The challenge

Advanced Hydration, spanning sports and rehydration drinks and home to brands like Powerade and Aquarius, is one of the fastest-growing areas within ready-to-drink beverages. New consumers are entering the category, expectations are evolving and innovation cycles are accelerating.

For Coca-Cola, the challenge wasn’t simply understanding where the category stands today. The team needed to make innovation decisions three to five years out, when consumer needs, behaviours and expectations could look very different. Yet traditional innovation processes have a built-in paradox: they ask people today to evaluate ideas designed for tomorrow. When R&D, claims / benefits and portfolio decisions need to be made years ahead of launch, waiting for the future to arrive isn’t an option.

The team needed a way to stay deeply connected to people while looking beyond the present. The goal was not to predict the future, but to make more confident decisions about the different futures that might emerge.

The brief was to co-create the future of the category by building a focused global innovation pipeline for its brands, designed to deliver high-impact innovations over the next three to five years.

The solution

We ran a five-phase, insight-led innovation programme, moving from foundational consumer understanding to a strategic innovation playbook, including a global innovation pipeline and portfolio architecture. The programme combined deep human understanding, cultural foresight, creative crowdsourcing, stakeholder co-creation and digital twins, to help the team explore future needs while keeping real consumers at the centre.

Using the rich first-party data gathered throughout the programme, we built digital twins of real, consenting consumers. We then added a future-self layer to explore how their lives, motivations and hydration needs could evolve over time.

But people don’t change in isolation. The world around them changes too. Drawing on cultural foresight, category expertise and emerging signals, we created five plausible future worlds in collaboration with our partner Space Doctors. Each represented a different direction the category could take, from highly optimised performance cultures to lifestyles driven more by wellbeing.

We then placed each consumer twin into these future worlds to explore how their hydration needs, behaviours and expectations might change. In innovation, the front end decides how far the work can go. The starting point is the opportunity space and defining it well is what makes everything downstream stronger. A traditional innovation platform defines that space once, against a single assumed future. This approach made the platform dynamic instead. Built around enduring consumer tensions and stress-tested across the five future worlds, these platforms helped identify opportunities that could remain relevant as the future evolves. As such, teams could test ideas, challenge assumptions and identify innovation platforms with the potential to remain relevant across multiple possible futures.

The work ultimately delivered the Advanced Hydration Playbook: a strategic innovation playbook built around a global innovation pipeline and portfolio architecture, giving teams a shared framework for where to play, how to win and how to adapt as new signals emerge.

The impact

The future-twin approach helped the team move from static planning to dynamic innovation platforms.

This translated into stronger and broader ideation:

• 2 to 3x more high-quality ideation directions
• About 4x more ideas that push beyond the obvious

The approach also sharpened concept development. When applied to a Powerade innovation platform linked to the LA 2028 Olympics, future-twin optimisation delivered significantly more actionable guidance for product development, with concept recommendations scoring 4.5 versus 3.3 for specificity on ingredient, claims / benefits and usage detail.

Beyond the metrics, the biggest shift was strategic confidence. Rather than relying on a single forecast of what comes next, the team gained a shared, evidence-based framework for navigating uncertainty, evaluating opportunities and deciding which futures to design for.

Recognised at Esomar congress 2026:

Gold winner
Tony Cowling Foundation Innovation Award

Gold winner
Excellence in Global Research Award

Troch, T., Verhaeghe, A. & Palenicek, A. (2026). Simulating tomorrow for Coca-Cola’s Advanced Hydration portfolio. ESOMAR Congress 2026, Valencia.