Liquid Water Enhancers: Minute Maid catching Mio?
As the first liquid water enhancer to hit the mass market, Mio is worth about $200m in the US, but Affinnova warns that smart packaging designs mean Minute Maid and Kool-Aid are catching up.
Despite leading the category in key design terms conversion and standout, the analysts said Mio’s packaging hurt the brand across numerous personality traits – with negative scores for aspects such as ‘healthy’, ‘natural’ and ‘wholesome’, ‘fresh’, ‘positive’ and ‘flavorful’.
By contrast, Coca-Cola’s Minute Maid drops launched in early 2014 scooped positives across for all these assessed characteristics, and topped the category in brand equity for ‘natural’, ‘wholesome’, ‘fresh’, ‘flavorful’ and ‘positive’.
Despite the advantage of newness Affinnova sees Minute Maid drops as Mio’s strongest challenger.
Kraft stable-mate Kool-Aid also scored well, with consumers seeing the packaging design as ‘energetic’, ‘fresh’, ‘positive’ and ‘bright’.
Intriguingly, Affinnova said consumers were highly engaged with and liked images of berries on packaging in the enhancers category, while Arizona’s Skinnygirl enhancer underperformed across all measures, with people finding the brand image (of a thin girl) polarizing.
