In front of me were two identical-looking glasses of clear lemon-lime soda over ice, prepared by my wife when I wasn’t looking.

One had Sprite, and the other a Sierra Mist I ordered on eBay that was likely intended more as a collector’s item — the sell-by date on the bottom of the can was June 2023. Pepsi discontinued Sierra Mist in January of last year, after nearly two decades of trailing its rival.

The liquid in the glasses tasted remarkably similar. The only real difference was that one soda tasted slightly less carbonated. I figured it was Pepsi’s Sierra Mist, partly because of that sell-by issue.

But it turns out that sensation of smoothness was actually key to the brand’s early marketing plan.

“We were coming in with the idea that Sierra Mist is a new brand, a new take on the flavor and not kind of the burn that goes down when you drink a Sprite,” said Bill Bruce, who worked on the creative team at ad agency BBDO in the 1990s and 2000s. “So, it was smoother, it was more flavorful. And we thought, like, let’s capitalize on what the product is and lean into that.”

Back in 1999, Coca-Cola Co.-owned Sprite dominated the lemon-lime soda market, with about 60% market share, according to data from Beverage Digest. Pepsi, in contrast, had long struggled in the lemon-lime space. Pepsi-backed brands like Teem, Slice and the briefly piloted Storm consistently lagged market leaders Sprite and 7UP.

In the 1990s, Bruce had spearheaded the highly successful Do the Dew marketing campaign for Pepsi’s Mountain Dew, tying the caffeine-juiced soda to youth-oriented action sports like BMX and snowboarding. The advertising series helped Mountain Dew become one of the most popular sodas in the country, growing from 4% to 7% of soda sales by the end of the decade.

So Pepsi turned to Bruce and basically said, see what you can do to chip away at Sprite. And at the very least, maybe knock 7UP down a few pegs.

Bruce wanted to convince consumers that the smoother Sierra Mist was more refreshing than Sprite. So with Pepsi’s very generous budget, he brought a film crew to Alaska.

“Off the boat we had a crane, we strung two guys up, we dropped them 35 feet above camera into the glacier water,” he recalled.

“Shockingly refreshing” became the tagline for the first Sierra Mist ads, which mostly had the same vibes — a funny scenario that often ended up with someone drenched in water or ice.

Pepsi spent tens of millions on the campaign, which included multiple Super Bowl ads, including one filmed by “Saving Private Ryan” cinematographer Janusz Kaminski.

While the name “Sierra Mist” drafted off the success of Mountain Dew, the advertising struck a different chord, more about taste and less about a burgeoning youth subculture.

“It was going at Sprite in such a way that, we’re not, we’re not going after them for the way they talked about their brand,” said Bruce. “We’re just talking about our liquid versus your liquid, and our liquid’s better.”

Over at Coke, Sprite brand manager Darryl “DC” Cobbin knew well before the official launch of Sierra Mist that Pepsi would be coming hard with a new lemon-lime competitor. And while he had obtained advance intel like Sierra Mist’s logo and distribution strategy, his team at Sprite wondered how exactly the brand was going to advertise itself.

When he saw the first ads, he wasn’t overly concerned.

“They went with a straight, what I call a ‘product play’ all about the taste of Sierra Mist and the refreshingness and the Sierras and all that,” Cobbin said. “They think they’re going to unseat Sprite by talking about their product? They’re going the ‘We’re the better lemon-lime’ strategy? It was surprising to us.”

Cobbin knew that people under 30 made up a huge portion of soda drinkers generally and lemon-lime fans specifically. And he had spent most of the last decade attaching Sprite to two cultural forces that increasingly resonated with that demographic: the National Basketball Association and hip-hop.

That’s the hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest in one of the first “Obey Your Thirst” Sprite ads, from 1994. Other commercials featured rappers KRS-One, Missy Elliott and Nas.

When Cobbin joined Sprite, the target demographic for those ads was the urban Black and Latino audience, who the data showed overindexed on lemon-lime sodas.

In the 1980s and early ’90s, Sprite was one of the first brands to ink endorsements from hip-hop acts like Kurtis Blow, Heavy D and Kid ‘n Play. But Cobbin and his team repositioned the brand around slightly less mainstream, more “authentic” hip-hop stars that true fans of the genre would appreciate — artists like Nas, KRS-One and Missy Elliott.

Sprite succeeded in attracting more Black drinkers. But as hip-hop’s popularity exploded in the 1990s, expanding to the white suburbs and beyond, Sprite became the fastest-growing soda in the country.

“We were not thinking of this as lemon-lime wars,” said Cobbin. “They had the cola wars, we had the cool wars. And the cool wars were not fought on Wall Street. The cool wars were not fought amongst senior management. It was fought amongst brand managers.”

Sprite did not change its marketing strategy all that much in response to Sierra Mist. The brand continued to align itself with hip-hop, signing deals in the 2000s and 2010s with stars like Mos Def, Drake and Vince Staples.

Sierra Mist did experiment with a new advertising campaign in the mid-2000s centered around comedians like Tracy Morgan and Jim Gaffigan. And while the soda grew its market share and dislodged 7UP as the No. 2 lemon-lime brand, it never really approached Sprite’s dominance.

“Sprite had already spent almost a decade getting a foothold and some really important cultural elements of the country, especially when it came to things like the NBA and rap,” said Duane Stanford, publisher of Beverage Digest. “Sierra Mist tried to get in and take some of that market share, and so it was an uphill battle to start.”

Hip-hop’s cultural cachet with younger consumers wasn’t the only reason Sierra Mist hardly dented Sprite. After a failed rebranding to Mist Twst — that’s not a typo — in the mid-2010s and experiments with the drink’s ingredients, Pepsi’s support for the brand generally waned.

But look at how Pepsi is marketing its Sierra Mist replacement, Starry, launched last year.

That’s the Gen Z rapper Ice Spice in Starry’s 2024 Super Bowl ad. That ex-boyfriend is clearly supposed to be Sprite, even if Pepsi exec Michael Smith won’t say so out loud.

“Nobody wants to look like the washed-up uncle who is still trying to pretend they’re cool,” said Smith. “We wanted to juxtapose the youthfulness of Ice Spice and the youthfulness of our brand.”

The Starry strategy is reminiscent of Sprite’s playbook from the ’90s. Beyond hip-hop stars like Ice Spice, Starry has signed deals with the NBA and basketball stars like Giannis Antetokounmpo and the WNBA’s A’ja Wilson.

“We felt that competitors had been on their front foot as marketing organizations in at a time when the current consumer was a bit older, and we felt like there was a Gen Z consumer and specifically a multicultural Gen Z consumer that wasn’t necessarily being spoken to by lemon-lime soda brands,” said Smith.

Cobbin, the Sprite brand manager from the ’90s and early 2000s, actually sees potential danger now in Sprite’s decades-old marriage with hip-hop.

“Classic hip-hop amongst some, younger [people], is considered dusty,” he said. “Can Sprite became dusty? Sprite can become dusty quickly.”

By the way, if you’re wondering, I tried Starry too. It tasted a lot like the other lemon-lime sodas.

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