How carbonated drinks became culture signals

The carbonated soft drinks category has always been competitive. What has changed is why people choose one brand over another.

Recent rankings from YouGov show a clear shift in how consumers perceive fizzy drinks — not as interchangeable products, but as cultural signals tied to age, lifestyle and media behaviour.

At the top end, San Pellegrino leads overall consideration. Pepsi Max is outperforming its parent brand. Fanta dominates with Gen Z. And Fever-Tree continues to quietly own older, more affluent audiences.

This isn’t coincidence. It’s a reflection of how brands now live — or fail — inside culture.

From Product Choice to Identity Signal

Carbonated drinks were once chosen on habit, availability and price. Today, they operate closer to fashion than FMCG.

San Pellegrino’s rise signals more than taste preference. It reflects a demand for restraint, sophistication and lifestyle cues in a category historically defined by mass appeal. Packaging, tone and context matter as much as flavour. The drink is no longer just consumed — it’s placed.

This is the defining shift: drinks are being selected not for what they do, but for what they say.

Fragmented Media Creates Fragmented Loyalty

Audience splits in the rankings mirror media consumption patterns almost perfectly.

Younger audiences gravitate toward brands that show up where culture is formed — short-form video, creator ecosystems, gaming and live platforms. Fanta’s strength with Gen Z is inseparable from its fluency in these spaces. It behaves less like a heritage brand and more like a participant in youth culture.

Older audiences, by contrast, remain loyal to brands that show up consistently in more traditional environments — premium retail, broadcast, long-form content and social occasions. Fever-Tree’s success is rooted in restraint, reliability and context, not volume.

This isn’t about generational taste differences. It’s about media alignment.

Brands are no longer competing on shelf alone. They are competing across attention environments.

Performance Has Replaced Aesthetics as the Backbone

Another clear pattern emerges from the rankings: the brands gaining ground are those that have stopped separating brand and performance.

Pepsi Max, Sprite and Red Bull haven’t abandoned creativity — they’ve disciplined it. Content is no longer produced to be admired; it’s built to be effective. Awareness, relevance and conversion are treated as one system, not sequential steps.

In this environment, creative work doesn’t earn its place by looking good. It earns it by moving product.

This is not the end of brand building. It’s the end of brand building without consequence.

Culture Is the New Distribution Layer

What these rankings ultimately show is that culture now functions as a distribution channel.

Brands that understand where and how they show up — and who they are signalling to — build preference more efficiently than those chasing reach for its own sake. Presence without relevance no longer compounds.

Carbonated drinks haven’t become cultural by accident. They’ve become cultural because media behaviour has changed, and the brands that adapted earliest are now being rewarded.

The winners in this category aren’t louder. They’re clearer.

And clarity, increasingly, is what cuts through.