Behind mocktail brand Mixoloshe’s viral rebrand, which began with an intern destroying its cans

More than 30 million people watched Mixoloshe intern Nicole Wingard swing a baseball bat into a can of the non-alcoholic beverage as she argued on Instagram Reels that “smashing this can is more effective than” her boss’s entire marketing strategy. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nicole The Intern (@thebestmarketingstrategyever) And Wingard has since provided ample proof to back up her claim. For the past two months, she’s been posting daily, increasingly elaborate videos of herself crushing cans of Mixoloshe, from dressing up as Pixar’s white desk lamp mascot, Luxo Jr., and stomping on a can the same way it does the “I” in the Pixar logo, to cosplaying as Katniss Everdeen from “The Hunger Games” and firing an arrow into a Mixoloshe can strapped to an archery target. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nicole The Intern (@thebestmarketingstrategyever) Wingard’s unorthodox marketing approach has not only driven over 525,000 people to follow her cheekily named Instagram account, @TheBestMarketingStrategyEver (more than the 91,000 followers on the main account), but it’s also “completely transformed the trajectory of the business,” according to the “boss” in question, Mixoloshe Chief Marketing Officer Mike Chambers. “Since we started the campaign, we’ve had basically an 800% increase in sales,” Chambers told Ad Age. “We’ve had tens of thousands of email sign-ups” and “hundreds of thousands of unique visitors. We sold out of four of our eight SKUs. So, it’s really had a huge impact on the business.” The brand launched in 500 Walmart stores across the U.S. last fall; a four-pack of the mocktails retail for $19.99 online. Despite the online narrative he and Wingard have fabricated over the past two months, Chambers isn’t actually an arrogant big shot getting in the way of Wingard’s savvy social-first marketing, he said. Their “conflict” is part of a staged storyline designed to help Mixoloshe stand out in the crowded beverage industry. Also read: Non-alcoholic beverages are hot right now “With beverages, you’re basically a marketing company that happens to sell a product,” Chambers said. “The best beverage brands in the world have figured out that they need to really flex their creative muscles. The only way people are going to recognize you is if you’ve given them a reason to—like, if you’ve entertained them in a meaningful way.” Chambers and Wingard are now leveraging the success of their can-smashing Instagram series to launch a new brand identity for Mixoloshe. In a theatrical, “Mad Max”-inspired Instagram video posted today, the two revealed a new name for the brand that embraces the root of its recent growth: Smashd. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nicole The Intern (@thebestmarketingstrategyever) The announcement video, filmed and edited by Chambers’ production company Bang Bang Studios, dramatizes the rebrand by having Wingard surround a car with cans of Mixoloshe and use dynamite to blow up the entire scene. In the rubble, she uncovers a can showcasing the mocktail brand’s new name and design—and, for the first time, she drinks from the can rather than destroy it, Chambers said. And with its new, easier-to-pronounce name (consumers had trouble pronouncing Mixoloshe, according to Chambers) and buzzy marketing strategy, Chambers is aiming to make the brand a “household name, like Athletic Brewing, in the non-alcoholic cocktail space,” he said. He’ll be working toward that goal in his new role as Smashd’s CEO, succeeding former CEO and Founder Kristina Roth, who will take on a new role as chairwoman of the brand. A new CMO was not named, and Wingard was appointed the brand’s “chief smash officer,” a title she selected herself. “The brands that win today are like the brands who underscore creative and understand how to entertain people and craft storylines,” Chambers added. “And that’s what we want to do in this next chapter of Mixoloshe, this next chapter of Smashd. We really want to build out an incredible creative team and go really hard on social, and become known as the brand that does it differently and does it better than anyone else. We very much intend for this [rebrand] to be kind of just the beginning.” Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs A smashing success Roth founded Mixoloshe in 2022 and brought in former One Direction member Zayn Malik as co-owner and chief creative officer in fall 2023, when it entered 500 Walmart stores. Chambers and Wingard both joined the brand’s marketing team a few months earlier, with Wingard never having worked in social media before (she previously worked as an IT recruiter) and Chambers having a background in running meme-oriented accounts such as an Instagram channel he launched, @DadPack. For several months, the duo struggled to land on a marketing strategy that cut through those of rival brands in the mocktail space. Wingard oversaw Mixoloshe’s TikTok channel and focused on “putting a non-alcoholic spin” on TikTok trends, but struggled to secure more than a few thousand views or over 100 likes per video, she said. On Instagram, meanwhile, Chambers employed a strategy similar to those of meme accounts by “taking relatable moments and making them applicable for whatever the theme of the page is”—in this case, non-alcoholic cocktails. He also capitalized on Malik’s celebrity status across Mixoloshe’s marketing and interspersed photos of the boy band heartthrob throughout the sea of meme posts. But that approach, too, failed to gain much traction, Chambers said. In March, though, Chambers came across the Instagram account @SharpDressedMonkey, where a marketing student was attempting to prove to his marketing professor that, by posting a daily photo of a monkey wearing sunglasses, the student would “gain more followers than [the professor’s] awful marketing course.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Monke Memes 🦍 SharpDressedMonkey (@sharpdressedmonkey) “It was a really interesting format, but it was sort of missing this key element of like, ‘What are you actually marketing?’” he said. “But I was inspired by that, and we had a call where Nicole and I were like, ‘Well, let’s just test this out and create a new account and see what happens.’” Wingard’s first two videos of her smashing expired cans of Mixoloshe with a bat didn’t garner much attention. But on her third day of posting on Instagram, her video suddenly went viral, quickly amassing millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes. That virality soon translated into web traffic, too, and Chambers and Wingard referenced that path from Instagram to the Mixoloshe website with a pop-up reading “Here for Nicole the intern? She claims that all this traffic is coming from these smashing videos. If that’s true, enter your email below.” Wingard’s fictional struggle to amass 500,000 followers by June 10 or risk being “fired” quickly captivated thousands of Instagrammers, many of whom joined her so-called “Smash Army” to cheer her on. And as her audience grew larger, Wingard sought to make her can smashing more engaging, adding in pop culture references to movies and TV series such as “Twilight,” “Game of Thrones” and “Pirates of the Caribbean,” among many others. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nicole The Intern (@thebestmarketingstrategyever) Though Wingard had never run a social media account for a brand, she did have experience creating videos for her own social accounts as a beauty pageant contestant, she said. She and Chambers brainstormed several of the bizarre can demolition ideas together, and sourced many—including the Pixar lamp parody—from comments that repeatedly appeared across the account’s videos, she said. “A lot of times I was like, ‘Well, I’m kind of nervous, because who else has done this?’ And Mike’s like, ‘Well, that's the point—that we're doing something different,’” Wingard said. “It's not perfect, and I think that's been really cool to see that it doesn't have to be very expensive-looking content for it to be really good.” In all, the two-month social campaign cost roughly $30,000, including the cost of travel, production and stunts such as having Wingard drive a tank over a car to celebrate her hitting the 500,000-follower threshold on May 25, Chambers said. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nicole The Intern (@thebestmarketingstrategyever) The element of Wingard’s videos that has perhaps kept most viewers coming back to the account, however, has been the running feud between “Nicole the Intern” and “Boss Mike,” Chambers said. Throughout her efforts to reach 500,000 followers, Wingard frequently updated her audience on the account’s growth and her direct business impacts and shared several screenshots of Slack messages between her and Chambers where she defended her can-smashing strategy against his skepticism. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nicole The Intern (@thebestmarketingstrategyever) “I think probably half of the community knows that this is just a marketing strategy and they're like ‘I’m just here for the plot,’” Chambers said. “But then there’s a percentage of people who have taken the whole thing seriously and are like, ‘Mike is the worst human being ever,’ which has been kind of hard, honestly—I’m, like, the most-hated man on the internet. I think we’ve all had an experience with an unsupportive boss who wasn't facilitating our ideas or believing in us, and that was sort of one of the main themes that really just struck a chord with Millennials and Gen Z.” About a month into Wingard’s mission to secure 500,000 followers, Chambers gave her an additional incentive to reach that milestone—she would get to spearhead a rebrand of Mixoloshe. In reality, the duo had trademarked the new name for the mocktail brand just two weeks into the Instagram campaign, Chambers said. But rather than announce the rebrand separately from the social media storyline they had created, the duo opted to incorporate it into the existing narrative and encourage a “community-led creation of the brand Smashd,” Chambers said. Throughout the Instagram campaign, “we intentionally didn’t have the logo facing the camera, and we intentionally didn't ask people to buy the product,” he said. “You buy the product because you want to be a part of this community, not because we're telling you to. And we wanted to empower the community to give them this feeling that like they're really, truly influencing like all these things—and they are, to a certain extent. We wouldn’t be doing this without them.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nicole The Intern (@thebestmarketingstrategyever) Along with revealing the brand’s new name, Wingard and Chambers also announced Wingard is receiving a promotion from “Nicole the Intern” to her new role as "chief smash officer." She is also receiving equity in Smashd as part of her promotion. And though she’s hit her 500,000-follower goal, Wingard’s journey on the brand’s Instagram is just beginning, Chambers said. “I like to think of this as less as a campaign and more of almost like a Netflix series—that’s kind of the vibe we’re going for,” with the Smashd Instagram account, he said. “We have a couple of really interesting, fun ideas, some fully centered around Nicole and the next stage in her journey. And, just like at the beginning of this [first campaign], we’ll probably let the community tell us what they want next.”

Behind mocktail brand Mixoloshe’s viral rebrand, which began with an intern destroying its cans

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