Sunkist bringing back ‘Good Vibrations’

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) — Hoping to build on its growth momentum, Cadbury-Schweppes Plc will announce Tuesday that it is bringing back some “Good Vibrations” in a new marketing effort for its Sunkist soda brand.

The classic Beach Boys tune will be front and center in the campaign, set to break Monday night, but with a twist: The song will be covered by Gym Class Heroes, a recent chart-topping hip-hop band. The first ads will run Monday night on the CW, the youth-oriented network that is a joint venture between CBS Corp.

Virtually all of the people in the brand’s target market of 18- to 24-year-olds wouldn’t even have been born then.

Still, the song “is still applicable today,” Gleason said. “We really wanted to focus on positive energy and good vibes, to make it accessible to a new generation, and how better to do that than with a No. 1 band?”

Not that Gym Class Heroes was top of the pops when first picked for the campaign: It was only after being selected by Sunkist from a roster of 25 relatively unknown groups that Gym Class Heroes headed up the charts with a top 10 single, “Cupid’s Chokehold.”

Unlike the carbonated soft-drink category as a whole — which fell 0.6% by volume in the United States last year, according to Beverage Digest estimates — Sunkist and select other flavored pops are in solid growth mode. The brand registered 9.3% growth last year, said John Sicher, publisher of the trade magazine.

“Though the [carbonated soft-drink] category is down, there is still more strength in flavored sodas than in colas,” he pointed out, citing Sunkist, Cadbury-Schweppes’ Dr Pepper. “Cadbury-Schweppes has done a fantastic job marketing Sunkist,” he added.

Sunkist is also by far the largest single orange-flavored soda with a market share of about 46%, according to the company, and it has recorded volume growth every year for the last decade.

Cadbury-Schweppes declined to disclose exact spending on the campaign, but Gleason said that it will be in the “high single-digit millions” of dollars over the next few months of its run. Last year, the company spent $5.2 million on Sunkist, up from $3.3 million on 2005, according to data from TNS Media Intelligence.
It’s a drop in the bucket for Cadbury-Schweppes’ combined media budget of $304.1 million. However, the total includes spending by both the U.S. beverage and confectionery arms of the company, which are in the process of being split apart.