Red Bull: how they became a media company that happens to sell drinks

Years back, I worked the gaming and esports till, restocking a fridge that was, generously, 80% Red Bull (the other 20% was regret). Half our customers weren’t buying it to drink during the tournament. They were buying it because the tournament felt like a Red Bull event, whether Red Bull sponsored that specific one or not.

2 decades of deliberate work built that feeling.

What did Red Bull do differently?

Red Bull launched in Austria in 1987, built on a Thai energy drink called Krating Daeng. Early taste tests reportedly went badly; testers described it as medicinal, an acquired taste at best.

Most brands would have reworked the recipe. Red Bull left the drink largely alone and rebuilt everything around it instead: extreme sports sponsorship, its own media arm producing films and events, athletes on its payroll, and stunts that had nothing directly to do with the can.

Red Bull Stratos put a man in a pressure suit and dropped him from the edge of space in 2012. MILLIONS watched live. Almost none of it mentioned the drink’s ingredients.

What does the research say?

The company didn’t just sponsor sport, it started behaving like a broadcaster: producing its own content, owning the footage, distributing it everywhere, largely independent of whether a single can got sold that day.

That’s a business model built on an audience that shows up for the identity, with the drink riding along as a membership card.

Nobody buys a Red Bull because the taste won a blind test. They buy it for what a can standing on a desk, or in a cup holder, or on a gaming setup, says about the 3am energy they’re about to spend.

What’s my take?

I’ll admit a bias here: I like the Red Bull F1 team and still drink the odd can of Monster, its biggest rival. The loyalty runs on which story I want on my desk that day, and the drink is just the ticket in.

Most companies chase attention with a bigger ad budget. Red Bull chased it by becoming the thing worth paying attention to in the first place, then let the can travel on the back of that.

The lesson here is narrower than “sponsor extreme sports”: figure out what your customer already loves doing, then become properly useful to that world, rather than interrupting it with a logo.

What would your product need to become before people started showing up for it, drink or no drink?

What’s the last brand you followed for the culture around it rather than the actual product?

Mark