Industry Insights
The Spirits Industry Is Having Its 90s Soda Moment
Occasion ownership is a brand claim. Occasion identity is a consumer truth.
Beyond The Agency · June 2026
In 1994, cola fell below half of U.S. soft-drink sales for the first time. What ate it wasn’t a better cola. It was an entire aisle of brands competing on personalization and salience — teas, waters, sports drinks, fruit drinks, herbal tonics, visual oddities. A $6B battleground where the fight wasn’t about ingredients. It was about resonance. Which brand feels like me, in this moment, right now.
Spirits is staring at its own version of that shift. RTDs now represent roughly 10% of spirits supplier revenue, with the broader RTD/RTS market at $13.9B — 12.5% of total beverage-alcohol dollar sales. A mature default category losing cultural heat, while more expressive, more personal brands start pulling attention. The shape is too familiar to ignore.
The spirits downturn isn’t just a volume problem. It’s a resonance problem — and resonance, at its core, is a personalization problem. Too much of the category is still selling credentials — provenance, process, rare botanicals, celebrity founders — as if credentials are the same thing as salience. One more brand telling you it’s 100% pure blue agave. One more beauty shot next to a rocks glass. Assembled by a committee trying not to offend anyone.
The 90s aisle was the opposite of that. Snapple wasn’t just tea — it was delis, glass bottles, Wendy the Snapple Lady, a voice that felt like a person. AriZona was the big can, the price point, the corner-store ritual. SoBe was lizards, functional edge, youth culture. These brands were loud and specific by design — because that’s how you build salience with a particular person in a particular moment. The weirdness wasn’t arbitrary. It was the signal. It told a specific consumer: this one is yours.
The brands that lasted did it in service of a real identity. You didn’t need to be in the industry to know exactly what kind of person drank Snapple versus SoBe versus AriZona — and what that choice said about who they were in that moment. The personalization created the salience. The salience created the resonance. And the resonance is what made the behavior repeat.
The brands that faded — Fruitopia, Crystal Pepsi, Orbitz — had the salience without the identity underneath it. Psychedelic names, clear-cola futurism, floating globules. All noticeable. High salience without occasion-identity is just novelty. And novelty doesn’t repeat.
RTDs have been running the same playbook as the 90s winners — and format is part of the reason, but not the whole story. The constraint of a 12oz can forced specificity. A can has to be something, for someone, in a specific moment. That pressure pushed RTD brands toward consumer identity in a way the spirits bottle — versatile, premium-positioned, built to be “for any occasion” — never had to reckon with. High Noon isn’t just a vodka soda. Fireball turned a sensory hit into a group ritual with its own social code. BuzzBallz is impulse, discovery, party energy — you know exactly who’s reaching for it and why. The salience serves the identity. That’s the sequence.
RTDs are also headed toward their own correction. Over 3,400 new products launched globally in 2021. By 2024, just over 1,800. The shelf is tightening. The brands that were only novel are getting cut. Which means the lesson from the 90s is about to repeat itself in real time: salience without identity doesn’t survive the correction.
What survives is fit.
Not the brand that owns the occasion — the brand that makes a specific person feel fully coherent inside it. There’s a reason the Snapple drinker at the deli and the High Noon at the pool party don’t feel like marketing. They feel inevitable. The brand was specific enough that the rest took care of itself. Pure credentials marketing doesn’t get you there. Most spirits brands are still too broad to do that job.
The work starts with a decision most spirits brands haven’t made: who specifically are we for, and what moment are we load-bearing in? Not a demographic. Not an occasion map. A real person in a real moment, and a clear answer to what reaching for your brand says about them when they’re in it. From there it’s about building the memory structures — the visual code, the behavioral ritual, the social signal — that make that identity legible without explanation. That’s what Snapple did. That’s what High Noon did. That’s what the next spirits brand to break through will do. The category has spent a decade getting better at premium. The next decade belongs to the brands that get specific.