From Months to Minutes: How We Developed a Brand Experience Strategy in Just Two Days
Transforming an Incomplete Brand Strategy into Clear Direction and a Scalable Execution Roadmap
At a Glance
🏭 INDUSTRY: FMCG (Beverages)
👥 PARTICIPANTS: 27 from global & local brand teams, agencies, creators, and platforms
🧠 CHALLENGE: Generate and prioritise new experience-led ideas from an existing brand platform
🎯 REASON: Fuel future activations through structured co-creation and open exploration
🗓️ DURATION: Two days in London
Intro
Two days. That’s all it took to turn a half-baked strategy into a clear creative direction and a pipeline of activation-ready ideas. The sprint moved fast, not because we rushed it, but because we came prepared. It was built on thorough pre-work, focused thinking, and a team eager to take action.
In November 2024, we worked with a global beverage brand to do in two days what often drags out for months: bring a half-baked platform into focus, align global and regional teams, and build a pipeline of bold, experience-led ideas that are ready to scale.
What made it work? A concentrated challenge, the right creative foundation, and 27 people from global and regional teams coming together to move fast and make it count.
The Challenge
The brand had a clear ambition: to drive awareness, trial, and loyalty around a new product platform with a focus on sensorial uplift and emotional resonance. The brief was to move quickly from “strategy on paper” to something that could spark ideas, stretch across touchpoints, and flex for different markets.
But while the global strategy was in place, it lacked an entry point. Teams across markets were eager to activate but didn’t have the creative foundation to build from.
What We Did
Ahead of the sprint, we worked closely with the brand’s agency to refine the strategic direction, a process that led to two distinct creative routes.
These routes were brought into Day 1, where 27 participants from global and regional teams, agencies, media, creative tech, and enabling functions came together. The day kicked off with structured exercises designed to pressure-test the two routes and identify the most fertile ground for creative ideation. Both had merit, but one stood out. It was chosen for its emotional relevance, cultural fit, and creative flexibility, setting the creative direction for everything that followed.
Day 2 shifted into ideation mode. Teams worked across PR, social, trial, and in-store formats to shape bold, experience-led ideas. Regional participants played a key role in grounding ideas in local reality, helping avoid the all-too-common pitfall of global ideas that don’t translate. The strongest concepts were refined in real time, with live feedback and convergence.
A senior global sponsor then reviewed the outputs, gave final feedback, and approved the shortlist for immediate next steps. Enabling functions supported feasibility checks throughout, ensuring ideas remained both ambitious and executable.
The Outcome
By the end of the sprint, the team had developed over two dozen ideas. Eight were prioritised, and four were taken into early prototyping, ready to move into production the following week. A rollout roadmap was created with clear timelines, owners, and activation windows, aligning both global intent and regional execution.
Beyond the ideas, the sprint created energy, alignment, and a renewed sense of creative confidence across global and regional teams. All outputs were documented and shared internally, providing the network a fresh, relevant pipeline to activate and build upon.
Like a juice bar where everyone’s in it, blending, a sprint can feel messy. But something delicious always comes out in the end.