The Vita Coco Company Validates Product Regionality with Audiences by Peel

The Vita Coco Company, Inc. was co-founded in 2004 by Michael Kirban and Ira Liran. Pioneers in the functional beverage category, The Vita Coco Company’s brands include the leading coconut water, Vita Coco; clean energy drink, Runa; sustainable enhanced water, Ever & Ever; and protein-infused water, PWR LIFT. With its ability to harness the power of people and plants, and balance purpose and profit, The Vita Coco Company has created a modern beverage platform built for current and future generations.

With more data than ever, and a thirst for growth with their brands, they came to Peel for a better understanding of their customer behavior, product performance, and upgraded reporting for their entire suite of stakeholders.

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Meeting Peel:

The Vita Coco Team met Peel in November of 2021 via our partnership with Lunar Solar Group, bringing one of their other brands, PWR LIFT, with them in October of the following year. Primarily looking to gain a deeper understanding of their customer base and their respective purchasing behaviors, they came in with several high-level questions in mind - most notably, “who is buying what,” and “how do we test our hypotheses?” 

Additionally, as a stalwart and industry-leader in the world of coconut water since 2003, Vita Coco was already aware that, generally speaking, coconut water has traditionally been more popular on the coasts than inland areas. With that in mind, and having already completed indexing of several different product lines on their own, they were very curious as to how Peel could help them gain additional insights into their data.

“We use Peel Insights, particularly the weekly dashboard and daily tracking emails, to keep a close pulse on the business. The dashboard clearly presents daily, weekly, and monthly trends in a way that is easily digestible and actionable.”

- Jane Prior, CMO

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Analysis They Needed:

After meeting with the Vita Coco Team, we learned that their preferred way of looking at trends was through the scope of week over week (WoW) reporting; however, they also valued the ability to zoom out and understand the broader, less granular picture, analyzing month over month (MoM) and year over year (YoY) reporting as well. The capabilities of Peel’s date range sorting feature within dashboards allowed for them to easily alternate between WoW, MoM, and YoY reporting with the simple click of a button and gave them the flexibility they were looking for.  

Vita Coco and PWR LIFT use their 3PL/DTC site as fulfillment for both customer service and influencer seeding. They found that this was inflating their order numbers, deflating their AOV and impacting other key KPIS. They came to Peel looking to clean up their data and get a more accurate read on their performance.  Peel was able to assist via our in-house data cleaning services. By removing specific promotional discount codes and $0 sales from their reporting, they were able to get a better understanding of customer purchasing behaviors and dig into the various metrics and features at their disposal more effectively.

One of the most impactful and empowering features they used to find answers and highlight insights was Peel’s Audiences feature, which allows for users to create and analyze hyper-segmented groups of customers that match a specific criteria (AOV greater than $100, 2+ orders in 2021, purchased a specific product 3+ times, etc) and then target these Audiences in campaigns.  

In 2022, Vita Coco started a round of marketing initiatives to drive awareness of coconut water and grow the category in the Midwest, Southwest, and South East. The map feature within Audiences enabled Vita Coco to track their progress against the overall goal and test their hypotheses on the popularity of certain SKUs within specific US regions. Creating Audiences focused around isolating specific flavors, variants, subscriber statuses, and SKU’s, as well as leveraging the map, did more than just allow them to see trends, it allowed them to validate and confirm that what they were doing was working. 

“Working with both Peel Analytics and their team has opened a world of data that we previously did not have access to. It has given us the ability to quickly validate a range of hypotheses. We have used the data to learn more about our customers, enabling optimization of our media and website. One recent example is using Audiences to understand that Vita Coco’s Pineapple SKU was underperforming on the site vs in-person. This led to us reviewing our product hierarchy, creating a “shop all” product page, and launching a workflow to increase shoppability.” - Erica Ruzhinsky, Senior Manager, Growth Marketing