Gold Peak Tea celebrates comforts of home with ‘tea shed,’ multichannel push

Dive Brief:

• Coca-Cola brand Gold Peak Real Brewed Tea launched a multichannel campaign this week, according to a company blog post shared with Marketing Dive. The “Comforts of Home” effort features a redesigned look for the brand, a TV commercial, a regional tasting tour and more.
• As part of the initiative, Gold Peak teamed with TV personality Egypt Sherrod to design a “Tea Shed,” a “backyard sanctuary” for drinking Gold Peak Real Brewed Tea. The brand will share Sherrod’s tips and DIY examples on its social channels.
• “The Feeling of Home Tour” will make appearances at events in the Southwest and East Coast, with iced tea samples and an interactive experience around the Gold Peak brand.

Dive Insight:

To boost its Gold Peak Real Brewed Tea brand, Coca-Cola is deploying a variety of techniques in a multichannel campaign. Debuted in 2006 with an iced version launched 2009, the brand is now emphasizing what it says is tea drinkers’ desire for authenticity — in this case, the authentic comforts of home.

The Tea Shed component links the brand with Sherrod, the host of a popular home buying show on HGTV who has nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram. A riff on the home improvement show “He Shed, She Shed” and the “she shed” trend more generally, the Tea Shed push could help Gold Peak reach Sherrod’s fans, as well as other DIYers interested in designing their own home sanctuary.

In addition to the Tea Shed social push, the experiential activation tour turns a standard product tasting into something more interactive and holistic, possibly helping the brand to burnish its “authentic” bona fides.

The new campaign is Coca-Cola’s latest effort to find customers who don’t just drink tea, but embrace the entire lifestyle. In 2017, Coca-Cola targeted ads for Gold Peak based on photos shared on social media. Through image recognition tech, it identified users whose images showed tea in glasses, cans or bottles, either unbranded or made by its competitors.

Gold Peak looks to prove that home is a feeling, not just a place, according to the press release. Similarly, beer brand Stella Artois’ just-announced campaign touts vacation as a state of mind, tying its brand to a feeling about a place that has personal significance with consumers.