Natakhtari was already known to Russian consumers as a Georgian lemonade and rated highly on product experience: 90% of those surveyed liked the taste, 72% were willing to buy. In 2025 a Russian-made Natakhtari entered the market, so the task was not to build interest in the category from scratch, but to transfer trust from the imported product to the locally produced one. That mattered particularly in a category where choices are made fast and out of habit, and where familiar brands win when people shop for family occasions and holidays. The category lives in at-home consumption and belongs to family territory — warmth and time spent together. The project therefore had to establish Natakhtari as the authentic, close and warm-hearted brand for the family table. The category was declining: −2.4% YTD as of November 2025. The market is highly concentrated, with roughly 50% of volume held by the three largest players. At the same time, the category's defining New Year brand — Coca-Cola — had left Russia. Its territory remains unclaimed: competitors occupy it only with generic codes — comfort, warmth, family — none of them tied to a brand.
Problem
In CSD, brand campaigns are largely confined to the warm season and the New Year peak. With 20.1% brand awareness, Natakhtari was not on the shortlist of brands considered either for everyday or for holiday purchase. The barrier was twofold. First, the brand read as a premium lemonade with an interesting taste, but not as an option for the big New Year table, where shoppers often trade down to the 1.5L PET format. Second, after localisation the brand risked losing its Georgian USP — its key point of difference in a category where, in consumers' minds, Georgia means Natakhtari (Natakhtari Lemonade Sip & Session, AC Consulting). The project therefore had to make Natakhtari acceptable for the mass New Year occasion and establish its Georgian heritage as an emotional reason to choose it. The core objective: bring Natakhtari into the New Year consumption occasion in CSD, lock in Georgian heritage as an emotional driver of choice, and deliver a short-term step change in key brand metrics while laying the foundation of a platform for future seasons. — Short-term: drive sales in December–January. — Business: demonstrate large-scale support to retailers to ease listing and strengthen internal focus. — Marketing: grow brand awareness, build New Year relevance
Solution
Natakhtari is the only brand in the category for which Georgian generosity is not a device but a cultural fact. In this category, Georgia means Natakhtari. Insight: the New Year table is an attempt to lay out the perfect feast. And one of the ideals of a feast in a Russian mind is the Georgian one. Natakhtari doesn't need to explain why it belongs at a celebration. It needs to claim the place that already belongs to it culturally. Idea: Natakhtari celebrates New Year the Georgian way — at length. A Georgian feast starts earlier and ends later than anyone else's. Manifestation: we made length literal — long formats, long placements and long letters. In an overcrowded New Year media landscape we made two strategic choices. We extended the season and began celebrating New Year on 1 December. The claim that a Georgian feast lasts longer — so it starts a month earlier — set the brand apart from the category and was thematically defensible: Georgian generosity means a long celebration. We built an omnichannel ecosystem around a single idea. No channel repeated the idea; each opened it up in its own way. The long wait for New Year, the long holidays and the long feast became the creative foundation. We reinforced length both through the media formats themselves and through stretched letters, creating one loooong experience across every point of contact. The idea of length and generosity took a different form in every channel — never copied, always recognisable. — 50+ long-format OOH surfaces carrying stretched letters — "a biiiig Georgian feeeast" — commanding attention on the street. — Themed sites, bloggers and social: dozens of tailored creatives built around length, adapted to audiences and formats. — A radio ident stretching the word "feast" across 23,000 Pyaterochka stores — a touchpoint at the moment of purchase. — An owned show on OK with Georgian chef Kote Oganezov (7M followers) and guest celebrities. — The VK show "Kstati": a branded content integration into the 31 December New Year episode. — An integration into the year's biggest New Year film, written into the plot around the holiday table. — A hub site assembling the largest feast on the internet, with receipt registration; the grand prize, a trip to Georgia. The full user journey and ecosystem are available in the supporting materials. We treated Georgian generosity not as an add-on but as the core of an omnichannel idea. A holiday can be associated with many brands — but a big feast is an attribute of Georgia, and in the beverage category Georgia means Natakhtari. That let the brand claim the territory, and it showed in the growth of brand image metrics. One idea, many executions, each working through the mechanics of its own channel and its own point in the consumer journey. A viewer watching the film, a shopper in Pyaterochka and a visitor to the site each received different but recognisable communication. Tactically, the brand took the risk of starting its New Year campaign a month early — and it worked. The platform scales to other seasons and formats, with room to strengthen offline and ATL.
Results
Business: December–January sales grew +30% versus the same period the previous season, against a +20% target. Natakhtari entered the top 3 fastest-growing brands in national coverage while the category was declining by 2.4% YTD. Off-take in Pyaterochka rose +34% MoM with distribution held flat. Brand image (Q4'25): awareness 25.6% (+5.5 pp; target ≥25%); consideration 20.9% (+3.8 pp); consumption 12.8% (+3.7 pp). Reach: 116.25M cumulative against a target of over 100M. Film integration — 24.6M; VK show "Kstati" — 12.4M; OK show "An Evening with an Accent" — 30.5M; digital — 32M; bloggers and seeding — 7.6M; OOH — 50+ surfaces, 9M people; radio across 23,000 Pyaterochka stores. Hub site: 150,000+ visits. The campaign delivered a step change at the moment the CSD category was contracting. Against a 2.4% YTD decline, Natakhtari posted the highest December growth in the top 10. Strategically, the case locked in what already belonged to the brand culturally: Georgia means Natakhtari. That lowers the cost of every future touchpoint, because the brand now holds a place in the Russian New Year code. Tactically, it laid the foundation of a platform that scales to other seasons and formats — ATL, e-commerce, HoReCa activations. Systemically, it showed that for an FMCG brand with a premium taste profile, the way into a mass occasion is not to simplify the product, but to move into a cultural code where that product is already accepted.
