For over 20 years, Vita Coco has been a pioneer and household name in the coconut water category across the United States. Operating within a fast-moving and highly competitive beverage market, the brand has continually evolved to capture varied consumer occasions—from wellness and hangover remedies to smoothie ingredients and daily hydration routines.
As the coconut water category matured, Vita Coco’s insights leadership recognized the need to go beyond high-level metrics like general brand awareness, consideration, and purchase intent to really drive brand growth through guided marketing efforts, targeted campaigns, and proactive market expansion.
To move from reactive analysis to proactive growth, Vita Coco partnered with quantilope’s Consumer Intelligence Platform to implement Better Brand Health Tracking (BBHT). Grounded in the scientifically validated research of Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk (How Brands Grow and Better Brand Health), Vita Coco’s adoption of the approach granted them real-time visibility into Category Entry Points (CEPs) and Mental Availability metrics. These insights allow the brand to quickly turn consumer triggers into measurable commercial success.
Key Takeaways:
- Diving deeper: Vita Coco replaced static brand funnel scorecards with dynamic Category Entry Point (CEP) mapping, pinpointing precise consumer triggers across diverse usage occasions.
- Speed and efficiency: Transitioning to quantilope’s automated platform slashed study turnaround times, giving the team the agility to adjust tracking parameters on the fly.
- Validating strategic decisions: BBHT metrics helped the Vita Coco team confirm their hunch that consumers are thinking of coconut water for wellness moments, not athletic performance: a key whitespace opportunity.
- Collaboration and activation: The insights team aligned cross-functional stakeholders around a shared Mental Availability framework, powering campaigns like "Active Hydration" and testing emerging cultural trends (such as GLP-1 lifestyle impacts) in real time.
Table of Contents:
- Understanding the 'why' behind category decisions
- Mapping Category Entry Points (CEPs)
- Validating the 'Active Hydration' campaign
- Tracking cultural trends & media impact in real time
- Turning consumer insights into a commercial growth engine
Understanding the 'why' behind category decisions
For established CPG brands, relying solely on broad awareness metrics can create a false sense of security. Near-universal awareness confirms brand recognition, but it fails to answer why or when a consumer chooses one beverage over another at the store.
Vita Coco recognized that driving continuous growth required moving beyond funnel metrics to understand the psychological hooks that prompt category entry.
"We’ve historically evaluated our brand through the standard metrics of awareness, consideration, and purchase intent. While the information was interesting, we found that it wasn't actually driving a lot of our decisions and actions. It was much more for validation... at a high level, it wasn't really the granular level of detail that we were looking for to help drive the business forward."
— Savita Kharbas, Senior Director of Category and Consumer Insights at Vita Coco (on stage with quantilope at Quirk’s NY 2026)
With the opportunity to adopt the Better Brand Health framework, Savita recalls:
“The team was really excited. The marketing team was feeling like the traditional brand funnel was nice to have but we were missing something that really connected the dots between what we were seeing happen in real life and what we were getting via tracking.”
Mapping Category Entry Points (CEPs)
To unlock deeper consumer motivations with their new approach, Vita Coco and quantilope began by identifying Category Entry Points (CEPs)—the internal cues, moods, and buying occasions that trigger consumer demand for coconut water.
Prior to launching their full-scale tracker, quantilope helped facilitate a cross-functional workshop with Vita Coco’s brand and insights teams. This pre-study alignment mapped out potential consumption occasions, followed by a preliminary survey to determine what resonated most with buyers. Using quantilope’s Mental Advantage analysis, Vita Coco could visualize where their brand held an advantage, where competitors dominated, and where untapped market potential existed.
"The primary thing we were interested in was the customizability and specificity of Better Brand Health tracking... Coconut water is a unique beverage in that you can drink it as a standalone product or as an ingredient for a variety of reasons. There are so many different ways that people were entering the brand and category that we weren't able to get to that level of detail with traditional brand tracking metrics."
— Savita Kharbas, Senior Director of Category and Consumer Insights at Vita Coco
Validating the 'Active Hydration' campaign
Tracking Mental Availability has played an integral part in Vita Coco’s recent “Active Hydration" campaign. They had a hunch (and confirmed through their tracker) that consumers widely recognized coconut water as a natural wellness drink but lacked connections related to athletic performance.
While wellness entry points related to feeling healthy, boosting an immune system, or achieving glowing skin are important buying triggers for coconut water, the team at Vita Coco recognized a key white space opportunity to educate consumers on the performance efficacy of the beverage.
"In general, coconut water is really well known as more of a wellness beverage... but there is a real gap for the whole category on this connection to performance. The Active Hydration campaign is something that we're using our BBHT for to really help us monitor our progress on as we're aiming to close this white space opportunity and convert more drinkers to Vita Coco via these active moments."
— Savita Kharbas, Senior Director of Category and Consumer Insights at Vita Coco
Tracking cultural trends & media impact in real time
In competitive CPG categories, waiting months for tracking results means missing key cultural shifts. When macro consumer shifts emerge—such as lifestyle changes stemming from GLP-1 medications or rising interest in "debloating" functional drinks—Vita Coco needs a way to adapt quickly, while those shifts are still happening in the market.
quantilope’s platform provides real-time access to data, with the flexibility to change and customize a study as needed without disrupting long-term tracking continuity.
Savita’s advice for other insights and research professionals considering a new approach to tracking is to:
"Focus on doing the work that will be actionable for your team... I think [BBHT] is a great way to work smarter and make sure that the work you're doing is really able to translate to actions, specifically commercial impact for the organization."
— Savita Kharbas, Senior Director of Category and Consumer Insights at Vita Coco
Turning consumer insights into a commercial growth engine
By replacing static brand funnels with quantilope’s automated Better Brand Health Tracking approach, Vita Coco transformed its insights division into an ongoing engine for commercial growth. Rooted in Mental Availability metrics and Category Entry Points, this partnership provides Vita Coco with the speed, customizability, and precision needed to capture new consumer occasions, validate media campaigns, and protect its market leadership.
