Bestie Bottles

Marketing case study

When Asobu was founded in 1998, it was a family-owned business with an ambitious vision to eliminate single-use plastics. In the 2010s, it evolved into an established brand known for creating one-of-a-kind drinkware that sparks conversation. By the time their team approached EMB in the 2020s, Asobu was ready to step into their collectible bottle era—and they wanted us, as the marketing agency that launched Squishmallows, to be their partner.

Or, rather, to be their new business Bestie. 😉

The challenge

How do you make water bottles the next must-have item among —and do it all within four months? That’s the challenge the Asobu team faced; they had great products and great ideas but lacked the marketing strategy to penetrate a new market. Like any company, their primary focus was sales, but as a new product in a crowded industry, they had to take a step back to build new relationships. (The “if you build it, they will come” strategy hasn’t worked for a while!)

However, we were entranced by the client’s novelty product and excited by the novelty of the client’s marketing challenges, so we said “game on” and immediately got to work.

The services

Digital Mindmap

Creative Mindmap

Roadmap

Strategy

Branding & identity

Social Media

Influencers

Public relations

Email marketing

The Results

Asobu had high hopes and a low budget, but our team was able to develop a plan of success by kicking things off with our Discovery Phase. Being efficient and strategic was the name of the game. As an agency with experience in the Kids & Toys sector, we leveraged our industry experience and market research to build buyer personas for adults and personality profiles for Gen Alpha faster than you could say “skibidi.”

After we got our hands on the new water bottles, we designed a new logo and icons, built a brand book, set up new social channels and established KPIs to create an identity that resonated with parents and was irresistible to kids (and kids at heart). We dove deep into character creation, giving each bottle its own personality, complete with a name, traits, backstories, likes and dislikes, and hobbies. We even paired up water bottle characters and wrote about how they first met. It was the most fun our team had in a while!

From there, we got started on content marketing with organic social. Through messaging and imagery testing, we quickly uncovered what the target audience liked, and from there built a comprehensive social campaign.

Organic is great, but it can only get you so far, so we immediately moved into paid social, resulting in an explosive growth. Organically elevating a social channel’s engagement by 330.4% in 18 days doesn’t normally happen, but this wasn’t our first CPG rodeo. Our social ad strategy achieved a 1.3 million reach, 2.5 million impressions, 4,866 new IG followers and 333 bottles sold, all while maintaining a $0.35 cost-per-click (CPC) on average. Not bad for limited time and budget, right?

We’re always thirsty for the next cool consumer brand. You must have heard about our work with Squishamallow by now, right? No? Tsk, tsk. Well, there’s no better time than the present to read how we took this brand from 0 to 60—and then to exit!

Check out Squishmallows