The Challenge

As the beverage market fragments across need states, moments, and identity cues, a legacy player sought to understand:

What drives beverage choices for India’s young consumers today—and where do new rituals, emotions, and unmet needs lie?

The task was not just to map consumption—but to decode the emerging semiotics of hydration, indulgence, energy, and care across a rapidly evolving youthscape.

Our Approach

We used a multi-pronged, life-stage-centered exploration combining:

• Embedded ethnographies across metros and midtowns, capturing daily beverage behaviors, transitions, and rituals through journaling, photo triggers, and home audits

• Behavioral recording of ‘beverage clocks’—tracing how hydration, energy, and comfort mapped onto mood, mobility, and digital rhythm

• Expert immersion with youth-facing intermediaries (e.g., creators, nutritionists, café operators) to decode peer-coded norms and emerging desirability signals

• Focused especially on non-meal moments—where Gen Z’s relationship with beverages is most expressive and experimental

What made it unique:

• Treated beverages as emotional technology, not just thirst quenchers

• Blended visual, verbal, and ambient cues to decode subconscious drivers

• Created a category-level view, helping the client reframe whitespace beyond product into occasion, role, and self-expression

The Impact

The work unlocked a rich innovation runway—not by trendspotting, but by mapping lived, layered needs across energy, escape, nourishment, and novelty. It offered both a behavioral model and a cultural compass—now shaping how the brand thinks about formats, tonality, and youth-first rituals.

The approach is now being repurposed for broader category landscaping and whitespace identification across adjacent portfolios.