With hilariously obvious product placement on Gossip Girl, a flavor created by 50 Cent, and a label mocking Paris Hilton, Vitaminwater had the early aughts on lock.
But now, it’s facing a quarter-life crisis.
Twenty-five years since Vitaminwater’s debut, and nearing two decades since the Coca-Cola Company bought its parent Glaceau, it’s at a crossroads as the beverage industry is flooded with new innovations, consumers seek low-sugar options, and kitschy labels don’t catch eyes like they once did.
“We took a step back for Vitaminwater, and thought, ‘We are iconic. We were relevant, but the landscape has changed,’” Vitaminwater Brand Director Amanda Harkins told Retail Brew. “We still look like what we did in 2000, and maybe that’s not where we should be when we think about the next 25 years ahead.”
The company aimed to revitalize the brand by conducting an audit on what makes a brand cool—and found some ways it could change from the inside out.
Flipping its lid: One pillar of the refresh was a packaging facelift.
Looking at the cool bevs of today across energy, sports drinks, and sodas, bold colors on the packaging were key, Harkins said, with black colorways for its full-sugar products and white for its zero-sugar options helping to better differentiate between the two lines.
The OG Vitaminwater packaging looked “medicinal” to emphasize its vitamin content, Harkins noted, leading some consumers to assume the product tastes like medicine, too. Now, the new packaging puts more emphasis on the brand name and flavors than vitamin content, spreading out the vertical logo from one word to two to be more visible for consumers.
“Irreverence” remains core to the brand’s marketing, Harkins said, so the packaging still contains that “cheeky” romance copy it’s known for, albeit much more brief than the paragraph-long copy that once adorned its packaging to account for the shorter attention spans of the social media age.
Maintaining that irreverent tone is trickier now—when “everything gets scrutinized at every angle”—than it was in the early days, Harkins said. But it aims to continue evolving that copy to stay relevant, so what’s there now will be different in one or two years, she said. Examples now include “Time for a full review of your ex’s profile. That’s some spy work,” on its Focus SKU and “Immune support when adulting gets hard. So, like, every day,” on Power-C. Some timeless copy still remains, i.e., “Get your mind outta the gutter,” on its XXX flavor’s label.
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The taste of time: Vitaminwater found it needed to update the product itself, too, learning a lot from the fallen flavors that’ve been discontinued over the years (RIP, B-Relaxed Jackfruit-Guava). The long-gone Revive fruit punch went out of style and wasn’t unique enough, per Harkins, while, on the other end, Forever You, a coconut lime flavor which featured white curcumin, was axed this year because consumers didn’t know what white curcumin is. The brand was “overthinking functionality,” and found products with niche ingredients are tough sells at top retail partners since they don’t appeal to a wide audience, Harkins said.
The brand has also launched new flavors with the refresh, including its first full-sugar flavor in several years, Blue Raspberry Limeade with multivitamins, along with a new Zero Sugar Pineapple Passionfruit with electrolytes. While its full-sugar line is its biggest, it's also working to grow distribution for the zero-sugar line, Harkins said, as it believes offering both options to consumers helps set it apart from the ever-expanding beverage set. Its top-selling flavor, Power-C, has a Zero Sugar counterpart previously sold in only a few markets, so the company is growing its distribution nationally this year.
Keeping its cool: With all the changes, Vitaminwater doesn’t want to stray too far from what millennial and Gen X fans who have been around since the Gossip Girl Vitaminwater White Party (IYKYK) are familiar with, as those remain its core demographics, Harkins noted. It’s been seeing growth from younger consumers since its Gen Z-focused campaign featuring Lil Nas X in 2022, but it’s recently been underscoring the beverage’s wider appeal since last year’s campaign in collaboration with Spike Lee called “Vitaminwater from New York.”
“Our biggest objective is to make sure that we are a brand for the masses, but we’re always going to have a youthful, playful, and timely point of view,” Harkins said.
While the goal isn’t to create a Vitaminwater for every type of consumer, she believes this range could help push it forward into the next 25 years.
“We do want this to be a brand that can withstand the test of time,” she said.