Mountain Dew - Why They're Successful

[Music] Mountain Dew is easily one of the most successful soft drinks in the United States for decades now they have ranked among the top five bestselling soda brands in the country controlling something like 6 to 7% of the overall Market with estimated sales of around $7 billion a year a higher portion of those sales come from the southeast and the Midwest and that makes sense considering it originated in in Tennessee now Coke and Pepsi have always led the industry that's pretty cemented but as far as non-cola products the lead has shifted between Dr Pepper and

Mountain Dew in 1996 after an incredible surgeon popularity Mountain Dew surpassed Dr Pepper but then exactly 20 years later Dr Pepper pulled back ahead so it's been a close race for a while now before I go any further I realize Mountain Dew isn't for everybody it is high in sugar and caffeine and artificially colored a bright yellow but even if you relate to Homer Simpson being repulsed by it and would much rather drink crab juice I hope you can still see it as being a fascinating success story The Way That Mountain Dew is evolved and

remained relevant through so many decades is impressive so in this video I want to talk about the history of Mountain Dew while outlining what I believe to be five of the biggest reasons behind its success starting off with the Citrus flavor not to be confused with lemon lime sodas like seven upper Sprite Mountain Dew can contains orange juice along with extra caffeine and other flavors to give it a distinctive taste that is almost hard to describe in 1932 there were two brothers named Barney and Ali Hartman who operated an orange crush bottling plant in austa

Georgia outside of work they like to drink whiskey mixed with a locally produced lemon lime soft drink called natural setup when sails slowed down during the Great Depression they were forced to shut down and move up to Knoxville Tennessee where they soon took control of a different plant that bottled Pepsi Cola well that lemon lime soda natural setup wasn't available in Knoxville so the Hartman Brothers started making their own version of it that they would distribute to friends and family but they didn't make it available commercially until 1948 when they did they called it Mountain

Dew and that marks its official debut on the market but remember it was still a pretty standard lemon lime soda there was nothing too unique or proprietary about it so it didn't sell that well the following year one of those Brothers Barney Hartman died and that did not help the situation by 1957 the company was struggling the Mountain Dew trademark was practically worthless so they sold the rights to it to a Virginia company called tip Corporation reportedly in exchange for a $7 meal it's hard to believe that the mount Dew trademark was sold for the

price of a meal at one point and that shows how unremarkable it was before that distinctive Citrus flavor which by the way was adopted while it was part of the tip Corporation there is some debate out there as to whether the new flavor was created as a result of Market trials and taste tests or if they took an existing formula and rebranded it but either way Mountain Dew now had that distinctive Citrus flavor was unlike any of the other popular drinks on the market so it quickly became a regional favorites my point here is that

Mountain Dew existed on the market for about a decade as kind of a copycat lemon lime soda and it wasn't until they started using the unique Citrus formula that things really started happening and I mean it when I say things started happening the next reason on my list is that in 1964 Mountain Dew was acquired by Pepsi probably the biggest single reason on the list because they are clearly a company that can build a soda brand leading into the deal Pepsi was having some trouble and that their growth rate was slowing down they just hired

a new CEO named Donald Kendall who would lead the company for the next 23 years over that time he helped orchestrate some big Landmark deals and turn them into a massive business I recommend this video I made if you want to hear more about the size of Pepsi but one of his first moves and kind of a launching point was to acquire Mountain Dew start Distributing it nationally and advertise it heavily by the end of that decade Mountain Dew had become the fastest growing soft drink in the country their sales had more than quadrupled and

it has continued to be their second bestselling soda behind only Pepsi itself maybe this is an odd comparison but I still think it's interesting that Mountain Dew sales today are 35 times higher than the sales of the entire Pepsi company at the time of the acquisition showing how much smaller everything was comparatively back then next up on my list is rebranding because seriously I challenge you to give me an example of a more dramatic Rebrand than Mountain Dew hear me out here early on their mascot was named Willie the hillbilly and all of their branding

had a similar theme I know that might sound kind of random but it actually made perfect sense at the time remember the product originated in Knoxville Tennessee as a mixer for whiskey in fact it is named after a slang term for or moonshine that term was widely used back then there's even an old folk song called good old Mountain Dew that was later made famous by Willie Nelson and used as the basis for the first ever Mountain Dew commercial in 1966 I mean this is Extreme stereotypical hillbilly stuff right here this guy in the commercial

is really bad at shooting turkeys until he drinks Mountain Dew and then he's really good at it and I wish I were kidding when I say that the song from this commercial is just stuck in my head it is not going to come out nipping at that good old Mountain de Hillbillies had become a big thing in pop culture at the time one of the biggest TV shows was The Beverly Hillbillies so they leaned into it with taglines like yahoo Mountain Dew and it'll tickle your in herds yahoo Mountain Dew oh my goodness so even

though it all made sense and it gave them a comedic identity it may not have been the most widely appealing going into the 1970s they set out to Target a younger more active demographic by changing their logo into something that much more resembles the one that they have today and changing their campaign the next one was potentially a little misguided where they showed a bunch of people doing everyday activities without shoes on because the soda gave them that Barefoot feeling you know it's so good it'll knock your socks off and make you want to relax

looking back on it we could see that focusing on people's feet during a soda commercial may not have been the greatest idea but they ultimately found success with the tagline hello sunshine hello Mountain Dew the commercials would show young people running around and having fun in nature settings and throughout the 19 7s they almost quadrupled their sales yet again by the 1990s they just continued building on that youth active lifestyle image by sponsoring the first X Games and coming out with new taglines like get vertical and the one that I remember the most do the

do that was pretty iconic right Mountain do is evolve their branding to appeal to new demographics and that has been a huge part in their efforts to grow and remain relevant over the past 60 plus years today they are even heavily associated with the video game world that is a world by the way that did not exist when Mountain Dew was first emerging an example would be when they came out with game Fuel to go along with the release of Halo 3 in 2007 and then they came out with Mountain Dew amp game Fuel about

a decade later is the first ever energy drink specifically for gamers with a no slip grip resalable lid and ingredient shown to improve accuracy and alertness I don't know about all of that but it is going to lead me to the next reason behind their success multiple variations Mountain Dew is now widely known for releasing uniquely named aggressively advertised often times colorful variations of their products in the 1970s they released a caffeine-free version then in the 1980s it was a sugar-free version but that's all very standard almost the exact same thing that Coke and Pepsi

were doing but then in 2001 they released cherry flavored code red and it was so successful that they kept creating other variations sometimes it would be seasonal or only available in certain places so it was a great way to spark conversation about themselves and get people to run out and buy the new product that they've been hear ing so much about before it's too late some of the more notable ones would be in 2003 orange flavored Live Wire was available for the summer and then kept coming back every year before it was finally made permanently

available very similar to Grape flavored pitch black that was released for Halloween in 2004 that same year they released probably their most popular variation Baja Blast that one was specifically made to be sold at Taco Bell as a way to raise restaurant sales of their high margin Fountain drinks and then after a decade it was finally sold in stores for a limited release and then after another decade to celebrate their 20th Baja versary it was put in stores for the full year in 2008 they had this democracy campaign I'm saying a lot of new words

in this video where soda drinkers helped develop a flavor based on interactive games on their website and then they voted on three finalists that were sold in stores over the summer after 350,000 votes 42% of them said they preferred blue raspberry flavored voltage and that became the new flavor and then on top of that there have been various energy drinks that use the Mountain Dew branding I can truly be here for the next hour detailing various Mountain Dew variations but I'm not going to do that because my intention here is simply to express how they

have stayed relevant by repeatedly releasing new flavors with catchy names and labels that typically prove to be popular my last reason behind their success is a lack of competition back in my first reason I said that signature Citrus flavor was the big new thing on the market way back in the 1950s and everyone else was so slow to react to it Sundrop is a competing soda that predates Mountain Dew but it was still very small at the time and larger companies did not pay much attention to it until Mountain Dew had already proven the concept

to be successful on a national scale today Sundrop is part of the cureg Dr Pepper company but has always been trailing far behind Mountain Dew the obvious direction to look for a competitor to the Pepsi owned Mountain Dew would be Coca-Cola right but no this is actually the only beverage category where Pepsi has consistently beaten Coca-Cola and it hasn't even been close in 1979 Coca-Cola released Mellow Yellow is a direct competitor but it has really fallen short it has been associated with racing ever since being featured on Tom Cruz's car in the movie Days of

Thunder giving it publicity but it is never caught up to the same scale as Mountain Dew and has always trailed far behind in 1997 they tried again much more aggressively when they released Serge with a $50 million marketing campaign starting with two Super Bowl ads in the distribution of 6 million samples and coupons they called it their biggest launch since Diet Coke and it did very well at first but it gained a negative reputation from being unhealthy despite having similar ingredients to Mountain Dew but I guess schools were even Banning it from their vending machines

plus I think the hype died down and people just gravitated back toward Mountain Dew by the end of that decade sales of surge were more than cut in half and it was discontinued altogether in 2003 2 years later Coca-Cola tried a third time with Vault saying it drinks like a soda kicks like an energy drink again none of it worked very well Vault was discontinued in 2011 so they could refocus that energy back over to Mello yellow that's when they relaunched it with new labels and entered new markets but still it is kind of sad

for cocacola they're almost always the ones in control that the other companies are trying to measure up to but in this instance they just cannot close that Gap Mountain Dew established themselves early made some smart decision and has stayed on top of their game it's like peps knows how easy it is to fall behind in that industry so they are not letting their foot off that accelerator for even a second let me know in the comments what is your opinion about Mountain Dew and if you do like it what is your favorite variation of it

maybe it's one that is come and gone and we need to get that conversation going about bringing it back also do you agree with my list of the reasons behind it success or do you think there's more to it why do you think they have grown into a multi-billion dollar brand and any other thoughts you have about Mountain Dew leave them in the comments I'd like to hear what you have to say thank you for watching [Music]