Black Rock Coffee / FUEL

Turning internal ambiguity into a brand voice—and then putting it on the can

Black Rock Coffee Bar is one of the fastest-growing coffee chains in America. They came to us to give their team a voice and help launch FUEL, their new line of premium energy drinks.

At the time of our work together, Black Rock Coffee Bar was approaching 100 locations and growing quickly.

That growth was creating a new problem.

Leadership had a strong sense of what Black Rock stood for, but that vision wasn’t always translating consistently across teams. People were getting pulled in different directions, creating friction internally and making it harder to move new ideas forward with a shared point of view.

Black Rock didn’t just need more marketing.

It needed a clearer language for who it was.

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The challenge

As the company expanded, the distance between leadership and the employees closest to customers was growing too.

Different teams were interpreting the brand differently. There wasn’t a shared vocabulary for making decisions, communicating internally, or translating the founders’ vision into the customer experience.

At the same time, Black Rock was preparing to build something new: FUEL, its own premium energy drink.

The opportunity wasn’t simply to launch another product.

It was to clarify the Black Rock story deeply enough that the company could express it through a completely new product and customer experience.

Creating alignment before creating the campaign

We started with a strategy workshop involving Black Rock’s leadership team.

The goal wasn’t to arrive with a prewritten answer. It was to surface the different assumptions already operating inside the company and create enough shared understanding to move forward together.

We explored:

• Brand character and personality
• Voice and tone
• Customer motivations
• Leadership vision
• Internal culture
• How the brand should make people feel

The conversations weren’t always neat. People disagreed. Different perspectives surfaced.

That was part of the work.

By the end, the team had aligned around a clearer point of view and a more consistent language for expressing it.

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Turning the workshop into a brand framework

We translated the workshop findings into a practical Brand Framework.

The framework defined the character, personality, voice, and strategic language Black Rock could use across the organization.

It wasn’t meant to sit in a presentation.

It gave leadership and teams a shared foundation for communicating with:

• Employees
• Customers
• Investors
• Shareholders
• New hires
• Creative and marketing partners

The strategy created a bridge between what leadership believed and how the brand could actually show up in the world.

Miles Albritton, Creative Director

“Simon and his team brought a fresh vision to our business. He helped to put a voice to our brand and customer so that we were able to speak and market to them.”

Last but not least, the Brand Framework and its strategies—brand character, personality, voice, and tone—overflowed right into their next product launch: Black Rock FUEL.

Simon and his team brought a fresh vision to our business. He helped to put a voice to our brand and customer so that we were able to speak and market to them.

Miles Albritton, Creative Director

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Taking the strategy into a new product

The framework quickly became useful in a very tangible way.

Black Rock was preparing to launch FUEL, its own premium energy drink.

FUEL had started as a practical business opportunity, but the product also created a chance to tell a new story about Black Rock and the people who bought from it.

Black Rock asked us to develop the narrative around the product.

The question became:

What role does FUEL play in the customer’s story?

We analyzed competing products and interviewed stakeholders to better understand how FUEL fit into Black Rock’s broader brand and customer experience.

From that research, we developed three distinct narrative territories, each connecting the product to a different aspect of the customer’s life.

One direction emerged as the strongest.

The concept was simple:

FUEL shouldn’t just give customers energy. It should fuel whatever story they were already trying to live.

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Putting the story on the can

That idea became the narrative for the product itself.

I wrote the final on-pack story:

Fueling your day might feel like catching lightning in a bottle. It’s a rare feat—either a moment of sheer luck or utter brilliance. That’s why we caught it in a can and packaged it for you. In FUEL, we’ve captured something powerful. Something that will put a spark in your step and illuminate the path ahead. So whether you’re working or playing, at home or on the road, drink up. #fuelyourstory

The strategy had moved all the way from an internal leadership conversation to something customers could literally hold in their hands.

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The result

Black Rock emerged from the work with more than a product narrative.

The team had:

• A clearer articulation of the brand
• Shared language for leadership and employees
• Defined brand character and personality
• A stronger voice and tone
• A strategic framework for future communication
• A customer-centered narrative for FUEL
• Finished packaging copy that brought the strategy into the physical product

The project is one of my favorite examples of what good brand strategy can do.

It can create alignment inside a company while also creating something memorable outside of it.

The Brand Framework helped Black Rock clarify what it wanted to say.

FUEL gave us the opportunity to actually say it.

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My role

I helped lead the strategy process across workshop facilitation, stakeholder discovery, brand character and personality development, voice and narrative strategy, competitive analysis, and product storytelling.

For the FUEL launch, I helped develop the narrative territories and wrote the final on-pack copy, working alongside Black Rock’s creative leadership to translate the strategy into a customer-facing expression.