Inside Vita Coco’s ‘super fluid,’ organic-first social strategy

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In the last month, coconut-water brand Vita Coco hit 1 million TikTok followers, marking a significant social milestone for the brand, which has 677,000 followers on Facebook and 137,000 followers on Instagram. Jane Prior, CMO of Vita Coco, attributes much of the brand’s success on TikTok to its playful tone and community-first approach.

“We’ve always had this perspective that consumers want authenticity, not ads,” she said. “They want to hear from real people.”

That’s especially evident in the brand’s latest viral moment on TikTok with creator Romeo Bingham, who first gained traction online after posting a made-up Dr Pepper jingle that was eventually used in one of the brand’s TV ads. Tapping Bingham to create a Vita Coco jingle and star in its online Super Bowl campaign ultimately helped the brand amass 130,000 new TikTok followers in the span of a month and reach 1 million followers and drove Google searches for the brand to a four-year high.

Vita Coco plans some branded campaigns in advance, Prior said, but it’s increasingly focused on finding quicker ways to inject the brand into cultural conversations as it looks to further increase household penetration.

“That’s the beautiful part, and the need for fluency in social,” Prior said. “It’s often the organic campaigns that generate the most value.”

Hydration nation

In her 17 years on Vita Coco’s marketing team, Prior has watched the brand transition from a startup to a global, public company, which has required plenty of pivots as new platforms and strategies emerged. Still, she said, some strategies have remained the same, like the brand’s use of mascots and community-led marketing to help boost brand awareness.

In the early days, community-led marketing largely meant seeding coconut water to celebrities and hoping they would name-drop the product in Us Weekly’s “What’s in my bag?” section or carry a bottle on a movie set, Prior said. Today, that focus has shifted to getting customers to post their Vita Coco on social media.

“It’s the same strategy that we had back in the day, just applied to a different day and time on different platforms,” she said.

Anchoring Vita Coco’s approach to TikTok is the marketing team’s commitment to responding to and engaging with the community, Prior said. Quick responsiveness helped contribute to the brand’s recent success with Bingham, as Vita Coco’s reply to that video was the first step in the brand’s own viral moment with them. Bingham’s video—in which they sing how the brand’s product is “so dang delicioso”—has racked up nearly 40 million views since it was posted in January.

“I don’t think we could have anticipated the level of engagement and impressions from that partnership,” Prior said.

Vita Coco has repurposed and reposted the jingle multiple times, and Prior said people aren’t just engaging—they’re also expressing intent to purchase at a level she hasn’t seen before. “If you look at the sentiment in the comments…it’s like, ‘I’m headed to Walmart right now to buy this product,’” she said.

On Sunday, the brand sent Bingham to the Super Bowl with a custom “Delicioso” jersey as a nod to the jingle, and the video of them wearing it has so far racked up more than 5.7 million views and 408,000 likes on TikTok. Another, which shows Bingham in front of a digital billboard with the jingle’s lyrics, has more than 3.2 million views and 242,000 likes. In total, Vita Coco received more than 245 million cumulative impressions from the campaign, according to the company.

Reply guy?

Vita Coco’s reply-all strategy goes beyond the comments section. Last year, the brand had one of its most successful marketing moments ever when it responded to the outrage over Poppi’s creator vending machine Super Bowl campaign with a pop-up event in Washington Square Park, where the brand labeled a mobile cart as a vending machine and handed out samples. Prior said the pop-up was organized in a single day, and drove both owned social engagement and UGC, she said.

Vita Coco also has a mascot named Coco Man, a walking coconut-water carton that often shows up on the brand’s socials. Prior said having a mascot has allowed Vita Coco to “jump into conversations with other mascots.” When Duolingo killed its owl mascot last year, Coco Man joined in on the mourning and overall conversation, which led to some of the brand’s most-viewed posts. Prior noted that Coco Man has also helped personify the brand in a way that complements its casual tone in the comments section, which is meant to feel human.

Prior said Vita Coco’s in-house social and growth teams meet each month to assess what’s getting the most engagement and are in constant communication with customers. Those teams, she said, are the reason for the brand’s success.

“There’s no time…that they won’t respond to a comment or respond to a consumer or jump on an opportunity or spot a cultural trend,” Prior said. “They’re pretty much always on.”

Overall, Prior said Vita Coco’s social strategy is “not static, it’s super fluid, and we’re always learning,” and this year, she hopes to experiment more with TikTok Shop and TikTok Live. Given recent uncertainty with the platform, she said the social and growth teams are prepared to pivot to YouTube Shorts if necessary, but they remain hopeful that the brand’s biggest platform will continue to operate—and perform—as usual.

As the team waits for the next opportune social moment, Prior said it’s important to remain ready, yet level-headed.

“We sell coconuts, not pacemakers,” she said. “We really don’t take ourselves too seriously.”