Starry Soda Rebrand: What PepsiCo Got Right and Why It Matters

The Starry soda rebrand is one of the cleaner strategic pivots in recent beverage marketing. PepsiCo retired Sierra Mist in early 2023 after decades of underperformance, replaced it with Starry, and built the new brand around a younger, more culturally connected identity. The brief was simple enough: stop losing ground to Sprite in the lemon-lime category and give the brand something worth talking about.

What makes this worth examining is not the rebrand itself. Rebrands happen constantly. What makes it worth examining is the commercial logic underneath it, and whether the execution matched the ambition.

Why Sierra Mist Had to Go

Sierra Mist launched in 1999. For most of its life, it was a distant second to Sprite in a category that Sprite has owned with remarkable consistency. The brand had multiple reformulations, multiple repositioning attempts, and a brief flirtation with the name “Mist Twst” that nobody asked for and everyone quickly forgot.

I’ve worked with clients in mature, category-dominated markets before. The instinct is always to try harder with what you have: freshen the creative, adjust the media mix, run a promotion. What that instinct misses is that sometimes the brand itself has become the problem. Not the product. Not the distribution. The brand. Sierra Mist had accumulated so much mediocrity over so many years that no amount of good advertising was going to shift the perception. You can’t polish your way out of irrelevance.

PepsiCo made the right call. Retiring a brand that isn’t working is not a failure. Continuing to invest in one that clearly isn’t is.

What the Starry Brief Was Actually Solving For

When you look at the Starry launch, the strategic intent is fairly legible. The brand was positioned around Gen Z, built around energy and attitude rather than the clean, refreshing simplicity that Sprite has owned for decades. The visual identity leaned into bright, high-contrast design. The tone was irreverent. The NBA partnership gave it immediate cultural context.

That’s a coherent brief. The category leader owns “refreshing and simple.” The challenger needs a different lane. Starry chose youth culture and sport, which is a defensible position if you can sustain the investment and the authenticity.

Where I’d push back slightly is on the assumption that Gen Z targeting automatically solves a distribution and trial problem. Younger consumers are not a monolith, and they are more resistant to brands that perform youth rather than earn it. The risk with any challenger brand built around cultural credibility is that the credibility has to be real. You can read more about how brand communication earns permission over time at Copyblogger’s piece on permission marketing, and it’s a useful frame for thinking about why Starry’s approach carries inherent risk alongside its potential.

Starry got the brief right. Whether the execution fully delivered is a more complicated question.

The NBA Partnership: Platform vs. Presence

PepsiCo secured Starry as an official NBA partner, which gave the brand immediate scale and legitimacy. The NBA is one of the few sports properties with genuine crossover appeal to younger audiences globally, not just in the US. It was a smart vehicle.

But I’ve seen enough partnership deals in my time to know that access to a platform is not the same as presence on it. Plenty of brands have paid significant money to appear alongside major sports properties and generated almost nothing in terms of brand equity or commercial return. The partnership creates the opportunity. The creative work and the consistency of execution determine whether anything comes of it.

When I was running an agency and we were managing large media partnerships, the question I always pushed clients to answer was this: if you removed the logo from every piece of content, would anyone know it was you? If the answer is no, the partnership is doing the heavy lifting and the brand is just renting someone else’s audience. That’s not a strategy. That’s a media buy dressed up as one.

Starry’s NBA work showed flashes of genuine brand voice. The campaign work with SZA was a reasonable attempt to connect the brand to a cultural moment rather than just paste a logo on a court. Whether that connection was deep enough to drive lasting preference is harder to judge from the outside.

The PR Dimension: Launching a Brand in Public

From a communications standpoint, the Starry launch was handled well. The announcement was clean. The narrative was clear: PepsiCo was making a deliberate choice, not retreating from a failure. That framing matters. There’s a significant difference between “we’re replacing a brand that didn’t work” and “we’re launching something built for a new generation.” Starry was positioned as the latter, and the coverage largely reflected that framing.

This is where PR strategy and brand strategy have to work in alignment. If the communications team is telling a story that the product and the marketing aren’t backing up, the gap becomes visible quickly. The coverage of a rebrand creates an expectation. If the brand doesn’t deliver on that expectation in market, the goodwill evaporates and the cynicism that follows is harder to shift than the original indifference.

For a deeper look at how brand and communications strategy connect across the full marketing mix, the PR and Communications hub here at The Marketing Juice covers the principles that tend to separate campaigns that hold up from ones that don’t.

PepsiCo’s communications team did the right things at launch. The real test was always going to be what came after.

What Rebrands Actually Change, and What They Don’t

This is the part of the rebrand conversation that tends to get glossed over. A new name, a new visual identity, and a new campaign can change how a brand is perceived. They cannot, on their own, change distribution dynamics, shelf positioning, retailer relationships, or the underlying product quality. Those things require separate work, and they take longer.

Sierra Mist’s problem was not just its name or its identity. It was that Sprite had a stronger product formulation in terms of consumer preference, better distribution, stronger retailer relationships, and decades of consistent marketing investment. Starry inherited some of those structural disadvantages. A rebrand doesn’t reset them.

I spent several years working with clients in categories where the market leader had such entrenched distribution advantages that even a genuinely better product struggled to gain ground. The answer in those situations is rarely a brand refresh. It’s usually a combination of product innovation, channel strategy, and very patient investment in building trial. Rebrands can support that work. They can’t replace it.

What Starry does have in its favour is that PepsiCo has the resources to sustain the investment over time. The risk is that internal pressure for short-term results leads to an early pullback before the brand has had time to build genuine equity. That’s a pattern I’ve seen more times than I’d like. The brand gets a good launch, the initial metrics look reasonable, and then the investment gets reallocated before the work is done.

The Measurement Question Nobody Wants to Ask

How do you know if a rebrand is working? This sounds like a simple question. It isn’t.

The metrics that are easiest to measure, brand awareness, social engagement, share of voice, are not the metrics that matter most commercially. The metrics that matter most, sustained volume growth, improved margin, increased household penetration, take longer to show up and are harder to attribute cleanly to the rebrand versus other factors in the mix.

I’ve judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically focused on marketing effectiveness rather than creative quality. The entries that stand out are always the ones that can draw a clear line from the marketing activity to a commercial outcome. Not “brand perception improved by X points.” Not “we generated 200 million impressions.” A real commercial outcome: market share gained, volume grown, new customer cohorts acquired and retained.

For Starry, the honest answer is that it’s too early to call with confidence. The brand launched in early 2023. Building genuine category share against an entrenched leader like Sprite takes years, not months. The question PepsiCo needs to be asking internally is not “are we getting good press?” but “are we building the kind of brand equity that will translate into sustained commercial performance over a five-year horizon?”

Those are different questions, and they require different measurement frameworks. Tools like Hotjar’s product analytics are useful for understanding digital behaviour, and platforms like Sprout Social’s reporting tools give you a clear view of how content is performing across social channels. But neither tells you whether the brand is building the kind of deep preference that drives long-term commercial value. That requires a different kind of tracking, and a willingness to wait for data that takes time to accumulate.

The Lesson for Brand Strategists Outside the Beverage Aisle

Starry is a beverage brand. But the strategic questions it raises are not specific to beverages. They apply to any organisation considering whether to retire an underperforming brand and start fresh.

The first question is whether the problem is the brand or the business. If the product is weak, the distribution is poor, or the commercial model is broken, a new name and a new logo will not fix any of that. You need to be honest about what you’re actually solving for before you commit to a rebrand.

The second question is whether you have the resources and the patience to see it through. Rebrands that get abandoned halfway through are often worse than no rebrand at all. They create confusion, waste investment, and leave the organisation in a worse position than before. If you’re going to do it, you need to be prepared to sustain the investment long enough for it to work.

The third question is whether your communications strategy is aligned with your brand strategy. The story you tell at launch creates an expectation. If the product, the distribution, and the ongoing marketing don’t back that story up, the gap becomes the story. That’s not a position you want to be in.

PepsiCo got most of these right with Starry. The brief was clear, the launch was well-executed, and the investment in the NBA partnership gave the brand genuine cultural context. The open questions are about patience and sustained execution, which are harder to judge from the outside and harder to sustain internally than any launch campaign.

Understanding how brand strategy and communications work together is something I cover regularly across the PR and Communications section of The Marketing Juice, where the focus is always on commercial outcomes rather than activity for its own sake.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

Frequently Asked Questions