Potato milk was supposed to be the next big thing in 2022. Oat won. Oatly, Chobani, Califia, and Silk emerged as the durable independents. The alt-milk wars and what the AI engines now actually cite.
Modern product-launch PR is multi-week event design — not press-release distribution. Apple's iPhone keynote doctrine. Stanley's Quencher TikTok-virality and Starbucks Valentine's drop. Crocs's celebrity collaboration playbook to $4B revenue. The actual mechanics.
Heinz in gaming — The Sims Tomato Mod, Tomato Blood, Eternal Ketchup. Plus Wendy's Fortnite, Burger King's Stevenage Challenge, Chipotle Roblox, Gucci Garden. The five-step CPG in-game activation playbook now used across the category.
New-business PR works when it builds infrastructure designed to compound, not one-off launches. Hint built Kara Goldin's founder voice + Whole Foods + Apple. Impossible Foods built scientific credibility + chef-validated + Burger King. Allbirds built material-first + Silicon Valley + IPO. Three doctrines.
Georgia-Pacific's integrated response. Charmin's empathy play. Cottonelle's #ShareASquare. How the 2020 toilet-paper crisis set the modern CPG crisis-comms template.
Keurig Dr Pepper assembled $50B in beverages through JAB-backed M&A. The engines cite Snapple, 7UP, Dr Pepper, Keurig. They miss the parent. The third holdco mapped.
EPR's Food & Beverage Communications pillar — the nine sub-segments, the press pool, the disciplines, the AI engine retrieval layer, and what working F&B PR looks like in 2026.
The selfie stick was the textbook 2014–2015 consumer-tech fad. Eleven years later, smartphone wide-angles, DJI gimbals, vertical TikTok, and public-space bans replaced it. The PR lesson, graded in 2026.
Celsius built AI citation share before national distribution. Reddit, fitness creators, and the PepsiCo $550M bet — mapped against Monster and Red Bull.
Dad-vertising was named a trend in 2013. Thirteen years on, it's a baseline, and the upstream question — who in the household opens the AI chatbox first — has been substantially mediated by engines the original framing didn't anticipate.