The idea of combining lime with black cherries in a beverage may not be intuitive for some foodies out there, but it appears to have been for the nearly 116,000 users on vitaminwater‘s flavorcreator application. The Coca-Cola-owned company has been running an ambitious campaign over the past month that includes a Facebook app, an active Facebook page, television commercials, YouTube videos, and more.

Vitaminwater is going beyond normal brand marketing, and trying to figure out Facebook users’ tastes to determine what new flavor of vitaminwater to introduce next spring.

The app actually has three steps, two of which are now complete. The first step asked users to pick their favorite flavors, and scoured a wide range of web sites for information about those flavors — see the screenshot for “Mint” for what that looked like.

And because this is vitaminwater, the new flavor will also have its own special selection of vitamins. Actually, all vitamins, and then some: “vitamins a to zinc + caffeine.” This is the result of the second step, a series of light-hearted games and quizzes that tried to figure out what sort of vitamins each user needed most — the answer was apparently “a lot.”

The company based the app as a tab on its vitaminwater Facebook page, and as a result the page itself was one of the fastest growers for a couple weeks in September. By this point it has more than doubled from 410,000 to 981,000 today. These are fans that vitaminwater can now promote the new flavor to when it becomes available, as well as any other campaigns it does in the future.

However, users who came to the fan page still had to install the app to participate. Given that the app has 116,000 fans, it seems the company did not convert hundreds of thousands of users from fans to market research subjects.

Now, in the third part of the campaign, users can form teams within the app on Facebook and enter a contest to design the bottle for the new flavor. The winning team will get $5,000. Celebrities Carrie Underwood and long-time vitaminwater business partner 50 Cent will help choose the winner.