Did you know that soft drinks act as emotional stabilisers, agents of reassurance and inducers of momentary regression, our official providers of happiness and bliss, eternal self regenerators, mood-altering forces, panacea and elixirs of life, activity energisers, pleasure instigators, our universal connectors, trusted friends, partners in unexplored worlds, and small escapes? This pioneering research cracks the code of buying behaviour related to soft drinks and puts forward a framework for shaping brand strategy and for growing revenue.

1. BUILDING
SOFT DRINK
BRANDS
THROUGH
INTRINSICALLY
ENGAGING
NARRATIVES ™

2. Hi! My name is Constantinos
Pantidos and I believe that
companies could improve
people’s lives even more
effectively if they had
deeper human insight.

3. We do not just buy soft drinks. By
integrating intrinsic functionality
with predefined meaning we
create and express the master
narratives of our lives.

4. We derive the
maximum value from
narratives that are
automatically
identifiable as
evolving parts of our
human experience

5. What deeply engages us always
fulfils some fundamental motive,
the evolutionarily-preserved
dispositions that have helped us
survive and grow

6. Concepts are neural
structures that allow us
to order and categorise
all stimuli around us

7. Our psyche consists of a code. We are an ordered pattern of
fundamental motives capable of generating life.

8. Successful brands
coherently express
the very patterns
of our psyche

9. Using , for the first time, a multidisciplinary approach,
including brand communication decoding, motivational
research, psychology, affective neuroscience, cognitive
linguistics, cultural anthropology, sociology, philosophy and
their proprietary tools, BRAND AVIATORS™ has studied the
motives underpinning buying behaviour in over seventy
global categories of goods including soft drinks

10. Beneath all the phantasmagoria of
global marketing communication,
lies order and rhythm, the source
code of our human behaviour

11. What follows is a brief
analysis of the deep
motives for buying soft
drinks. The motives are
presented in order of
increasing relative
importance in line with
their power to influence
our buying decisions.

12. TRANSFORMATION: On an initial
layer of motivation what makes
soft drinks popular is their
property of capturing our fantasy
and transforming the moment.

13. As liquids are, by their
nature, quickly absorbed
by the organism producing
rapid effects, drinks have
always possessed life-
altering capacities.

14. To satisfy our need for need
mood-altering liquids, we
design our drinks to provide
us with some kind of
pharmacological effect.

15. EXPERIMENTATION: On a deeper
layer of motivation what makes
soft drinks sell is their promise of
alternatives as yet unexplored. The
success of soft drinks is founded on
our low boredom threshold. To
escape the plainness of water,
humans have created more exciting
drinks.

16. As the brain likes contrasted effect,
complicated formulas with experiences
that alternate send the brain into a spin
and postpone satiety

17. DEFIANCE: More significantly,
what makes us buy soft drinks
is their maverick and mildly
addictive nature. Thirst itself is
defined as the craving for fluids
resulting in animals’ basic
drinking instinct.

18. The balance of fluids
within the body needs to
be very precise; a
variation of no more
than 1 or 2 percent from
the normal immediately
makes itself felt as thirst
or pain

19. We fight the pain of
any thirst with sugar,
caffeine, fruit extracts
and fizz put together
in a soft drink, which
produces in its turn a
pleasant dependence

20. EMPOWERMENT: Proceeding
closer to the motives that
dominate the soft drinks
category, what makes soft
drinks sell is their promise
and their capacity to boost
our activity.

21. As liquids act quickly on the body
we expect that the ideal drink
must energise the body and mind.
In our collective fantasies, the ideal
soft drink is a machine for cooling
the throat, injects sugar into the
pancreas, and gets us up and
going.

22. PLEASURE: On a yet
deeper level, embedding
the capacity of soft
drinks to promise a
more sensual experience
than water and many
other drinks, some of the
most successful brands
mark the essence of soft
drinks to offer greater
satisfaction as their own
territory

23. Soft drinks promise and deliver an
instant overwhelming pleasure

24. CONNECTEDNESS: A
deeper motivation for the
sales success of soft drinks
rests on their bonding
capacity. Soft drinks are
made for everyone, for
every moment, and are
intrinsically egalitarian. A
trusted friend, the soft
drink is always there.

25. In our collective fantasies, with the opening
and drinking of our favourite soft drink, we
join millions of people who are drinking
their favourite drink at the same time as us

26. PLAYFULNESS: Moving a
step closer to the core
motive underpinning our
soft drink behaviour, what
makes refreshments sell is
their capacity to act as the
little jesters of the
beverages category

27. Supercharged with vitality,
they cheer up all five
senses. Their vibrant fruity
base provides flavour,
colour, exuberance,
radiance, brightness,
vivacity and gaiety. Acidity
is sharp and bright.
Carbonation is experienced
like a succession of tingly
little pinpricks, sharp little
bursts in the mouth and on
the palate.

28. SECURITY: On the
innermost layer of human
motivation, soft drinks act
as “liquid candies” and
“emotional stabilizers”.
Always the same, soft,
clean and completely
innocent, what they evoke
in us is safety, happiness
and wholesomeness.

29. In our collective
unconscious, when we
drink a soft drink we
become babies in bliss. It
is the ideal drink we
always craved. In essence,
soft drinks act as safe
water.

30. This map
illustrates the
way some major
brands in the
global soft drinks
category are
positioned in the
consumers’ mind

31. Deep category understanding is just the first step
in creating engaging narratives. To build a
proposition that is deeply engaging, the brand
must activate the motives that drive the category
in its own unique and profoundly human way.

32. CONNECT
CONTROL
The wheel of motives™
GROW
CARE
BALANCE
DESIRE
FEEL
SAFE
SEEK
PLAY
CREATE
DEFY
TRANSFORM
TM
Having captured, for the first
time, our fundamental human
motives at the deepest levels of
their deployment, all the way
from their biological value to the
neurosystems they engage in our
brain, to the cognitive operations
and psychological states they
activate, to the major social
reinforcers they cause and to the
rich hierarchy of inherent
concepts they infuse into our
everyday life, BRAND
AVIATORS™ helps marketers
develop Intrinsically Engaging
Narratives™

33. BRAND AVIATORS™
specialises in activating the
unique codes of your
brand, those that engage
people at a profound
human level using a three-
phase methodology

34. Phase 1: Map the territory
The first phase of the methodology deconstructs the
fundamental human motives driving the sales and profit of
the category, establishes the relevant psychographic
territories and reveals the way that the brands are
mapped in people’s mind

35. Phase 2: (Re)define
your brand
This phase activates the
unique codes of your
brand, those that
engage people at a
profoundly human
level.

36. Phase 3: Enrich people’s lives
Powerful strategies require effective articulation. In this
third phase, the consumer proposition is translated into
ownable experiences written in the language that uses
our primary emotions as structural elements.

37. BRAND AVIATORS™ are trusted by some of the world’s
leading companies:

38. (Re)define your brand through
the human fundamentals if you
seek to:
• Deeply engage people locally
and across cultures
• Develop genuine concepts that
work year after year after
year
• Align all brand
communications under one
master idea
• Increase the ROI of all your
brand activities

39. My mission is to help clients
around the world build
brands that liberate the very
forces of life. Contact me now
for a free discovery audit by
clicking on the icon: