Red Bull: a Thai tonic, a new category, and the stories that sell the can

In the early 1980s Dietrich Mateschitz, an Austrian marketing manager for the toothpaste maker Blendax, found on a trip to Thailand that a local tonic helped with his jet lag. Krating Daeng, made by Chaleo Yoovidhya’s company, was drunk by truck drivers and labourers to get through long shifts. In 1984 the two men founded Red Bull GmbH, each holding 49% of it, with Mateschitz in charge. He adapted the drink to Western tastes, carbonating it and putting it in a small, slim can. It went on sale in Austria on 1 April 1987.

There was no shelf waiting for it. Soft drinks competed on thirst and taste, Red Bull did poorly on both, and it cost far more than a cola. The company sampled it where people were tired (ski resorts, bars, clubs, university campuses) and gave it a cartoon style of advertising and one line, “Red Bull gives you wings”. Twenty-five years later, on 14 October 2012, Felix Baumgartner stepped out of a capsule about 39 kilometres above New Mexico and became the first person to break the sound barrier in free fall. Red Bull ran the project and produced the broadcast, and YouTube reported more than eight million concurrent live streams, a record at the time.

A frame drawn before the flavour

The method describes the creation of a category in three moves: Frame, Name, Claim. The frame is a point of view on the world that makes your offer the obvious answer. Red Bull’s was that tiredness is a problem a drink can fix. Seen through that frame, the taste stopped mattering and the price changed its benchmark. A small can at several times the price of a cola reads badly next to a cola, and reasonably well next to a coffee or a night of lost sleep.

In the books’ terms, Red Bull redrew the value curve, taking out thirst and taste and putting in energy and performance. The name “energy drink” then did the conditioning, and for years Red Bull was the brand people meant when they said it. The slogan was concrete enough to be treated as a promise with clauses: in 2014 Red Bull settled a US class action over its marketing claims for about 13 million dollars, without admitting wrongdoing.

Channels that double as proof

What sets Red Bull apart is how it chose its channels. A useful way to read any channel is as a triplet: the subject it speaks to, the value it carries, and the proof it gives. Most brands buy channels for the first element alone, reach. Red Bull’s events, from the Flugtag contests of homemade flying machines to air races, cliff diving and its own teams in Formula One and football, fill all three at once.

Each event is content, so it works as a channel. It is also behavioural proof: the company spends serious money on the extreme sports it talks about, and spending on what you preach is the strongest kind of proof there is, because it costs. And each event garrisons the category, keeping the brand’s name attached to effort, risk and performance. Red Bull eventually set up its own publisher, Red Bull Media House. At that point the relationship had flipped: the stories produce the brand, and the can works as merchandise for a world of adventure the company films.

Stratos is the clearest example: a single jump was conquest (millions of new viewers), proof (years of engineering and risk, paid for in full) and belonging (a moment people watched together and talked about), and the product barely appeared.

The cost of building an ocean

Creating a category has a known risk: the pioneer pays for everyone’s education. Once the West had learned what an energy drink was, others could sell one without explaining it. Monster, launched in 2002, built a large business on the shelf Red Bull had taught people to look for. More recently a wave of “functional” energy drinks, sold on ingredients and wellness, has positioned Red Bull as the established player in a category it founded.

The narrative system also asks for constant escalation, since a brand built on extremes has to keep finding new ones. Mateschitz died in October 2022, and whether the system he designed keeps its energy without him is an open question we will keep watching.

The lesson worth keeping is the order of the work. Red Bull settled the frame and the price before it spent on reach, and then chose channels that would prove the promise every time they spoke. If you are about to name a category, or to pick the channels that will carry it, see what we do and how we design both before the media plan is written.