Grind started serving specialty coffee back in 2011. If you’re an OG, you’ll know that they were a small cafe Shoreditch Grind, way before they launched their iconic pink branding and coffee trucks in and around London. 

Now they’ve opened 14 different locations in London; their coffee beans, cans and pods are in most major UK grocers; and they’ve gone from local flyposting to collabing with the likes of Hello Kitty and American rock band Green Day.

Our members had the privilege of listening to Frankie Cooke, Brand Marketing Lead at Grind, tell us how they used the power of campaigns to fuel major growth. Here are 3 ideas that stuck with us…

☕“Why, Who, What”

Before anything creative happens, they get crystal clear on three things: the why, the who, and the what. It sounds basic, but this is exactly the step most startup teams rush past in the pressure to “just launch something.”

The Why is about defining the real objective. Not a vague “awareness push,” but a clear decision: is this campaign meant to drive revenue, acquire new customers, or shift brand perception?

The Who encourages focus. Grind might position itself as coffee for everyone, but each campaign still targets a very specific audience. In their Hello Kitty collaboration, they were speaking to nostalgic superfans and a younger, trend-driven audience rediscovering the brand through culture.

And finally…

The What. This is your core message. Not the final copy, but the central idea everything else will build from.

It’s simple but it’s foundational. Without it, campaigns drift.

🌟The importance of storytelling

Once the foundations are in place, Grind anchors every campaign around a single, clear idea.

Usually, that takes the form of a short tagline.

It isn’t something added at the end for polish, but something that’s created early, and used as a decision-making tool throughout.

Take their Hello Kitty campaign, built around the line: “This kitty is from the city.”

That one idea shaped everything. 

It dictated the shoot location in London, influenced the casting of urban creatives, and tied back into Grind’s identity as a London-born brand.

• Shoot location → London café

• Creative direction → urban lifestyle

• Influencers → city-based creatives

• Messaging → London heritage

It’s a small thing on the surface, but it creates consistency at scale. Every decision becomes easier when you have a clear reference point.

🎨Reframing the category (not just selling into it)

One of the most impressive examples from the talk is their instant coffee launch.

Instead of leaning into convenience (the obvious angle), they tackled the biggest barrier head-on: perception.

Instant coffee is often seen as low quality.

So they reframed it entirely.

This became the idea behind “craft in an instant.” The campaign brought this to life through artists creating work in real time, events that showcased craft, recipe-led content, and content that reinforced the idea that quality doesn’t have to take time.

Before touting lazy product benefits (like instant coffee = convenience), think about how you might reframe how your customers think about the category entirely.

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What stayed with us from Frankie's talk is this:

Good campaign planning = thoughtfulness and clear thinking.

Slapdash creative campaigns are sometimes necessary when you’re on a time crunch – if the idea is right, they can even be successful. But if you want the moment to last beyond virality, it pays to take some time to think about what you want your brand to look like long term, make sure every brand decision feeds into it, and invest in getting the execution exactly right. That’s how you build a brand that keeps growing.