Nestea Plunge Makes A Comeback To Revitalize The Tea Brand

via Forbes

After years of declining market share, Nestea is trying to make a comeback now that it is under the leadership of Nestle Waters which regained stewardship of the brand from Coca-Cola last year. Nestle Waters, which also has Sweet Lea Tea and Tradewinds in its portfolio, plans to restore Nestea to a leadership position in the high-volume mass-market segment of the ready-to-drink category to compete with Lipton and Arizona. While Nestea has high awareness, it lags significantly in purchase consideration according to Rick Tanner, VP of Marketing for Nestle Waters. I recently had a conversation with Tanner about the revitalization plan and the reasoning behind resurrecting The Plunge as the communications platform for the brand.

Ellett: You’ve been leading the water portfolio for about a year and a half. Where does Nestea fit into your priorities?

Tanner: Nestle Waters started as an importer way back. We had CEO Kim Jeffrey who led this company through the scaling into the water category by acquiring all of these regional spring brands. Ozarka is your spring brand [in Texas] at the moment. But we have six regional spring brands that make up several billion dollars in business. We have import brands: Perrier and San Pellegrino. We acquired two tea brands about a year and a half ago. One is in your backyard: Sweet Leaf, built in Austin. Everyone in Austin loves Sweet Leaf.

Ellett: A hometown hero.

Tanner: That’s right. When the worldwide relationship with Coke was restructured, we picked up Nestea and we put it into the portfolio as well. We believe ready-to-drink tea is a great adjacent category to bottled water and we think we can do a great job in the category. We’re starting with Sweet Leaf, Tradewinds and now Nestea. We think Nestea is going to be the big driver. It’s got 95% awareness but little consideration.

Ellett: Why has water become such a hot category?

Tanner: Water is about to surpass carbonated soft drinks as the largest consumed volume category in the U.S. It’ll probably be another two years before we pass the carbonated soft drinks. Soft drinks have fallen off about 300 million gallons of consumption in the past year and water’s been the recipient of that change. People are moving from the Pepsi Generation to the healthier new generation of bottled water consumption.

Ellett: Tea as a bottled drink has grown quite a bit over the last five years. What’s been the driving force behind that growth?

Tanner: Arizona really redefined the category about 12 years ago and caught Lipton and Nestea sleeping. That was probably the primary driver. We see Arizona topping and an opportunity to recapture the share position Nestea had. It may take a little bit but it’s a powerful brand. This is going to be a great exercise in brand revitalization.

Ellett: Since awareness isn’t your problem what’s the strategy for building consideration to revitalize the brand?

Tanner: It starts with preference throughout all the pieces of the equation. So having the right recipe to ensure we have taste preference versus the key competitors. Whether it’s diet green tea or whether it’s just straight Nestea with lemon, it’s having taste preference.

Then it’s having the right formula in the right channels. What’s it going to take to win with the big guy in Arkansas? What’s it going to take to win with Kroger? What’s it going to take from the retailer’s side? Then once we had that figured out the next step was how to build consideration.

And that basically came back to communication: How do we capture hearts and minds through meaningful relevant emotional communication? We said, “Well, let’s do some exploring here.” But what kept coming back was “The Plunge.” It had such strong equity, particularly with people who were aware of it. But we also found an immediate response with millennials who didn’t have awareness. It was so interesting to see creative copy testing scores from the 80s that hadn’t changed today.

There’s something about “Take the Nestea Plunge” that’s really unrivaled in its delivery of refreshment. There’s a strong restoration component to the plunge that really amped up the notion of what refreshment should be. And that just transcended generations and we couldn’t find a stronger piece of communication than that.

The new commercial we just launched is an updated take on the plunge. It’s close to the original plunge. It provides an additional emotional connection in terms of what refreshment means for today’s consumer. It’s easy telling a brand story when you have these equities at our fingertips with the awareness and the strength of the plunge communications.

Ellett: Since the 80s, how consumers engage with brands and communications has changed dramatically. How is that shifting your marketing mix and the way you’re thinking about communicating now versus before?

Tanner: To me the communication objective is to build consideration. That leads me to deliver my defining message, and the plunge is the defining message. And TV is still a driver to achieve that reach. We’re [limited in the number of] markets we’re going to be in this year, but TV still gets us there. How it’s delivered is heavily digital so there are a lot of pre-rolls on Hulu and other digital services. We’re maintaining that TV investment but we’re also spending in the digital partner space. We’re extending into our owned assets and trying to build earned views through partnerships with Google, mostly YouTube, but other platforms, too. So it’s taking the equity of that commercial and extending it over multiple touch points in a digital space to maximize our reach with our target.

Then the rest becomes activation. As you can imagine there are lots and lots of plunge videos out there. So we expect to do a lot in the space of digital engagement around the plunge and work with key partners such as Facebook, Google and a few others to leverage the Nestle global partnerships we have in the digital and social media space.

We’re excited about it. It really comes down to how much you have to invest. That will play out over time as we build our distribution and we start seeing things take off this summer. We had to rush but I think we have a pretty good mix of offline and online activity to fill that consideration piece. But we’re going to have to do it market by market. We’re kind of east coast, west coast and a couple of retail markets this year, but we expect [our presence] to be much broader next year.