Looking to get healthy in 2016? Apparently, beverage companies are also taking note of the collective resolution of many consumers to change their lifestyles. According to reports, soda brands like Pepsi and Coca-Cola are changing their marketing schemes to focus more on the positive health benefits of their non-carbonated products like sports and energy drinks, fruit juices, and even water.
Well, it's a matter of perception, whether these drinks are truly healthier for you, really.
Analysts say that beverage companies need to start looking for ways to reformulate their recipes to contain less calories, sugar, and sodium in order to keep up with a more health-conscious public. However, many companies like Coca-Cola have expressed hesitation about changing their recipes. They are marketing smaller cans and bottles instead, for their trademark drinks in order to cut the calories for the consumer. The new marketing dilemma for this scheme is how to get their customers to spend more when they're getting less.
In addition to downsizing their more sugar-filled drinks, companies are also developing products that will magnify the benefits to customers looking to get more fit.
Pepsi, for example, is set to launch a new line of Organic Gatorade and its Tropicana drinks will sport a non-GMO label in 2016. Coke, meanwhile, is introducing sparkling Minute Maid and Smart Water.
Reportedly, companies are also looking into how to make their own designer water lines more marketable to consumers. While both Pepsi and Coke have their own bottled tap water products, which cost more than 2,000 times more than regular tap water, the products have thus far proven not very profitable, and these cola giants are way behind other companies like Nestle in the bottled water business which leads the pack with a hold on more than half the market of the $13-billion industry.
Will consumers buy in to these new healthy lifestyle targeted products? Beverage companies are hoping so.
“We’ve had some substantial investments in R&D that have allowed us to put out more new products. Not all of it is skewed toward healthy, but very much healthy and very much single serve. And, what that’s done for us is allowed us to change the mix of its portfolio,” said Al Carey, CEO of PepsiCo.
