Before juicing was, well, juicing, Jamba was there. Launched as a little juice shop 34 years ago in San Luis Obispo, CA, Jamba today boasts more than 700 locations across the U.S. and even other parts of the world. But following the QSR brand’s reboot four months ago with a new look and name (just Jamba) and new offerings, like blended coffees, the brand is turning to experiential to maximize engagement around its repositioning in its most saturated market, California.
Enter: the Jamba Sunrise Smoothie Tour, a hyperlocal sampling program on the coastline that hit Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco from Sept. 6-8 with early-morning sampling experiences, giveaways and lounge spaces. Anchoring the experience was a branded Airstream trailer with a fully working smoothie kitchen setup and order window.
Partnerships with yoga studios in each market helped create buzz around the activations, which took place at the Santa Monica Pier in L.A. (with Alex Silver Fagan yoga), Mission Point Park in San Diego (with YogaWorks), and Spark Social in San Francisco (with YogaWorks). The yoga sessions were one hour at 6:15 a.m., with sampling running from 5:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. Bright signage featuring Jamba’s new slogan, Hello Sunshine, reinforced messaging around fueling mornings with purpose and balance.
“We wanted to show people how Jamba could play a more prominent role in their routine in the morning and be that ‘sunshine in a cup,’ that meal or replacement for a smoothie bowl,” says Nathan Louer, chief brand officer at Jamba. “We’re all about activity, portability and energy around this amazing brand and we seek to bring that out at every touchpoint—like having a trailer go from city to city, meeting people where they’re at, making smoothies fresh on-site.”
The brand engaged between 200-500 consumers at each respective activation ahead of the official release of Jamba Blended Coffees on Sept. 10. One week after the tour wrapped, the brand also launched a one-day-only price point of $2.99 for the coffees in store as a measurable, tangential piece of the campaign.
“As we looked at rethinking who Jamba was and how we represented ourselves to consumers, it dawned on us that we didn’t really have to look too far or be contrived in what we were doing. It was all there from Jamba’s past,” Louer says. “This was a multi-prong attack for us to just launch things differently now that we have some exciting new products at Jamba and this brand-new product that is white space on our menu.” Agencies: Hodde Bros Beverage Co. (vehicle); M Booth (p.r.).
