The challenge

Fanta wanted to inject fresh inspiration into its innovation pipeline, with a focus on disruptive ideas for its core audience: teens.

The brand identified two key opportunity areas to explore. The first, Sensory Pleasure, focused on creating new and exciting taste experiences. The second, Collective Fun, explored product and packaging ideas that could inspire social connection and shared experiences.

To unlock new thinking, Fanta needed an innovation approach that could bring together diverse perspectives while staying closely connected to what teens value.

The solution

We designed an iterative innovation approach that combined research, creative inspiration and consumer validation.

• We started by immersing ourselves in the world of teens through secondary research and our NextGen expertise, identifying emerging behaviours, needs and opportunities.
• These insights then inspired a global creative ideation challenge, where creators were invited to imagine new Fanta drinks that would deliver exciting tastes and fun experiences. This generated 112 original ideas, complemented by 28 additional ideas from Fanta’s internal teams.
• The strongest ideas were refined through collaborative ideation and concept-writing workshops with Fanta, transforming initial inspiration into more developed concepts with clear benefits and reasons to believe. Visualisations helped bring the ideas to life, resulting in 21 concepts ready to be tested with teens.
• Finally, 172 teens from Poland and Romania evaluated and further refined the concepts through an online consumer community, ensuring the strongest ideas reflected the preferences of Fanta’s target audience.

The impact

By combining internal expertise, creative perspectives and direct input from teens, Fanta successfully accelerated its innovation journey.

In just 10 weeks, the team moved from initial immersion to a validated set of concepts, creating a stronger innovation funnel grounded in consumer needs and powered by the creativity of diverse voices.