Yes we have the first ever social drink! And who else than Vitamin Water would be the brand to create a drink socially. The new drink is called connect and is the result of a competition run on Vitaminwater’s Facebook page. Consumers were invited to design their own flavors. They could do this by voting on the most talked about flavors or make a flavor themselves by combining several others and putting that one up for votes. The new flavor is a black cherry-lime combination. The packaging of the connect vitamin water is also a tribute to facebook. It carries the Facebook logo ad descriptive text, using references to untagging, friend requests and photo stalking. One of the people who helped in creating the connected flavor was also granted a grant price of $5.000.

              The new connected Vitamin water flavor

So basically a good sample of marketing as a service. You can create you very own flavor. But the other side is much clearer of course. Using the consumer as a resource. Coca-Cola, who bought Vitamin water from Glaceau in 2007, not only gets free market research but also directions on the implementation of that research in combination with loads of exposure. So you see R&D, marketing and advertising is getting very closely related today. As it should be of course. Although I don’t think any R&D department would be very happy with this job of monkey see monkey do.

Steve Nash as the Vitamin water endorser