In pre-campaign testing consumers described Tango as “a total Dad brand” and this perfectly summarised our challenge – having been a youth brand powerhouse in the 90s and 00s, Tango now had a classic aging out problem.

Berry Peachy was a product designed to meet this challenge, but 3 months before launch, market leader Fanta released a similar flavour (WTF3), with significantly higher budgets.

This was a major challenge for Tango – aside from being a preferred brand, salience is a critical driver of category purchase and Fanta’s higher investment presented a major hurdle to delivering this.

As such, we were tasked with engaging Gen Z audiences and particularly, to deliver salience at shelf, to ensure they chose Berry Peachy over WTF3.

We knew the peach emoji could be a shortcut to this but using it ‘straight’ wasn’t an option for a “Dad brand” like Tango…

To create a convincing parody, we would need to introduce the product and brand over time, so we created the MUPPET (Mums and Dads United for the Proper Peach Emoji Treatment) movement as our parody vehicle.

Our approach to content was divided by phases, from the initial ‘prank’, where audiences were to be fooled by our MUPPETS, to a moment of clear ‘parody’, where we brought the audience in on the joke, and finally introducing the product.

We were mindful that the right channel to deliver credibility (Twitter) and organic reach was not a bullseye for our audience, so engaged a social first publishing partner to bridge the gap onto Instagram, the right platform for our audience to encounter "news". This also enabled us to guarantee reach, whilst retaining the credibility of a PR led approach.

Our work began weeks ahead of launch, creating organic MUPPET movement accounts and populating them with content to appear authentic.

We then launched our hero 60” film of a MUPPET protest through the accounts and gave it scale by getting our partner to promote it ‘as if real’.

Vox Pops took the conversation to the street, playing into the sense of a new story breaking.

We gave the conversation a full 24 hours to build before revealing all and introducing a range of partner content, from our ‘peach or bum?’ game to Influencer content to product taste reactions, always focusing on Gen Z entertainment. We repurposed the best performing partner content across wider paid social channels, maximising engaged reach.

We organised a partnership with Deliveroo, enabling anyone who tweeted Tango with a peach emoji to trial the product… Berry Peachy out so quickly this activity had to be paused!

Our activity delivered in spades:

- Total viewing of our 60” film was equivalent to 26 days, despite no paid support behind it

- Our social publisher partner received 81k likes in the first day of the campaign

- In total we reached 21m people in the UK with this activity, a cost per person of 1.2p

- ¾ of people exposed intended to trial Berry Peachy

Berry Peachy:

- Is the Fruit Flavoured Carbonates (FFC) youngest skewing product

- Sales during in our 1 month campaign equalled WTF3 sales for whole of 2022

- The UK’s most popular soft drink NPD in 2022

By committing a quarter of the brand's annual budget to a bold, earned success led campaign we disproportionately contributed to 55% brand value growth, making Tango the fastest growing and second most drunk FFC brand in the UK.