Leave Glaceau Alone and Let Vitamin Water Have the Crown

I've always felt that Pepsi's SoBe Life Water is an honest attempt to beat Glaceau at their own game. Respectfully, Coca Cola thought well enough not to play this game against a newcomer to the beverage industry whose integrity and credibility was previously unchallenged until Pepsi had the bright idea to introduce their own take on flavored water by breathing new life into their SoBe imprint, which made juice drinks popular in the late nineties.

SoBe had numerous products such as teas, diet teas, juices, juice drinks and energy drinks. Alternative juice enthusiasts have tens of drinks to choose over, many of which have the same amount of sugar that colas do but offer a dramatically different taste and feel to old traditional health beverages. SoBe continued to use creative marketing campaigns employing around 100 catch phrases and for years had a preeminent position as their beverages were accessible, cheap, and easy to find.

There were others but none were quite like SoBe. But then the market changed as people wanted the energy drinks popularized by Red Bull (which is still the leading energy drink by far) and Rockstar, among others. Cola companies were slow to adopt, grudgingly releasing Vault (Coca Cola) and MDX (Pepsi), a variant of Mountain Dew. Neither were really hard energy drinks, yet Pepsi continued to try to chip away releasing even more variants, most notably Diet Pepsi Max, which has more caffeine than any of their other drinks, including Coca Cola's Vault.

Coca Cola, on the other hand, was more conspicuous with their attempts, producing energy drinks but never branding them as such. The newly reintroduced Tab is an energy drink marketed towards women, and Blak is a mash up of Coke with coffee that is heavily caffeinated. Yet nothing is more discrete than Dasani Plus, a new imprint offering 3 cool flavors of water for soccer moms that has just enough B vitamins to help them get around in suburban traffic.