then engaged a modified sampling program that involved giving away cases of GoKo to fraternities, sororities, and some other student housing locations to begin creating a habitual consumption of the beverages. This was done while we simultaneously placed flyers and other OOH assets around the campus with messaging both about GoKo’s ability to provide the energy to power an active lifestyle and about GoKo’s as a perfect pairing with nightlife and fun.

While these actions were taking place in view of the public, our team was working with campus bars to host promotional nights that would connect GoKo with alcohol. By offering students discounted GoKo-based cocktails (e.g. Pineapple GoKo and Rum - which tastes similar to a Piña Colada), the participating bars completed the chain of connecting GoKo with nightlife, and deeply seating an association between the beverages and the best parts about college. At the same time, the GoKo sales team secured placements in local grocery and convenience stores, and vending machines on campus, to complete the distribution ecosystem. Within a few weeks, GoKo went from being completely unknown, to a campus-wide phenomenon that bars would be stocking moving forward, available for purchase at the most popular retail outlets, and vended for students on campus when they need their in-between class boost.

What’s On the Horizon

With our team’s marketing and distribution plans beginning to bear fruits, we now turn our attention to the next phase of growth for the brand. The two high-level considerations for this growth are, of course, spread and penetration - increasing the number of geographies where GoKo is available versus the number of secured customers within established geographies. Between Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Portland, and San Diego, we have over 7 million potential GoKo customers. The decision was made to first secure significant penetration within those markets before turning our attention to entering new markets to avoid spreading our resources too thin.

Within those initial cities, our research indicated that between 2-5% of that population fell within our primary target market, or 140,000-350,000 people. Thus, we set a target of achieving market penetration of 10% of that population or at least 14,000 GoKo customers. Working backwards from there, the team recommended that GoKo first secure distribution in at least 140 retail locations, as a strong KPI that our target number of customers would be secured before widening our coverage in other geographies.

The long-term plan for GoKo is still a work in progress, as our team continues so power it towards achieving the milestones we set forth in terms of retail locations, sales, habitual customers, and the other KPIs guiding our efforts. Our work over the coming months will determine GoKo’s fate, and whether the entire world will one day live life at the speed of go!