How United Sodas Can Win the Soda 2.0 Moment (Before It Gets Outshouted)

Welcome to Marketing Chronicles. A monthly dose of strategy and creativity for brands, agencies, and businesses — delivered on the second Wednesday of every month. If you like what you see and you’re not already a subscriber, join us for free.

Hello Marketing Chroniclers.

For the first deep-dive column of 2026 I am doing an analysis on a lesser known “functional” soda brand": United Sodas.

While all the furore in the sub-category is around Olipop and Poppi, there are smaller emerging players that have a real shot at breaking through and establishing themselves as legitimate competitors.

Drop me a line on LinkedIn if anything stands out to you!

Enjoy 🧠

COLUMN/

How United Sodas Can Win the Soda 2.0 Moment (Before It Gets Outshouted)

Every category that “comes back” does so in disguise. It returns wearing a different outfit, speaking in a slightly different accent, and asking to be taken seriously again by a public that had already made up its mind. Soda’s disguise, this time, is health. Not the severe, joyless kind of health that makes everything taste like penance, but the modern kind: functional claims, low sugar, ingredient scrutiny, influencer aesthetics, and the soft promise that indulgence doesn’t need to feel like a moral failure.

That’s why this moment matters. Soda isn’t just growing; it’s changing in meaning. What was once a guilty pleasure is now being repositioned as a lifestyle choice, and in the process, the category has become one of the loudest battlegrounds in consumer-packaged goods. Better-for-you challengers have turned the aisle into a cultural conversation, and now Big Soda is moving in with its own formulations and muscle. In other words: the “Soda 2.0” moment is real, and it’s already being captured at scale.

So where does that leave United Sodas?

According to Tracksuit’s U.S. brand tracking data, United Sodas’ problem is not what most founders would fear. Consumers aren’t rejecting it. They’re not suspicious of it. They’re not rolling their eyes at the premise. United Sodas’ problem is simpler and more brutal: most Americans don’t know it exists.

The Category Is Crowded. United Sodas Is Invisible

Tracksuit data tells us that the soft drinks category is highly penetrated and highly competitive. That’s important context because in mature categories, “good product” is never enough. The baseline is already good. The shelves are already full. The consumer already has a default brand in their head, and default brands don’t get displaced by nuance. They get displaced by repetition, visibility, and distinctiveness — the basic mechanics of mental availability.

That’s where the data lands with unusual clarity. United Sodas sits at roughly 1% awareness. In the same tracking set, Poppi sits around 39% and Olipop around 31%. Those numbers don’t merely describe a gap; they describe different stages of existence. Poppi and Olipop are brands with established mental presence. United Sodas is a brand that is still largely absent from memory.

And when a brand is absent from memory, everything that follows becomes almost impossible to interpret. Low consideration is not necessarily a signal of low appeal. Low preference is not a verdict on quality. Flat usage is not proof the product isn’t working. Often, it’s simply what happens when the market hasn’t been exposed to you at scale. To put it simply: United Sodas’ challenge is visibility, not rejection.

The Great Soda Misunderstanding: Consumers Don’t “Choose,” They Recall

One of the most persistent myths in marketing is that consumers are constantly “choosing” between brands. As if the buyer stands at the fridge, weighing value propositions with a tiny spreadsheet in their head. In reality, most choice is retrieval. People don’t deliberate; they remember. Brands compete to be the one that comes to mind quickly, in the right situation, with the right emotional texture.

That is why awareness matters, but not as a vanity metric. Awareness is a proxy for whether the brand is even eligible to be bought. If United Sodas is at 1% awareness, then for 99% of people, the brand is not in the consideration set at all — not because they’ve rejected it, but because it never enters the mind. And if a brand isn’t in the mind, it doesn’t matter how good the packaging is, how balanced the sweetness is, or how clean the ingredient list reads. None of that can operate until the brand is mentally available.

This is also why it’s a mistake to frame United Sodas’ situation as “a funnel problem.” At 1% awareness, optimizing the bottom of the funnel is like polishing a door handle on a house no one can find. The job isn’t conversion. The job is presence.

United Sodas Isn’t Weakly Perceived. It’s Thinly Perceived

Tracksuit’s perception data provides the second key insight — and it’s even more instructive than awareness. Among those who are aware of United Sodas, the perception map is dominated by a word that should make any strategist nervous: “good.” It’s not a negative association, but it’s also not a useful one. “Good” is what consumers say when they have no sharper category memory to attach; it’s a compliment that signals pleasantness without specificity.

United Sodas also picks up lighter associations like “carbonated” and “unique,” but the center of gravity remains generic. And in a category where the leading challengers have crowded their perception maps with highly legible meaning — distinct health and functional associations that collapse into memorable cues — generic goodness is not a competitive position. It is an absence of one.

Competitors like Olipop and Poppi have built ownable health and functional associations that help convert awareness into usage, and United Sodas does not yet own those kinds of distinctive associations. That observation is valuable because it explains why “being liked” is not the same as “being chosen.” Liking is soft. Choosing is a memory reflex.

The Temptation to Copy the Leaders (and Why It’s a Trap)

At this point, many brands do what the market rewards in the short term: they copy the dominant code. If gut health is working, we’ll talk gut health. If fiber is the category badge, we’ll find a way to add fiber. If the culture is rewarding functional claims, we’ll manufacture a functional claim.

That response is understandable — and often disastrous.

United Sodas is not positioned as a functional soda first. Its aesthetic and worldview are different. It’s a brand that feels like it is trying to rescue soda from becoming medicine. That’s a real strategic opportunity, especially as the category risks over-claiming, over-explaining, and exhausting consumers with benefits that start to sound like supplement labels. But the opportunity only exists if United Sodas makes that worldview explicit and repeatable. Right now, it isn’t. The market isn’t holding the idea in its head yet.

So United Sodas faces a strategic fork that most challengers don’t like admitting: you can either join the code and fight incumbents on their terms, or you can build a different code and fight for distinctiveness. The first route might feel safer; the second route is how brands become memorable.

What the Data Is Really Saying: This Is a Mental Availability Job

The dataset’s conclusions are unusually direct: United Sodas appears to be at an early stage, and the growth unlock is building mental availability and clearer distinction — not lower-funnel optimization. In other words, United Sodas doesn’t need a more clever conversion play. It needs to become easier to remember, in more situations, for more people.

That means three practical implications, all of which are uncomfortable in a world addicted to performance metrics.

First, United Sodas needs reach. Not micro-targeted precision masquerading as strategy, but real reach. Broad exposure is what turns a brand from “nice” into “known,” and from “known” into “habitually retrieved.” This is especially true in low-involvement categories like soft drinks, where most purchasing is quick, habitual, and heavily influenced by what is most mentally and physically available.

Second, United Sodas needs to choose what it wants to stand for in the buyer’s mind. Not in a lofty brand manifesto sense, but in the brutally practical sense of “what do you want people to say about you in one line?” “Good” is not enough. Poppi and Olipop have compressed their meaning into a set of cues consumers can repeat. United Sodas needs its own compressible meaning. That meaning can be functional, but it doesn’t have to be; it simply has to be consistent and distinctive.

Third, United Sodas must treat its design system as a distinctive asset strategy, not just an aesthetic preference. Minimalism can become a powerful recognition shortcut — but only if it is deployed consistently and seen frequently enough to become familiar. Distinctiveness is not something you “have.” It’s something the market learns through repetition.

The Real Risk: Becoming a Beautiful Brand No One Buys Because No One Thinks of It

United Sodas’ situation is not rare. It is the classic challenger trap in a mature category: premium sensibility, strong intentions, good product and insufficient mental presence. When a brand sits in that trap, it often turns inward. It starts treating growth as a product problem or a messaging problem. It begins cycling through copy variants, retail promos, influencer partnerships, or brand collaborations, hoping something sparks.

But the Tracksuit data suggests United Sodas isn’t missing a spark. It’s missing oxygen. 

In categories like soda, the biggest growth lever is rarely “deepening loyalty.” It’s widening the buyer base: acquiring more light buyers, reaching more future buyers, and being the brand that shows up in memory when the situation arises. United Sodas can’t deepen what it doesn’t yet have. It needs to first become mentally present at scale.

And that brings us back to the most important number in the entire pack: 1% awareness. 

That is not a condemnation. It is a diagnosis. It means United Sodas is early. It means the brand still has time. But it also means the next chapter cannot be written like a niche brand.

The Soda 2.0 moment is happening now. And in moments like these, history tends to be written by the brands that become easiest to remember — not the ones that are merely the most tasteful.

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram

• 🗣 For speaking engagements, you can reach me at [email protected]

• 💌 In case you missed it: How To Think Better — The 250-year strategy, AI as value-creation tool, social sentiment, and 4 key questions for category analyses

PPA 

Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing strategist with in-depth experience building brand and communications strategies for top-tier B2C and B2B organizations across North America. His repertoire extends from crafting and executing integrated multi-media brand marketing campaigns to the commercialization of performance-driven innovations for multimillion-dollar and nascent brands alike.