The Challenge

A legacy coffee brand, long dominant in Southern India, was losing traction in its stronghold and struggling to penetrate non-traditional markets in the North. The brand needed to re-establish relevance in the South while building fresh equity among emerging consumers in other regions. The key was to uncover what the brand truly stood for in consumers’ memories and emotions—and whether it had permission to evolve into a more premium, contemporary avatar.

Our Approach

We designed a layered equity exploration anchored in System 1 and System 2 thinking:

• System1 (Brand Imprint Mapping):

We used digital tools and implicit techniques like moodboarding, gaze tracing, and emotional response heatmaps to uncover subconscious brand codes and emotional hotspots across packs and creatives—without over-moderation.

• System 2 (Diagnostic Decoding):

Through extended mini-groups, brand decoding workshops, and cultural narrative mapping, we traced where and why the brand’s equity was weakening or evolving—especially against local and premium competition.

• Sensory Lab Pilot:

As a parallel innovation, we conducted a pilot of a sensory testing lab using real beverage consumption moments coupled with facial coding to decode instinctive delight, familiarity, or hesitation—marking our first hybrid emotional-sensory read on consumption experience.

The Impact

The study revealed distinct cultural memory trails for coffee—grounded in family rituals and homegrown pride in the South, and marked by modern, aspirational discovery in the North. The brand’s equity was rooted in comfort and authenticity, but it lacked the signals of expertise and aspiration needed to compete with premium offerings.

Our work unlocked:

• A sharpened map of equity drivers and detractors across regional and cultural cohorts.

• A coded repository of brand imprints and emotional memory cues to inform future communication.

• Guidance on packaging, varianting, and storytelling that could bridge traditional memory with modern coffee culture.

Most importantly, the sensory-emotion pilot laid the foundation for a future-facing method of testing brand interventions—not just through words, but through felt experience.