Building Brand Equity through the Gatorade Gx Innovation
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Gatorade and Smart Design’s ongoing collaboration on the Gx Sports Fuel Platform has been a 3-year journey from vision to market launch, and continues to play a key role in evolving and enhancing the brand’s reputation from its origin as a sports beverage, to Sports Fuel Company.
The Gx roll-out began in 2014 with the Brazilian National Football team in preparation for the World Cup. Leveraging a unique innovation method that relies heavily on in-market piloting in live sporting environments, Gatorade brought athletes into the product journey from the beginning. This open approach gave users enormous transparency into the process, and critical learnings that enabled the product and service offerings to be optimized faster – taking advantage of emerging technology advancements and rich new insights from Gatorade’s Sports Science Institute (GSSI), as they became available.
Simultaneously, Gatorade used large-scale press and advertising efforts at events such as the Super Bowl and NBA All-Star game as one of the parallel streams to pilot the service offering, and then refine based on feedback from experts, the public, and end users. Asking the marketplace for their reaction synergistically, as it was being piloted with the end users, is a unique influencer marketing model that has seen Gatorade build enormous brand equity along the path the launch.
A direct-to-consumer retail offering will be launched in late 2017, including personalized bottles and Gx formula pods. This e-commerce channel is poised to deliver a new revenue stream – one that is founded on market demand generated via the unique and open marketing approach.
Read the full article in Forbes, as we uncover the key marketing and innovation lessons fueling the success of Gatorade Gx.