Vita Coco's Influencer Marketing Playbook for Building a Category Leader

Coconut water wasn't always a grocery store staple. Yet, today, Vita Coco stands as the category leader, with impressive year-over-year retail sales growth reaching 33% in recent quarters.

According to their IPO filing, Vita Coco's marketing team has developed what they describe as a "playbook on authentic grassroots brand building and influencer marketing" —  a strategy that has helped them consistently drive consumers into retail stores searching for their products.

This approach makes perfect sense for the coconut water category.

As a product that can't be fundamentally changed (coconut water is coconut water), differentiation must come through branding, positioning, and consumer perception. Influencer marketing excels at building these emotional connections and contextual relevance that traditional advertising often struggles to create.

In this blog, we'll dissect Vita Coco's influencer marketing strategy, examining how they leverage influencer marketing to drive brand awareness, test different positioning messages, and create a community of influencers.

Whether you're in beverages or another category where differentiation is challenging, Vita Coco's approach offers valuable lessons on how to use influencer partnerships to build a distinctive brand in a crowded marketplace.

Re-sharing influencer content and engaging with their content

Most brands know they should reshare influencer content, but few do it effectively. Vita Coco stands out by re-sharing influencer-generated content with their own captions.

While other brands might lazily copy-paste captions or add generic comments like "Check out this creator using our product!" Vita Coco crafts their captions in a way that continues the conversation the creator started.

For example, when someone posted about drinking coconut water for clear skin despite not loving the taste, Vita Coco responded with "We don't care why you drink us as long as you do 😉" - embracing the honest feedback while keeping it aligned with their brand voice (playful).

This approach matters because it transforms what could be a transactional repost into authentic engagement that benefits both parties — the brand gets quality content while the creator feels truly valued, leading to stronger relationships and more organic mentions over time.

They always credit creators properly by tagging them in captions. It makes the creators feel respected, and valued.

Beyond just resharing, Vita Coco actively engages in the comments section of influencer posts. These small gestures that show they're actually interested in their influencer's content.

This engagement strategy builds stronger relationships with creators because:

• It shows the brand values their content enough to comment
• It creates a two-way conversation rather than just extraction of value
• It makes creators feel seen and appreciated, encouraging them to create more content with the product

How to use SARAL to find the best content to re-share

You don't have to scroll through social media for hours to find what your influencers posted that is share-worthy.

SARAL's social listening feature automatically tracks and collects content where your brand is tagged. You can easily spot high-performing posts that would make great ad creatives, good for email creatives, or even for re-sharing. Check it out for yourself.

Taking influencers on trips

Vita Coco understands that creating memorable experiences for their influencers generates far more authentic content than any scripted campaign could. When launching new products or seasonal campaigns, they bring together their most loyal brand advocates for exclusive trips that strengthen relationships and generate natural content.

For their summer campaign, Vita Coco organized an exclusive weekend retreat in the Hamptons, inviting select content creators to experience the brand in a relaxed, upscale setting.

Instead of getting a single sponsored post from each influencer, the trip generated multiple posts from each attendee – both during and after the event – creating a sustained wave of content rather than a one-time promotional push.

Influencers were encouraged to enjoy themselves and document authentic moments throughout the weekend, from beach activities to social gatherings.

But these gatherings offer benefits beyond just content creation:

• Building community: When influencers connect with each other, they form relationships that strengthen the overall brand ecosystem. These connections often lead to collaborative content and cross-promotion beyond what the brand originally planned.
• Briefing influencers: These trips provide the perfect setting to educate creators about new products, brand positioning, and upcoming influencer campaigns in a way that feels conversational rather than corporate.
• Getting ideas and feedback: Brands use these gatherings to collect invaluable feedback directly from people who understand both the product and audience. Influencers often spot opportunities and trends before they hit the mainstream.

Not every brand has the budget to fly influencers to exclusive destinations, but there are accessible alternatives that can achieve similar results:

1. Local experiences: Host a dinner, workshop, or activity day in your city that brings together local influencers.
2. Virtual retreats: Create digital experiences where you send product kits to influencers and bring them together online for exclusive sessions.
3. Behind-the-scenes access: Invite creators to your headquarters or production facility for a unique look at how your products are made.
4. Pop-up events: Organize temporary brand experiences during relevant local events where influencers can gather and create content.

The key is creating a space where influencers feel valued as more than just content creators — they're treated as partners who contribute to the brand's development. When influencers feel this level of involvement, their promotion becomes more authentic.

Driving key positioning messages

Coconut water faces a fundamental marketing challenge: it's a commodity product that can't be changed much from its natural state. Coconut water from one brand is chemically similar to coconut water from another.

This gives Vita Coco limited options for making their product truly different from competitors on a functional level. They need to focus intensely on positioning — how consumers perceive and understand their product compared to alternatives.

Vita Coco cleverly solved this problem by partnering with influencers to spread different value propositions for the same product. They identified distinct benefit categories that would appeal to different consumer segments.

Some influencers promote Vita Coco as an essential ingredient for clear, glowing skin, integrating it into beauty routines and smoothie recipes with tags like #clearskin and #glowingskin.

Wellness creators market the product as an "adrenal mocktail" that balances cortisol levels and supports hormone regulation, appealing to health-conscious consumers.

Lifestyle influencers position Vita Coco as the ultimate hangover solution, creating a practical use case for younger demographics.

By outsourcing these specialized messages to relevant influencers rather than making broad claims themselves, Vita Coco gains credibility they couldn't achieve through traditional advertising.

When a wellness expert talks about cortisol balance or a beauty influencer shares their skin-clearing routine, the audience is more likely to believe these benefits than if they came directly from the brand. People trust recommendations from individuals they follow, especially when those individuals have established expertise in specific areas.

How to find the right influencers for your brand?

You can find the ideal influencers for your brand with tools like SARAL. Our discovery tools help you identify influencers whose audience demographics match your target customers.

Our Chrome extension even lets you quickly evaluate engagement quality and other influencer metrics before reaching out, so you don't waste time on influencers whose followers won't connect with your brand. Talk to us and see if SARAL is the right platform for you.

Brand awareness campaign

Social media marketing isn't always about driving immediate sales, or getting dollar-to-dollar ROI. When a brand has sufficient cashflow, investing in pure brand awareness campaigns can become a strategic priority for long-term growth.

Vita Coco shows this perfectly with their pronunciation campaign.

They launched an entire campaign centered around one simple question: how do you pronounce their brand name? With the hashtag #howdoyouvitacoco, they collaborated with multiple influencers to spark a playful "debate" about pronunciation.

This campaign had nothing to do with product benefits or driving direct sales. It was purely about getting people talking about the brand.

What makes this approach smart is simple:

1. It created a low-stakes, entertaining conversation that encouraged engagement
2. It subtly addressed a potential barrier (people being unsure how to pronounce the brand when ordering)
3. It increased brand recall by getting viewers to mentally repeat the name "Vita Coco" multiple times

Each creator put their own personality into the content while sticking to the central pronunciation theme. The campaign generated engagement not just through views but through comment sections filled with people sharing their own pronunciation preferences.

Should smaller or medium-sized brands attempt similar awareness campaigns?

The honest answer is: it depends on your growth stage.

Pure brand awareness plays typically work best when:

1. You've already established product-market fit
2. You have sufficient cashflow to experiment beyond direct-response marketing
3. You're facing a specific brand challenge (like pronunciation confusion) that needs addressing

For smaller brands with limited budgets, focusing on campaigns that drive both awareness AND conversion usually makes more financial sense.

However, don't shy away from experimentation if you have the resources. Even smaller brands can allocate a portion of their marketing budget (perhaps 10-20%) to test pure awareness campaigns if they believe it addresses a specific barrier to growth.

The key takeaway from Vita Coco's approach is that sometimes marketing needs to step back from constantly selling product benefits and instead focus on making the brand itself more familiar, approachable, and memorable in consumers' minds.

Building your own influencer marketing success story

The hard part for most brands isn't knowing what to do. It's actually doing it efficiently when working with dozens or hundreds of influencers. Spreadsheets get messy, emails get missed, and tracking results becomes a headache.

This is why having the right tools matters. When you're ready to grow your influencer program beyond a few partnerships, you need a system that keeps everything in one place.

SARAL exists for this exact reason.

It's the backbone that lets you focus on the creative, the strategy, the relationships—not the spreadsheet hell that comes with managing dozens of creator partnerships manually.

Whether you're just starting with influencer marketing or trying to level up like Vita Coco, see how it works. Hop on a quick demo with our team. We'll show you exactly how brands like Vita Coco build influencer machines that drive consistent growth, and how your brand can do the same with the right tools in place.

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