Frucor Suntory is launching a new variant of its isotonic sports drink brand with the help of Sydney's Saltmine Design Group.
In time for summer, Frucor Suntory will introduce the new flavour of Lemon Squash – aka 'The Big Squash' – under the Maximus brand.
Maximus was first to market with a large one-litre bottle size, and saw success with ‘The Big O’, its orange juice flavour with 20 per cent real orange juice.
‘The Big Squash’ builds on this.
It contains 10 per cent real lemon juice, and it will extend the range’s flavour portfolio to allow for new drinking occasions.
Saltmine designed the new label to fit with the rest of the range, but it has a distinctive lemon peel texture throughout the yellow variant colour.
Saltmine also developed the shopper marketing campaign for the launch of the new variety.
The brief was to follow the simple, straight-up format of previous Maximus campaigns but to bring out more refreshment and dialling up the ‘real lemon’ ingredient.
The final visual features the Lemon Squash 1L bottle with a refreshing lemon splash exploding out from the bottle.
Category shake-up
The Maximus brand, created by Frucor Suntory in conjunction with Saltmine Design Group, launched in 2013 and proceeded to shake up the Australian isotonic sports drink category.
Speaking at Future Unpacked, the Food & Drink Business and PKN LIVE event held in Sydney last month, Frucor Suntory MD Mark Wiedermann said Maximus was launched with a focus on individual drinkers, as opposed to marketing to an entire demographic of consumers in one fell swoop.
Through a partnership with Coles Express, the company had the drink tested at the country's top 100 small stores as though it was a national launch at its larger stores.
“We wanted to do small things but tell big stories,” Wiedermann said.
“We monitored the results as though we had sold it in every retailer.”
Within six weeks, Maximus held 15 per cent of the sports drink category. Prior to this, only two brands made up 94 per cent of the vertical.
