The challenge
Nespresso already had strong awareness and a clear premium position, but reaching a younger Gen Z audience required the brand to show up in a different set of cultural and media spaces.
The brief was to strengthen Nespresso’s authority in coffee while making the brand feel more current to audiences who may have known the name without feeling particularly connected to it.
That meant building relevance without disrupting the qualities Nespresso was already associated with: quality, taste, design and a sense of occasion.
The challenge was to create enough variety across the year to keep the brand interesting, while maintaining a coherent point of view across every story, partnership and product moment.
Our solution
We built a year-round PR programme around a series of distinct cultural, product and partnership moments.
The work included a King’s Coronation-themed high-coffee event for the Jewels of Nespresso collection, seasonal Iced Coffee and Pumpkin Spice Latte activity, and the introduction of Simone Ashley as Nespresso’s first UK ambassador at Cannes.
Those moments opened up different routes into the media and helped place Nespresso in contexts that felt more relevant to younger audiences.
The programme also included a boutique launch at Manchester’s Trafford Centre, a rare blend event for journalists, research linked to Nespresso’s Royal Mail recycling partnership, a Recycle Week collaboration with Ravneet Gill, and a festive partnership with Battersea Power Station’s GLIDE and Fusalp.
Across the year, the brand moved through food, culture, sustainability, fashion and seasonal lifestyle stories, with each activation carrying the same underlying cues around quality and coffee expertise.
That gave the programme breadth without making it feel disconnected. Nespresso could keep creating new reasons for the media to engage with the brand while building a more contemporary cultural presence over time.
The result
Across 2023, the programme generated 209 pieces of coverage, including 41 national pieces and two live TV segments, exceeding the previous year’s results by 25%.
Total coverage reach exceeded 380 million.
Nespresso also secured coverage in titles including SheerLuxe and GQ that had not previously covered the brand, expanding its media footprint into spaces with stronger relevance to the audience it wanted to reach.
The programme helped Nespresso become more visible across culture, lifestyle and fashion while retaining the premium positioning the brand had already built.
Search and sales increased during the year, with two collections selling out.
The result was a broader, younger and more culturally relevant presence for Nespresso, supported by stronger media reach, new editorial relationships and product demand that carried through beyond individual campaign moments.
