NBA player Anthony Edwards and Olympic sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson drank Sprite within the Coca-Cola brand’s most up-to-date “Obey Your Thirst” ads, and the star athletes will not be alone: Sprite has now surpassed Pepsi to change into the number three carbonated soft drink by volume within the U.S, per Beverage Digest data shared with Marketing Dive.
The sales milestone comes after an lively yr of selling that saw the brand bring back “Obey Your Thirst” 30 years after the unique campaign helped establish the brand’s individualist ethos. Launched last April, Sprite’s latest tackle the tagline got here amid a wave of nostalgia-washing, however the brand’s success suggests its what-is-old-is-new-again effort connected with consumers.
“‘Obey Your Thirst’ wasn’t only a relaunch of a platform, but really refreshing it for a brand new generation of consumers. Transparently, most of Gen Z wasn’t conversant in ‘Obey Your Thirst,’ so it was very very similar to launching a brand new campaign,” said AP Chaney, senior creative director of sparkling flavors at Coca-Cola. “The resonance has been great when it comes to the way it showed up and how we’re infiltrating culture.”
The decision to bring back “Obey Your Thirst” speaks to how the platform’s essence — of being true to yourself — resonates with Sprite’s core audience, per research done by the brand. That is very true amid a social-media-heavy period that encourages social pressure around conforming and acting a certain way online.
“What our audience desires to feel is that it’s okay to to be yourself,” said Josh Kroo, vp of sparkling flavors in Coca-Cola’s North American operating unit. “That authenticity is on the core of what we’re showing with the partnerships that now we have and with the way in which that we communicate.”
Picking winners
The launch of “Obey Your Thirst” recreated an iconic 1994 ad that starred Grant Hill, with Minnesota Timberwolves star Edwards subbing in for the NBA Hall of Famer. Edwards’ relationship with Sprite — which continued in a vacation ad that remixed “The Night Before Christmas” and a series of social-first spots — has coincided along with his rising profile. Most recently, Edwards led his team to an upset of LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers in the primary round of the NBA playoffs.
Edwards isn’t the one wagon that the brand hitched itself to early. Sprite last summer tapped Doechii as a participant within the third iteration of its Limelight music platform, weeks before the rapper would capture viral attention on the road to a Best Rap Album on the Grammys and high-profile ad appearances for Nike, Jack within the Box and Major League Soccer. For Sprite, finding the best partners is about finding figures that embody “Obey Your Thirst” — not keying in on a star for celebrity’s sake.
“I live and breathe pop culture, what our consumers are doing and what they’re serious about,” Chaney said. “I wish let’s imagine we do a complete bunch of research into who we’re picking and all these analytics, which we do in a while… [but] it’s more instinctual than anything.”
Those instincts have prolonged to connecting Sprite with subcultures on the rise before they get the notoriety they deserve, because the brand famously did with hip-hop. Sprite this yr was the presenting partner of Unrivaled’s one-on-one tournament, an attention-grabbing play from the emerging women’s basketball league that might be adopted by the NBA.
“One of the things that we were super enthusiastic about on Unrivaled was getting in very early, particularly around women’s sports,” Chaney said. “It’s a spot that we hadn’t really been, and so to do it with such an modern and groundbreaking league, it really wasn’t an issue when it comes to if we must always do it, it was how we must always do it.”
Sprite plans to proceed the partnership with Unrivaled and do more with the league in 2026.
Extending the brand
When Sprite launched the unique “Obey Your Thirst” campaign in 1994, the brand could communicate every thing it wanted the patron to know in a 30-second TV industrial. That is clearly not the case today, as attention and media proceed to fragment across channels. In kind, Sprite has prolonged the present iteration of the campaign, and others, with digital experiences like its “Obey Days” activation powered by QR codes on its packaging.
“All these touch points are a chance to bolster the brand values and what we stand for,” Kroo said. “ We actually sweat every asset pretty hard — big and small — and take into consideration the right way to construct legs to it beyond just what you would possibly experience in a chunk of video.”
Along with its QR code experience, Sprite last month launched Sprite Squad, a text-and-scan activation that offers consumers access to limited-time digital experiences tied to cultural passions in sports, music and fashion. The brand kicked off the trouble by teaming with Black House Radio, a music platform focused on Black DJs that play house music, for an event and merchandise giveaway.
“We want our communication to be a two-way street,” Chaney said. “We don’t desire to only serve messages at [consumers]… it’s also a way for them to attach and interact with the brand, as well.”
The Black House Radio collaboration was with Sprite Chill, a soft drink with a cherry-lime flavor and a proprietary cooling sensation that became a everlasting addition to the brand’s portfolio this yr. Sprite sees flavor innovations (including a forthcoming one which “blur[s] categories”) as platformable experiences that reinforce what the brand stands for and delivers. Innovation and marketing are two parts of the brand’s plan to strengthen its position within the soda standings.
“Sprite does have this momentum that we’re constructing on,” Kroo said. “We are planning to proceed to speculate more behind it, because we predict it can play an excellent vital role in the long run of the overall portfolio.”
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