From much-loved product to iconic brand experience

Milo is a much-loved chocolate malt drink, an icon of energy and sport in kids' lives across Asia and Australia. But a brand built on one beloved product has a ceiling, and the ground was shifting: children are less physically active than they were, nutrition is now about mental resilience as much as movement, and consumers increasingly expect brands to offer experiences and services, not just a product. Nestlé's brief was to modernise Milo so it could re-energise kids' success and nourish their growth in sport and beyond, by stretching the brand into new products, services and partnerships across four markets: Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines and Australia.

I led the work across two stages. First, opportunity-defining: grounded in cultural, consumer and category insight, and framed by what we called the era of the elastic brand, we looked for room to grow from two directions at once. Inward-out from the category, across dairy and milk, broader food and drink, and beyond into new territories such as gaming, technology and sport. Outward-in from people, across kids, teens and tweens, and their parents. Ten opportunity areas were weighed against four criteria, brand alignment, business alignment, consumer and cultural relevance, and ideation potential, and narrowed to a priority six. We then ran two ideation sessions against those areas: one growing the opportunity inside Milo's current food and drink categories, the other stretching well beyond the category into new products, services and partnerships.

The two sessions generated twenty-nine concepts, thirteen in food and drink and sixteen beyond the category, from street-sports packaging that ties Milo to skateboarding, parkour and urban culture, to services and partnerships that take the brand a long way past the tin. We mapped every concept on a brand-stretch model across three horizons: close-in ideas that use Milo's current capabilities, brand-stretch ideas that push into new formats and audiences, and partner-led ideas that reach beyond what the brand can do alone. From these we drew out a shortlist of hero concepts to develop further.

Nestlé came away with more than a strategy. Alongside the prioritised map of where Milo could grow sat a pipeline of concrete concepts to back it, spread across three horizons of ambition and grounded in evidence from four markets. It gave the brand a clear, defensible basis for deciding where to take Milo next, from close-in portfolio moves to bigger bets beyond the category.