Brand Name: Sprite
Founded By: The Coca-Cola Company
Created by the renowned Coca-Cola Company, Sprite introduced itself first to the world as a lemon and lime flavored caffeine-free and colorless soft drink. The original product of Sprite was released in 1960. After the success of the products, the company released more variants of it and made the brand more interesting and unique in the eyes of the consumers. The main competitor of Sprite is 7up of Pepsi.
How It All Started
Originating in West Germany with a completely different name, Sprite was first introduced in the year of 1959. The name was ‘Fanta Clare Zitrone’ which means Clear Lemon Fanta. The brand was later introduced in the USA after 2 years in 1961. It took some time for Sprite to be the leader in the global market in the lemon-lime soft drink category. They finally achieved the honor in 1989, partially because of the strength of the brand name of its Parent company.
Launching
Sprite initially received a good response in the market upon its release. But the company started to make more variants to keep things interesting for the consumers. Keeping this in mind, in the early 1970s, the company released Sprite with the taste of herbs named ‘Sprite Lemon-Lime Herb’. It was sold only in Germany. Later, in 1974, a new variant of Sprite was introduced in the market called ‘Sprite Zero Sugar’. True to its name, the product did not contain any sugar. But it was renamed to ‘Diet Sprite’ in the year of 1983. It was rebranded again as ‘Sprite Zero Sugar’ in 2019.
The early 2000s saw more unique products of Sprite. The names of some are ‘Sprite Dry Lemon’, ‘Recharge’, ‘Sprite Ice’, ‘Sprite on Fire’ which was ginger flavored. In 2005, an energy drink of Sprite was released with the name of ‘Sprite 3G’. More products like ‘Sprite Duo’, ‘Sprite Green’, ‘Sprite Cranberry’, ‘Sprite Tropical’, ‘Sprite Blast’, ‘Sprite Fiber+’ etc were also released between the years of 2006-2018. The newest variant of Sprite is ‘Sprite Lymonide’ was released in 2019.
Marketing Strategy and the Reasons behind Its Success
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- Colorless Soft Drink: The Coca-Cola Company designed Sprite for those consumers who did not want to have any colored drink. Because the drink had no color. The flavor of it was extremely important. With the company’s idea of making it a refreshment drink, Sprite was made to be lemon flavored. As the taste and the nature of the drink were particularly different from the other drinks of that time, Sprite was rapidly bought and used in creating new kind of Cocktails. With the exquisite green colored packing, the consumers were visualized with the idea of refreshment even more. These factors proved to be the key to give the Sprite brand a positive kick-start as the main aim was to compete with 7up of Pepsi.
- Famous Parent Company: A wide recognition of a company can determine the success of its products. The bigger the reputation base, the bigger the chances are to succeed. The Coca-Cola Company is one of the biggest names in the category of Soft Drink manufacturers. It has a strong reputation base with worldwide recognition. Being a part of such a company, it was not hard for Sprite to be successful in the market. The quality as well as the uniqueness has also helped with this cause. Because of these reasons, Sprite did not take much time to be one of the leading drinks in the world of soft drinks.
- Distribution: Because of the strong distribution of the company, Sprite is available all over the world. As of 2016, the Sprite is supplied to over 200 countries. The company makes sure that their products reach to every possible customer. Because of this, almost every person in every possible city knows the taste of Sprite or at least knows its name. The more the recognition, the better the sale.
- Price and Quality: Price of a product as well as its quality mainly determines the success of the brand. Sprite serves great quality with rich taste. The price of the products has been determined after considering the size of the bottles as well as the price of the rival brand products. Because of this, everyone can afford Sprite and enjoy the unique taste of the product.
- Variety: Having a large variety of items can always help any brand to expand its business. Sprite has a big number of varieties which also serves the quality of the products. Among these variants, some popular ones are ‘Sprite Duo’, ‘Sprite Cranberry’, ‘sprite fiber+’, ‘Sprite Zero Sugar’ etc. This much variety of drinks with different tastes has made Sprite brand unique and kept the consumers refreshed without making them get bored over the same product.
Campaigning
Over the years, Sprite has used the portmanteau word ‘Lymon’, which was made by combining the words lemon and lime. Introducing in 1987, ‘I like the Sprite in You’ was the very first slogan used by the brand. It was very famous and before its discontinuation, many jingles were created around it.
Sprite changed its brand slogan to ‘Obey Your Thirst’ in the year of 1994. They also revamped their logo by making some changes like removing the words ‘Great Lymon Taste’ from it. With this new slogan, the brand tapped into Hip-Hop culture and featured some of the popular artists like KRS-one, LL Cool J, Fat Joe, Grand Puba, Nas, Common etc in their commercials. Later famous basketball players such as LeBron James have also featured in their advertisements. The famous graffiti artist Temper was hired by Sprite to design a limited edition art which appeared on more than 100 million cans and sold across Europe.
Sprite advertisements have always been clever and smart with a tinge of sarcasm. This has attracted the attention of not only the younger generation but the older generations’ too.
Conclusion
Even though starting under a strong parent company, Coca-Cola, Sprite has already made a name for it because curious features it comes with. The brand was first released to compete with Pepsi’s 7up. But their inventiveness has made them reach much higher than their direct rivals as they are now the 2nd best Global brand of Coca-Cola Company.
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