 What's the worst consumer feedback you've ever got? The coconut water tastes like dirty sock water. I haven't had the privilege of tasting it. So Jane Pryor, CMO of Vitacoco, Runa, and ever and ever. You ready to answer some questions? I'm ready. I'm going to start with a personal question. Okay, awesome. Why don't you have a LinkedIn profile picture? I haven't got a great photo, but I have one coming very soon. So what's hard about branding coconut water? Educating people about what coconut water is in the first place. So we spent the last 15 years helping people understand that coconut water is not coconut milk and that's been our biggest obstacle to date. Something else? The taste. Coconut water has a very polarizing taste profile and getting people to understand the benefits and overcome the taste profile has been another big barrier for us. So the campaign's called Impossible to Hate and as someone who came from a copy background this kind of flies in the face of what we'd consider the right way to message something and you stand behind it. 100%. I think that's what makes it special is that it's unexpected and it's not often that a brand uses the word hate in their advertising and I think that's what makes it provocative and super fun and refreshing for consumers for a brand to be this honest about a product. You know, we are saying that coconut water is polarizing and now we have a product that is much more universal and we wanted a really bold campaign to tell that story. It is bold. It's bold, but it's not so meta that people can't get it. I mean it's very clear when you taste the product what we're trying to get at with this message. Clearly the product is impossible to hate. You said it yourself, you're a big fan. So I'll give you this. The advertising creative in me doesn't like it but it's surprisingly truthful given the product. And I think that's again what consumers want from brands. They want to be spoken to honestly and the fact that we can be so self-deprecating in our advertising is a testament to the brand's personality and again it's disruptive and that's what we were going for. Is it working? It's working. It's 100% working. From a brand and communications perspective, people get it. From a buzz perspective, I'm sure you saw our P-gate incident where we broke the internet and we're a trending topic on Twitter which was a huge win for this campaign and the beautiful part about that was when you got to the, you know, when the reporters and consumers asked us why we did that, it was very clear because of, it was so rooted in the campaign idea. So, and then from a sales perspective, the velocity on that item has been off the charts. It's our, by far and away, our best innovation introduction since Pure Coconut Water, so definitely working. Does the decision to create this kind of coconut water come from the marketing division? 100%, yeah, innovation is run by the marketing department. So you run that? Yes. Are you at your core? Are you more of an innovation person wearing a marketing hat or are you more of a marketing person? Marketing person wearing an innovation hat, for sure. What individual PR marketing media, anything in your career, what's been the one thing that's had the most impact at its time? Rihanna, we partnered with Rihanna in 2011 and 2012, right as the brand really started to take off and she set us off on a rocket ship. Was that peak Rihanna as well? It was peak Rihanna, so it was the perfect, it was a confluence of circumstances and the perfect marriage at the perfect time. She was a massive brand fan. We had pictures of her at Gelsons in LA with her arms stacked with coconut water. So we knew it was a super authentic partnership and when we approached her, she was just, like you said, on the way up in her career and she blew up the year that we launched the campaign. So we had this massive celebrity on this seemingly very small brand of the time and it really enabled us to punch above our weight. I presume that was an extremely pricey proposition. No, it wasn't because she got a small amount of cash and a decent chunk of equity. So in the end, she did very well out of the partnership but she worked incredibly hard for it and she took a big risk because we were a very, very small brand at the time and coconut water was a completely unestablished category so she came and she played with us. It was really fun. In hindsight, can you tell me, because that campaign seemed everywhere, how much media do you have to put behind that? Not much at all. I think we spent about a million dollars. That's it? A million and a half. We had no money, we were tiny. We had billboards in New York and LA and we had an incredible amplification through PR. Okay, so let's talk about Ever and Ever. Yes, Ever and Ever is really aimed at telling the story about how special aluminum is in the context of sustainability. So we embarked on this project as we started to think about our overall sustainability initiatives for Vitacoco and realized that there was such an opportunity to drive change in the conventional water isle by providing a product that was much better for the environment than single use plastic water bottles. We knew in order to do that that we had to break through with something very disruptive because canned water is, it's not a thing. Yes, but it will be. We wanted to use the packaging as a vehicle to really tell people that story and tell people why aluminum is so special. I'm sure you don't know this, but 75% of all the aluminum ever produced since 1888 is still in circulation today, thanks to recycling. On the other hand, 91% of plastic has never been recycled. So as a consumer, if you pick up an Ever and Ever and you dispose of it correctly, there's a possibility it can show back up on shelf within 60 days. And we think that's a really, really special story. Hence the brand name. This can can live forever and ever. And again, hence our ambition to really, to be very copy heavy with this packaging and to tell consumers that story. And again, to disrupt the water isle. You know, everything in the water isle is very same. Same category cues. So we knew we had to do something different. Whose idea was it to have the website go on and on and on and on? The agency. Which agency? Interesting development. What part of the brand could still use work? We still think we're getting to know the brand tone. So we've just established our social presence and we're building our audience and we're starting to talk to consumers. And I just think we're finding our voice a little bit. I think they think we still have some work to do. Was the Ever and Ever package when you were designing this brand with Dr. Bronner's ever on that wall? Yes, it was. It was definitely one of the brands in the mood board for Ever and Ever case. What brands do you look up to? I love what Adidas has done recently with Parley. And maybe that's connected to the work that we're doing with Ever and Ever. But I think they've just done an amazing job raising awareness for an issue that is a massive global crisis and people need to be aware of. And I think they've just done a really, really nice job driving a cultural conversation around that and also providing great-looking sneakers that people can buy and sport them. Jane Pryor, thanks for sitting here with me and answering most of the questions. I really appreciate it. I'm Ian Wishingrad and that's another episode of I'm With The Brand.