New York
CNN
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When Coca-Cola fully took control of BodyArmor in 2021 in a $5.6 billion deal, the company had the goal of it “becoming the #1 global sports drink,” toppling PepsiCo’s Gatorade from its top-selling position.
About four years later, BodyArmor remains stuck behind rival Gatorade and sister brand Powerade. The drink is beset with several problems, including more competition, a muddled identity and stagnating sales that forced its parent company to take a $760 million write-down of the brand last April.
BodyArmor is a “little lost in the middle,” said Howard Telford, head of soft drinks for research firm Euromonitor. “It wouldn’t surprise me if it hadn’t met expectations because it was quite a big purchase at the time.”
On Thursday, BodyArmor announced a “rebirth” of itself, with refreshed packaging, a tweaked logo and its largest-ever advertising campaign. The splashy ads feature athletes like NFL player Joe Burrow and WNBA star Sabrina Ionescu and will make its debut this weekend during the NHL playoffs.
“One of our biggest barriers right now is just not a lot of people know about who we are and what we’re about,” Tom Gargiulo, BodyAmor’s chief marketing officer, told CNN. “We think there’s a massive opportunity ahead of us in terms of really exploding this brand’s growth.”
Launched in 2011, BodyArmor positioned itself as a healthier alternative to other sports drinks, like Gatorade. It used coconut water, for example, and touted its use of natural flavors and sweeteners.
BodyArmor first rose to prominence following investments from celebrities, most notably the late Kobe Bryant in 2013, who took a 10% stake and became the face of the brand. And as soft drinks fell out of favor from consumers, BodyArmor attracted the attention of Coca-Cola. The beverage giant took a 15% stake in 2018 before fully acquiring it a few years later in the company’s biggest brand acquisition ever.
But the transition into the $300 billion conglomerate has been anything but smooth. Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey bluntly said in a 2023 interview with the Wall Street Journal that there have been some “hiccups” in bringing BodyArmor under its umbrella and combining it with Powerade, the company’s budget-minded sports drink.
“It’s not atypical that when you buy a smaller company and bring it over that there’s some disruption in the short term,” Quincey told the newspaper. “There was certainly more than we would have liked or expected. And now we have to kind of reset ourselves.”
BodyArmor CEO Federico Muyshondt acknowledged that there had been growing pains moving from an investment to a fully owned company.
“Coca-Cola is a company, but it’s also a system,” he told CNN. “So a brand that operates on the periphery and a brand that operates inside of the system are two separate things.”
Under Coca-Cola, BodyArmor’s portfolio has expanded with several variations of the flagship brand including a lower-calorie version, an alkaline water and a hydration powder to compete with fast-growing Liquid I.V.
Two additions that have become bright spots for BodyArmor are its sugar-free line and rapid rehydration beverages, similar to Electrolit. Both have generated $100 million in sales since their launch a year ago, Muyshondt revealed, crediting marketing and distribution help from Coca-Cola for making them successes.
Competition, big and small
Over the past few years, the sports drink category has grown beyond a basic slate of lime or cherry-flavored drinks for die-hard athletes. Now, its filled with upstart competitors touting benefits aimed at the less athletically inclined.
“It used to be a fairly narrow category and a very defined proposition around sports and athletic activity,” Telford told CNN, but now “hydration isn’t really about sports” with younger customers gravitating toward drinks they perceive as healthy.
Consumers have tons of new options, ranging with offerings from sports superstars like Leo Messi and Steph Curry; popular influencers like Alex Cooper’s Unwell Hydration and Logan Paul’s Prime; and smaller, cult-favorite brands like Local Weather and Leisure, all of which are fighting for market share.
That influx of new options, plus rising prices, has dented Gatorade, Powerade and BodyArmor’s success, Telford said. Gatorade’s market share has dipped but remains in first place at nearly 62%, while Powerade is in second at 14.5% and BodyArmor has grown but still sits in third at nearly 12%, according to Euromonitor.
Telford said it was likely Coca-Cola’s hope that BodyArmor would have been in second place by now, but the acquisition happened during the height of the popularity around Paul’s Prime drink, which has since “collapsed” in sales. That gives BodyArmor an opportunity to reintroduce itself.
“I can understand the need to kind of reset and maybe draw some clear lines about ‘Who is our consumer?’” Telford said, adding that a better differentiation between Powerade and BodyArmor is “probably overdue.”
For BodyArmor’s Muyshondt, having “more competitors is a beautiful thing because you don’t see a lot of competition entering categories that are not growing.”
“Each competitor is going to do their own thing and only time will tell who who can survive and who can’t,” he said. “Our North Star is very clear: We want to become number one.”
