Keurig Dr Pepper

The Belief

Within that framing, something got lost in translation. When coffee was talked about primarily as fuel, small, functional pleasures became the first thing people were encouraged to cut.

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The Original Donut Shop didn’t naturally fit that logic. It wasn’t an identity brand or a performance fuel. It was familiar, comforting, and indulgent — a quiet constant in people’s routines. It simply hadn’t been permitted to fully own that role. Until Rival intervened.

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So the strategy wasn’t just about reframing coffee as something new. It was about permitting people to keep the small joys they were usually told to cut. An everyday moment of self-permission. A little treat, every single day.

How We Challenged It

Working closely with the Keurig Dr Pepper team, Rival challenged conventional thinking around demographics and scale by applying our Microcultures approach — a way of mapping cultural behaviors and mindsets rather than relying on audience segments or age bands. Instead of asking who the coffee drinker was, we focused on how indulgence, joy, and self-permission already show up in people’s lives.

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This meant moving beyond obvious audiences and comfort zones, and required senior, hands-on collaboration throughout. Rather than treating social as a content channel, we used Microcultures as a strategic system — guiding how the brand showed up, sounded, and connected emotionally over time, grounded in real cultural patterns rather than posting cadence or trends.

Making It Real

Instagram and TikTok became the primary stages for the brand’s evolution, with strategy anchored in distinct Microcultures such as Little Treats, Dopamine Maximalists, and True Crime Aficionados. These weren’t interest groups or formats, but culturally defined behaviors that revealed how and why people seek small moments of comfort and indulgence in everyday life.

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By entering culture through these Microcultures, The Original Donut Shop adopted a more contemporary and interesting tone without pretending to be something it wasn’t. The result was a social presence that felt culturally fluent and emotionally resonant, repositioning the at-home coffee moment as a pause for pleasure, comfort, and enjoyment rather than a push for performative output.