Bringing local personality to a national coffee brand.
The situation
Costa Coffee wanted to strengthen its presence at branch level without diluting the consistency people expect from a national brand. Rather than pushing generic corporate content, the goal was to build a genuine connection with each branch's local community, showing the atmosphere in store and the people behind the counter, not just the coffee.
That meant finding a format that felt native to social platforms like TikTok, where polished, ad-style content tends to underperform against footage that feels real and unscripted.
The challenge
Three things had to work together, and each one could easily have undermined the others. Every video needed to be recognisably Costa, using the tone, visual language and values of the brand, while still giving each branch room to feel like its own place with its own personality.
TikTok audiences can tell within seconds when something is a repurposed advert. The content had to be built for the platform from the ground up: fast paced, authentic, and led by people rather than product shots.
Our approach
We built each shoot around the branch team and the people who actually walk through the door, not a national script imposed on top of a store. Every edit was cut for TikTok first: vertical, quick pacing, in-app style captions, hooks in the first two seconds.
We wrapped the work in a lightweight format guide so new branches could be added without losing the tone that made the early videos work.
The solution
We produced an ongoing stream of short-form video that put branch teams at the centre. Baristas, managers and regulars became the on-screen faces of each store, and the format flexed to match whatever was actually happening on the day, a new drink, a busy morning rush, a slow Sunday, a local event.
The result was content that felt like it came from inside the branch, not from a marketing department.
The results
The work has done exactly what it was designed to: stopped the scroll, opened up genuine engagement with local audiences, and given individual branches a personality on social that no national ad campaign could deliver.
Consistent double-digit engagement rates on TikTok, well ahead of the hospitality benchmark, plus a growing library of on-brand, platform-native assets Costa can keep reusing across branches and channels.
Rollo understood exactly what we needed: content that felt like Costa, but also felt like our branch. The team made it easy for our people to be on camera and the videos landed.
