The product sits in half the kitchens in the country. Our job was to make people stop and pay attention as if they’d never seen it before.
A few months ago we received a brief that, on paper, sounded almost impossible.
An Asian brand was launching in New York. The product was an everyday object, the kind of thing most people already own a version of. And they wanted a launch event that would land in the most overstimulated city in the world.
The question was immediate: how do you build a brand activation around something nobody considers exciting? Not a perfume. Not a sneaker drop. Something simple. Something already familiar.
This is what we learned doing it.
1. Find the role the product plays that nobody talks about
Every commodity product has an obvious function and a hidden one. The obvious function is what the box says. The hidden function is the experience the product enables, and that’s usually where the story lives.
In our case, the product was an ice machine. The obvious function is producing ice. The hidden function is what good ice does to a drink: it doesn’t dilute it, doesn’t ruin the temperature, doesn’t water down what a bartender spent time crafting. There’s nothing worse than a drink ruined by bad ice. Nobody talks about that until someone does.
We stopped selling the machine. We started selling what the machine enables: a drink that stays as the bartender intended it.
2. Build a world, don’t show a feature
Once you have the hidden function, resist the temptation to explain it.
We built a fictional world called The Ice Society, a tongue-in-cheek secret society for people who take their drinks seriously. Members understand. Outsiders don’t. The product became the key into the club.
That framing did the heavy lifting. It turned a functional benefit into cultural code, and it gave the brand a personality a spec sheet never could. Commodity products especially need world-building, because functional differentiation alone is too small to carry the conversation.
3. Stage the product as a totem, not a sample
Where the product lives in the room dictates how people read it.
We didn’t put the machines on a counter or behind a bar. We staged each one as an illuminated totem: individually lit, isolated, treated like sculpture. Guests walked through a tunnel into the venue, and the machines appeared one by one like objects in an exhibition.
A product on a counter is a product. A product on a pedestal is a story.
4. Anchor the experience to an expert who validates it
When you ask people to believe a familiar product is suddenly interesting, you can’t be the one making the claim. You need a third voice.
In our case, the voice was a mixologist. He didn’t pitch the machine. He used it. The audience didn’t hear an argument about quality. They watched a craftsman choose this tool over every other one available.
The brand should never be the one explaining why the product matters. Someone the audience already trusts should be the one demonstrating it.
5. The hardest creative discipline: not making it gimmicky
The trap with a commodity product is overcompensation. When the product is plain, the instinct is to layer on theatrics.
In our case, the risk was obvious: turning an ice machine event into something out of Frozen. Snowflakes everywhere. Cold-themed everything. We didn’t, on purpose.
The visual language stayed restrained. Everything pointed back to the product without ever mocking it. The result felt expensive because it felt confident, and confidence in this craft means trusting that the idea is strong enough not to need decoration.
6. The principle that holds all the others together: the team
Everything above is theory until someone executes it perfectly under pressure, in a foreign city, on a deadline.
We were producing for an Asian client launching in the United States, which meant the brief lived in three cultural languages before it ever became an event. Translation isn’t only linguistic, it’s cultural, operational, emotional. The lighting designer had to understand the same brand intention as the mixologist, as the printer, as the venue manager. Every link in the chain reading the same script.
That doesn’t happen because the creative is good. It happens because the team is good. Every person involved knew exactly what story they were serving, and made fifty silent decisions a day to protect it. The polished moment a guest sees on opening night is the visible part of a thousand invisible ones, made by people whose names will never appear on the invitation.
Creativity gives you the idea. The team is what keeps the idea alive between brief and execution.
A note for any brand sitting on a “boring” product
If you’re a brand manager looking at your product and feeling like it’s too familiar to deserve a launch, you’re probably wrong. Most categories with the strongest brands have the most ordinary products. Coffee. Sneakers. Bottled water. Eyewear. Soap. The product was never the limit. The framing was.
There’s nothing more ordinary than ice. There’s also nothing more capable of ruining or saving a good drink. Both things are true. The activation just has to make people remember the second part.
Planning a launch for a product the market thinks it already understands? Let’s talk. We help.
Jimena, producer at Alfred
