The Starry Rebrand: What PepsiCo Got Right and What It Reveals
The Starry soda rebrand is a case study in how a challenger brand can carve out space in a category dominated by two entrenched players, not by outspending them, but by making a sharper choice about who it is for. PepsiCo retired Sierra Mist in early 2023 and replaced it with Starry, a lemon-lime soda built around a younger, more culturally connected identity. Whether it works long-term depends on whether the brand can do what most rebrands fail to do: hold the line.
Key Takeaways
- Starry is a strategic repositioning, not just a cosmetic rebrand. PepsiCo retired Sierra Mist entirely rather than refreshing it, which is a harder and more honest call.
- The brand’s target audience is Gen Z, and its creative strategy is built around cultural relevance rather than product superiority claims.
- Challenger brands in saturated categories rarely win on taste. They win on identity, association, and distribution.
- The rebrand raises a question every marketing leader should ask: are you solving a brand problem or a business problem? They are not always the same thing.
- Long-term success will be determined by whether Starry can build genuine brand equity or whether it becomes another forgotten SKU in the lemon-lime graveyard.
In This Article
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years watching brands make the wrong call on this. A struggling product gets a new logo, a new name, a new campaign, and the underlying issue, whether that’s distribution, pricing, product quality, or simply a lack of any real reason to exist, goes untouched. The rebrand becomes a press release, not a strategy. Starry is more interesting than that, and it’s worth unpacking why.
Why Sierra Mist Had to Go
Sierra Mist launched in 1999. It was PepsiCo’s answer to Sprite, which is Coca-Cola’s answer to 7UP, which means Sierra Mist was essentially a third-generation response to a category that Sprite has owned for decades. That’s not a great starting position.
The brand was reformulated multiple times, briefly renamed Mist Twst in 2016, then renamed back to Sierra Mist in 2018. Each change generated a small amount of trade press and very little consumer momentum. By the time PepsiCo pulled the plug, Sierra Mist had less than 1% of the US carbonated soft drink market. Sprite had more than 8%.
The decision to retire rather than refresh is the most commercially honest thing PepsiCo could have done. I’ve sat in enough boardrooms to know how hard that call is. There’s always someone in the room who wants to save the brand, who has emotional equity in it, who argues that with the right campaign it can be fixed. Sometimes they’re right. More often, they’re protecting a sunk cost. Sierra Mist wasn’t broken because of its name or its packaging. It was broken because it had no coherent identity and no compelling reason for anyone to choose it over Sprite. A new logo wouldn’t fix that.
Starry gave PepsiCo the chance to start clean. New name, new visual identity, new brand positioning, and critically, a new audience target. That’s not a rebrand. That’s a relaunch with a rebrand as the vehicle.
What the Starry Brand Strategy Actually Is
Starry’s positioning is built around Gen Z. The brand’s tagline, “Hit Different,” is doing a lot of work here. It’s casual, it’s culturally coded, and it signals clearly that this brand is not trying to talk to the same people who have been buying Sprite for thirty years.
The visual identity leans into this. Bright, high-contrast, with a character-led mascot system featuring two cartoon figures called Lem and Lime. It’s playful without being childish, which is a difficult balance to strike. The creative direction has a strong social-native sensibility. It looks like something designed to be shared, not just seen.
PepsiCo also made a significant media investment in the launch, anchored around the NBA and WNBA. Sports sponsorship for a lemon-lime soda aimed at younger consumers is not a new idea, but the execution matters. Sprite has owned basketball culture for decades, so going after the same territory is either brave or foolish depending on how well it’s done. The WNBA angle is interesting because it signals cultural awareness rather than just demographic targeting, which is a more sophisticated play.
When I was growing the agency at iProspect, we worked across a wide range of FMCG and beverage clients, and the consistent challenge was always the same: how do you build brand preference in a category where the product is functionally indistinguishable from the competition? You can’t win on taste. Blind taste tests in carbonated soft drinks are notoriously unreliable as brand predictors. People choose based on habit, association, and identity. Starry is trying to build the right associations with the right audience before those habits are formed. That’s the correct strategic instinct.
If you want more context on how brand strategy intersects with communications and public narrative, the PR and Communications hub covers the mechanics of how brands manage their public positioning across a range of situations, from rebrands to reputational challenges.
The Challenger Brand Problem in a Two-Player Category
Lemon-lime is effectively a two-player category. Sprite dominates. 7UP is a distant second. Everyone else is noise. Starry is entering a market where the leader has decades of brand equity, massive distribution, and deep cultural roots in the spaces it wants to occupy. That’s a structural problem that great creative cannot fully solve.
The honest assessment is that Starry’s ceiling as a standalone brand is probably limited unless PepsiCo commits to the kind of sustained investment that builds real brand equity over years, not quarters. I’ve seen this pattern play out across multiple categories. A challenger brand launches with strong creative, gets good PR coverage, shows promising early numbers, and then the budget pressure starts. The campaign gets cut. The media weight drops. The cultural relevance fades. Within three years, the brand is back in the same position as its predecessor.
The brands that break through in saturated categories tend to share one characteristic: they make a very specific choice about who they are for, and they hold that line even when it’s uncomfortable. There’s a useful lens here from how David Bowie built Ziggy Stardust, which is not as far from brand strategy as it sounds. Committing to a persona, a world, a specific audience, and refusing to dilute it for broader appeal. Most brand managers don’t have the nerve for that. Most clients don’t either.
Starry’s Gen Z focus is the right strategic choice, but it only works if PepsiCo resists the temptation to broaden the appeal when the early numbers don’t move fast enough. Gen Z brand equity takes time to build. The cohort is skeptical of brand intent, highly attuned to inauthenticity, and makes purchasing decisions in ways that don’t always show up cleanly in short-term sales data.
The Performance Marketing Trap Rebrands Often Fall Into
Here’s something I’ve noticed across the brands I’ve worked with over the years. When a rebrand launches, the performance marketing team tends to get excited. New creative assets, new messaging, new audience targeting parameters. The early metrics look good because there’s novelty effect, there’s PR-driven search volume, and there’s a burst of social engagement. The attribution models assign credit. The rebrand looks like it’s working.
What those models are often capturing is existing intent from people who were already going to engage with the brand. The lemon-lime drinkers who were already PepsiCo loyalists, the marketing press, the social media observers. It’s not new demand. It’s existing demand wearing different clothes.
I spent years earlier in my career overweighting lower-funnel performance signals. It took time and a lot of honest conversations with clients about what the numbers were actually measuring before I understood the gap between capturing intent and creating it. A rebrand like Starry needs to reach people who have never thought about this category, who have a Sprite habit and have never questioned it. That requires sustained brand investment at the top of the funnel, in places where the audience is before they’re in a buying frame of mind. That’s harder to measure and harder to justify in a quarterly review, which is exactly why most brands don’t do enough of it.
The tools exist to understand where audience attention actually lives. Understanding how audiences behave on platforms like Reddit gives you a different picture of cultural conversation than your standard social listening dashboard. For a brand like Starry that is explicitly chasing cultural relevance with a younger audience, that kind of qualitative signal matters as much as the quantitative dashboard.
What the Rebrand Gets Right About Communications
One thing PepsiCo handled well was the communications sequencing around the Sierra Mist retirement. They didn’t try to spin it as an evolution or a refresh. They retired the brand, announced Starry as a new entity, and let the story be what it was: a clean break. That’s the right call from a PR standpoint.
When brands try to position a complete overhaul as a natural evolution, the press sees through it, consumers see through it, and the narrative becomes about the gap between what the brand is saying and what it’s doing. I’ve worked on enough brand transitions to know that honesty about the nature of the change, even when it involves admitting that the previous version wasn’t working, tends to generate better coverage and better consumer response than the managed spin version.
The Starry launch also benefited from being genuinely newsworthy. Retiring a brand that has existed for over two decades is a real story. The name, the visual identity, the mascots, the NBA partnership, all of it gave journalists and content creators something to write about. That earned media value is significant for a brand that is trying to build awareness from scratch.
The communications work didn’t stop at launch either. Ongoing partnerships, athlete endorsements, and cultural activations have kept the brand in conversation. That’s the right approach for a brand at this stage of its lifecycle. You need to be consistently present in the cultural spaces your target audience occupies, not just loud at launch and silent for the rest of the year.
There’s a broader set of principles here that apply well beyond this specific case. The PR and Communications section of The Marketing Juice covers how brands manage narrative, handle transitions, and build reputational capital over time. The Starry case is a useful reference point for anyone thinking through a brand transition of their own.
The Risks That Could Still Sink It
Every rebrand carries execution risk, and Starry is no exception. The risks here are specific and worth naming clearly.
The first is budget discipline. Challenger brand building requires patience and sustained investment. The moment PepsiCo starts treating Starry as a performance marketing problem rather than a brand building problem, the strategy collapses. You cannot buy your way to cultural relevance with retargeting ads.
The second is authenticity erosion. Gen Z audiences have a finely tuned radar for brands that are performing cultural relevance rather than earning it. The mascot characters and the “Hit Different” positioning work right now because they feel considered. If the brand starts chasing trends rather than setting its own tone, that perception will shift quickly and publicly.
The third is distribution dependency. Starry lives or dies on its ability to get shelf space and fountain placement. PepsiCo’s distribution network is a genuine competitive advantage here, but it’s not a substitute for brand pull. Retailers allocate shelf space based on velocity. If Starry doesn’t turn fast enough, it loses space regardless of how good the creative is.
I’ve seen campaigns derailed by far less than structural distribution challenges. We once had to abandon an entire Christmas campaign for a major telecoms client at the eleventh hour because of a music licensing issue that emerged late in production, despite having specialist consultants involved from the start. We rebuilt the concept, got client approval, and delivered in a fraction of the original timeline. The lesson wasn’t about licensing. It was about how quickly the things outside the creative work can determine whether the strategy lands at all. For Starry, the creative is strong. The non-creative variables are the ones to watch.
What Marketers Should Take From This
The Starry rebrand is worth studying not because it’s guaranteed to succeed, but because it represents a more honest and strategically coherent approach to brand transition than most companies manage. PepsiCo made a hard call, built a clear positioning, chose a specific audience, and invested in the communications infrastructure to support it. That’s more than most brands do.
The lessons that transfer to other contexts are straightforward. When a brand isn’t working, diagnose the actual problem before reaching for the rebrand lever. If the problem is identity and positioning, a rebrand can help. If the problem is distribution, pricing, or product quality, a new logo will not save you. Once you commit to a repositioning, choose your audience specifically and hold the line. Broad appeal is the enemy of brand distinctiveness. And invest in brand building with the same rigour you apply to performance. The metrics are harder to read, but the long-term value is real.
For anyone managing a brand transition or thinking about how to frame a strategic shift in the market, the principles of good communications strategy are consistent regardless of category. Understanding your audience, being honest about the nature of the change, and building a narrative that holds up over time rather than just at launch. Those are not complicated ideas. They’re just consistently underexecuted.
You can find more thinking on brand communications and strategic positioning across a range of contexts at the PR and Communications hub on The Marketing Juice.
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.
