Starry: Product Sounds in Beverages
Pepsi’s new lemon-lime soda, Starry, targeting Gen-Z. [Photo: PepsiCo]
Try not to hear this,” Coca-Cola’s 2019 campaign encourages their audience not to mentally input their own sounds to still images of Coca-Cola being opened, poured, and fizzing. It was a window into the world of beverage campaigns. Even as far back as 1961, Coca-Cola used the “fizzing” and “pouring” sound of the beverage as a way to promote the delicious and refreshing nature of their sugary beverage. Coca-Cola is not the only beverage to be branding their products with natural sounds; Pepsi, Budweiser, and more recently Heineken are a few other beverage brands that have been prominently using these sounds for years.
Beverage sounds can be extremely effective, which is why they are used so often. For instance, beverage brands sound more premium if they use the sounds of bottles over cans, pouring over opening, and high pressure over low pressure (Almiron et al., 2020). These features can quite heavily affect the consumers’ desire to buy the beverage as even something like the “pop” of a Snapple indicates the untampered and fresh nature of the bottle’s content.
While using product sounds can be a good mechanism to encourage positive and related consumer connection to the beverage, it should not be the entirety of a brand’s sonic strategy as it is not really unique. This lack of originality is not just bad for building brand equity but also is unownable. The EUIPO and USPTO, (European Union Intellectual Property Office of Europe & U.S. Patient and Trademark Office) both require a sound to have a unique, differentiable, and creative aspect to be patented. This leaves brands that use product sounds as their main sonic identity in a dangerous position as bottle opening, pouring, and fizzing sounds are not subject to protection due to the fact they are “usually associated with certain goods and services.” (EUIPO, 2021)
This leads to a new player in the beverage market: Starry. You may have seen Starry recently if you live in the U.S. and asked yourself: what is that, where did it come from, and how has it filled the shelves of every market I go to overnight? Those are valid questions as it feels like one day this beverage brand just appeared out of nowhere. Starry is PepsiCo’s new lemon-lime soda, which is supposed to be a direct competitor to Coca-Cola Company’s Sprite. Starry debuted in January of 2023 after the discontinuation of Sierra Mist.
Starry has already made its presence known through their NBA sponsorship and their mass push to target Gen-Z; however, they are still finding their sonic identity. Using our Sonic Radar® tool from Sonic Hub®, we have been able to analyze Starry’s sonic brand from its birth. We found that it is falling into similar traps as previous beverage brands by using a lot of non-branded custom music (42%) while continuing to have a high amount of content that uses no music (33%), often with the previously discussed product sounds. One of their most popular commercials is the “Starry Symphony,” which creates a track using the can-opening sound of Starry. Although this video is fun and visually creative, with eyes closed the “Starry Symphony” could be the “Sprite Symphony” or even the “Bud Light Symphony” without much question.
While a brand like Starry may want to use product sounds in their commercials to capitalize on an already mentally existing association between sound and product, they will likely want to differentiate themselves with more unique sonic assets. Starry has the rare opportunity to build a sonic identity from the birth of its brand while having one of the largest CPG beverage companies economically backing it.
As Starry is only five months old, it is not yet time to make conclusions about the effectiveness of its sonic strategy. Nevertheless, as of now, they seem to be falling into the enticing trap of generic product sounds that may help create a consumers’ momentary interest in freshness and quality but make no true difference in promoting them as a unique beverage option from other lemon-lime sodas.