Up & Run
Research and strategy for Up & Run's children's hydration supplement — finding the insight that reframed a supplement as fuel for the way kids already live.
The Brief
Up & Run came to us with a specific challenge. They had built a credible hydration brand for active adults — gym goers, athletes, everyday movers. Now they wanted to extend into a new and very different audience: children.
The product was a clean, need-based hydration supplement designed to support kids through their days. The brief was to find the central idea that the communication could be built on — something that worked for the new product while staying true to what Up & Run already stood for.
The Problem
The children's supplement space in India has a perception problem that goes deeper than most brands acknowledge.
Parents are comfortable with what they know — Horlicks, Bournvita, sugary drinks, milk. These aren't necessarily good choices nutritionally, but they're familiar. They don't feel like interventions. They feel like food.
Supplements, on the other hand — regardless of how clean or honest their formulations are — carry a different association. They feel like something that changes a child from the inside. Something medicinal. Something that implies the child is lacking. That perception doesn't disappear with better packaging or cleaner ingredient lists. It has to be reframed entirely.
The second tension was category awareness. Most parents in the target audience knew something was off — their kids were tired too quickly, drained after school, sluggish in the heat — but they hadn't connected that problem to hydration. They were problem aware but solution unaware. Telling them about electrolytes and clean formulations wouldn't land until they understood why hydration was the answer in the first place.
Supplements, on the other hand — regardless of how clean or honest their formulations are — carry a different association. They feel like something that changes a child from the inside. That had to be reframed entirely.
The Research
To understand how parents were actually thinking about their children's energy, fatigue, and daily nutrition — I designed a qualitative research questionnaire that mapped their relationship with children's supplements and hydration.
The questions were built around four areas:
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What parents noticed about their children's energy through the day
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What they were currently giving them and why
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What their associations with supplements were
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What would make them trust a new product in this space
What came back was consistent. Parents weren't thinking about hydration at all. They were thinking about energy — and solving it with familiar, sugar-heavy products because the alternatives felt clinical or unnecessary. Nobody was connecting afternoon fatigue, post-sport exhaustion, or heat-related sluggishness to hydration specifically.
I also conducted qualitative research on how global and domestic competitors were approaching children's packaging — mapping what brands like Cure Hydration, Welle Kids, and Hiya were communicating and to whom. What emerged was a consistent pattern: most brands were speaking to parents through clinical and functional language, while trying to attract children through colour and character. Very few were doing both well. Most were choosing one audience at the cost of the other.
That gap — between the problem parents were experiencing and the solution they hadn't considered, between the parent's need for trust and the child's need for energy — became the strategic foundation everything else was built on.
The Insight
Kids don't need to be fixed. They're already moving.
When you spend time in the children's supplement category, you notice that almost every brand is speaking to a deficit. Your child lacks immunity. Your child lacks nutrition. Your child lacks focus. The communication is built around what's missing. But that's not how children experience themselves. Children don't think about what they lack. They think about what they're doing next. School. Sports. Running around. The next thing.
The insight came from observing that simple truth — children are already the most active demographic there is. They have more on their plates than most adults. More movement, more energy expenditure, more heat exposure, more physical output. The hydration they need isn't corrective. It's fuel. This reframe changed everything. The product wasn't a supplement that filled a gap. It was hydration that kept up with kids who never slow down.
Movement became the central idea.
They have more on their plates than most adults. More movement, more energy expenditure, more heat exposure, more physical output. The hydration they need isn't corrective. It's fuel.
The Strategy
The central idea — Movement — anchored everything that followed.
The brand personality drew on the Hero and the Explorer in deliberate combination. The Hero spoke to parents — it said your child is capable, and this supports that capability. The Explorer spoke to children — it said the world is yours to run through, and this keeps you running. Both archetypes served the same product but met their respective audiences exactly where they were.
The positioning reflected the dual audience reality:
For active individuals who refuse to slow down, Up & Run is a hydration brand with clean, need-based formulations that help your body stay hydrated, so you can keep moving.
The tone — confident, warm, functional, empowering — made the brand feel like an ally rather than an authority. Not a lab. Not a doctor. Something closer to a coach who knows your kid better than the category does.
The five communication pillars built from the same foundation — product truth, movement as purpose, everyday encouragement, education that simplified rather than intimidated, and community built around real stories of real kids in motion.
A personal note
This project taught me something specific about entering a new audience with an existing brand.
The temptation is always to build something new — a new identity, a new voice, a new set of values — to speak to a new audience. But the more honest and often more powerful move is to find the thread that already exists in the brand and follow it somewhere new.
Up & Run was already about movement. Children are already movers. The insight wasn't invented. It was recognised.
That's the work I find most interesting — not building a brand idea from nothing, but finding the one that was already there, waiting to be seen