‘There was a conversation’: Vita Coco rides out TikTok U.S. uncertainty with its safety nets built
By Seb Joseph • February 2, 2026 •
Ivy Liu
Even as TikTok’s U.S. ownership shake-up fuels uncertainty and some audience drift, Vita Coco is staying put, keeping the platform central to its social marketing without mistaking it for a permanent foundation.
That stance, according to its CMO Jane Prior, isn’t denial. It’s restraint. When talk of a U.S. deal first surfaced, the brand adjusted its expectation and kept moving. Now, the uncertainty just reads like the cost of doing business in an internet era where platforms wobble as often as they win.
Because leaving would mean abandoning years of momentum — the audience, the creative fluency and the cultural muscle memory — its marketers have been stacking there since 2021. Over that period, TikTok has grown to account for around 70% of its social spend, which is the bulk of its marketing outlay. Until the floor actually caves in, Vita Coca’s marketers are still running plays.
The returns help explain the calm. On Jan. 22, the same day the app’s U.S. ownership deal was ratified, creator Romeo flipped a Vita Coca jingle after the brand reached out amid his viral Dr Pepper moment. What followed was the kind of fast moving brand-creator loop TikTok has become known for. Eight days in, Romeo’s Vita Coco video had racked up roughly 34.5 million views, according to the brand. In doing so, its own account added more than 130,000 followers.
And the gains aren’t just viral. According to the brand, Google searches for Vita Coco spiked to a four-year high that week, landing 22% above any other week in the past three months. What’s more, people are pledging online to buy their first-ever Vita Coco purchases like they’re participating in a trend, going so far as to share videos of themselves drinking it when they do.
“We sell coconuts not pacemakers so we’ve tried to develop a self-deprecating personality around the brand,” said Prior, who oversees a team of 30 people, seven of whom work on the content team that oversees social and influencer marketing. “If we took ourselves too seriously we wouldn’t be nice people.”
That’s the brand’s social strategy distilled. Like most brands, Vita Coco’s marketers track culture closely then moves fast — often within 36 hours — when the right opening appears. Sometimes that means paying a signal creator, sometimes several, sometimes none at all. The through-line is the emphasis on organic reach. Paid amplification has its role but more often the investment goes into the creator or the content itself, with the belief that when something is right, culture does the distribution.
“I don’t think the overall allocation [of dollars] to social has increased but in terms of what we spend on creators, it’s always been a combination of organic, earned, owned,” said Prior. “The paid piece of it is a little bit of the gravy but it’s not the core.”
Whether that equation holds under a new ownership structure — and a U.S.-specific version of the algorithm — is the lingering variable. For now, Vita Coco is assuming nothing. The trickle of users drifting away from the app could swell or it could stall. Either way, the brand has contingencies ready.
“There was a conversation last year that TikTok was going away and at that point our sort of hypothesis was that the conversations would shift to other channels like YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels,” said Prior. “We’ve made sure we’ve got a presence on all those to be able to pivot.”
If that shift comes, the content model should travel too. Its built more around internet culture and short-form behavior not platform-specific mechanics. In Prior’s view, Reels currently functions as the secondary lane to TikTok with Shorts the merging one — adjacent plays rather than wholesale replacements.
“When there was the possibility of TikTok shutting down last year we knew that the users weren’t just going to go away because we could see from what we were doing on Reels that they were engaging with the same sort of content,” said Prior.
Whatever happens to the platforms, creators are the constant for Vita Coco. They sit at the center of its marketing strategy, an extension of the brand’s long-standing reliance on word of mouth over heavy ad spend. The mix runs wide — athletics, celebrities, creators of all sizes and everyday fans surfaced through organic user-generated content.
“Oftentimes, particularly with micro-influencers, we’ll find UGC of someone using the brand who’s not being paid, and then we’ll engage with them and develop an idea to do something with them,” said Prior.
The mindset behind these moves skews long-term, even if the contracts don’t. Vita Coco’s marketers avoid one-off transactional deals, preferring to work repeatedly with creators who genuinely use the product and feel like a natural fit. Briefs are kept loose, scripting is minimal and authenticity is treated as the performance driver, said Prime. If creator content begins to gain organic traction, paid media may be layered on to accelerate reach but momentum is expected to start with the creator and their audience not the media budget.
“We don’t really love short-term transactional partnerships,” said Prior.
This isn’t a brand hedging its TikTok exposure. It’s a company that has always marketed like a challenger, leaning on word of mouth and other people telling its story because it never had the budget to outshout bigger rivals. TikTok happens to be the best stage for that model right now but the system isn’t platform specific.
“Periods of ownership change or platform disruption are not necessarily a signal of long-term instability,” said Ric Hayes, chief strategy officer at marketing agency Brave Bison. “While in some cases excessive change to the product, customer experience or brand can introduce risk, we’ve seen ownership transitions strengthen platforms, as with Meta’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp.”
