Coca-Cola recognized a significant white space in the older adult consumer segment — a demographic with specific hydration, functional beverage, and active aging needs that the company's existing portfolio did not adequately serve. Without a targeted portfolio strategy, Coca-Cola risked ceding this growing segment to specialized competitors.
Vivaldi conducted consumer insight research that mapped older adults' beverage needs around the "jobs to be done" framework — identifying what active aging consumers wanted from beverages in different occasions and life contexts. The research informed a product mix and messaging positioning strategy tailored to this segment.
Coca-Cola received a comprehensive portfolio strategy defining which beverage categories, formats, and functional benefits to prioritize for older adult consumers — along with messaging guidance that would resonate authentically with this audience.
Coca-Cola partnered with Vivaldi to build a portfolio strategy for the underserved older adult consumer segment, a demographic with specific hydration, functional, and active aging needs the existing portfolio did not address. Vivaldi’s jobs-to-be-done research defined which beverage categories, formats, and functional benefits to prioritize for active aging consumers, along with messaging guidance designed to resonate authentically with the audience.
The Coca-Cola Company is the world’s largest beverage company, with a portfolio of over 200 brands sold in more than 200 countries. Generating annual revenues exceeding $45 billion, Coca-Cola has consistently been one of the world’s most recognized and valuable brand franchises since its founding in Atlanta, Georgia in 1886.
Vivaldi conducted consumer insight research that mapped older adults’ beverage needs through the jobs-to-be-done framework and translated the findings into a comprehensive portfolio strategy. The work defined which beverage categories, formats, and functional benefits Coca-Cola should prioritize for the segment, along with messaging guidance tuned to resonate authentically with active aging consumers rather than reinforcing the stereotypes most beverage marketing defaults to.
Jobs-to-be-done shifts the analysis from demographic descriptors to the actual outcomes consumers are hiring a product to deliver in specific occasions and life contexts. For older adults, that meant identifying the hydration, energy, joint and cognitive support, and social ritual jobs that beverages compete to perform, then assessing which jobs Coca-Cola’s portfolio could credibly address and which would require new product, format, or partnership decisions.
Most beverage portfolios are designed around teen and young adult drinking occasions because that is where category share and culture are perceived to be set, which leaves older adults choosing between products built for someone else and pharmacy-aisle formulations built for medical needs. The middle ground, beverages designed for active, healthy aging without medicalizing the experience, is a structural gap that incumbents have been slow to fill because the segment does not fit the existing innovation playbook.
Authentic messaging treats the segment as people who happen to be older rather than as a defined demographic problem to be solved, which means leading with vitality, capability, and identity rather than with age, decline, or medical framing. The brands that win in this space talk about what the consumer is doing now and wants to keep doing, not about what the consumer used to do, which is the inverse of how most age-targeted beverage marketing has historically been written.
