Honing in on our audience has resulted in strong growth across all Gatorade channels, reaching more than 7.8 million fans across our owned social channels. Not only have we increased engagement, but we also increased organic engagement on Twitter by 61%. With no paid support, Instagram engagements increased 125% in 2014 by identifying what our audience wants and when they want it.

The brand drove record results when transforming teen athletes into superheroes in digital with over 175,000 avatars created. Seventy-two percent of created superheroes were downloaded or shared across social, putting our consumers at the center of our brand. Ultimately, this resulted in a 5% lift in purchase intent from our core audience with retails sales increasing over previous results.

We successfully shifted what it means to Win From Within to our core audience with relevancy of mentions reaching an all-time high of 96%; this is up from our launch year of 60%. Our series not only inspired our athletes, but it connected inspiration to the brand with 91% of mentions connecting back to Gatorade. This effort translated into a 2.7% lift in purchase consideration.

Seeing an opportunity within science from our social brand pillar monitoring, we seized the opportunity and gained results. We saw 11% higher engagement rate with science content on our social handles. Our Science of Gatorade experience on Gatorade.com saw the highest average completion rate at 83%, with users doubling their time on site to 6 minutes, 03 seconds. Science shined through our Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) documentary, with 20% of consumer conversations specifically calling out the science in the product.

Mission Control provided insight to inspire our audience, and also has inspired and educated the internal constituencies of the brand by putting insights at the core of what we do.

By having Mission Control at the core of everything we do, we have seen the output and insights make an impact across our digital strategy, traditional efforts and always-on brand strategy. Every execution begins and ends with data-driven insight with our audience at the center.

For example, using our custom teen athlete white list, we were able to identify that our core audience over-indexed for interest in superheroes and comics. We took this insight and tested, turning our Gatorade athletes into superheroes, and saw an immediate impact. Based on these results, we activated our core audience by making our followers the heroes of the brand by turning them into actual athlete superheroes hand-drawn by DC comics. We didn’t stop there; we shifted this concept into retail with limited-edition bottles, driving record sales.

Through the use of proactive monitoring around our brand, we revealed that our audience was struggling to understand the meaning of Win From Within. Not only had volume decreased, but so had relevancy of mentions. Using our social channels, we found an inspiring teen athlete named Ben Jackson and created a documentary about how he “Wins From Within.” Other athlete stories followed, and all the videos were launched on YouTube and promoted across our digital platforms.

While Mission Control has made impacts within our social channels and marketing programs, we have also driven business decisions by using digital data to drive insight into product perception, pinpoint customer behavior around retail for our sales team and map social conversation to our brand pillars for insights across the organization. Shifting away from just marketing, Mission Control has become a central hub of intelligence for the brand, proving the power of digital.