Chugging batteries? - A semiotic analysis of Red Bull and the concept of transferable energy
‘Gives you wings’ — Under this famous tagline, Red Bull is a must-have for struggling students and workers in a desperate pinch; those who are pulling all nighters to get that reference list correct in APA style, or aligning those last few pictures on powerpoint for a deck to present in 5 hours… When your brain has liquified and leaked out of your ears a few hours ago and your eyes are drier than the Sahara, that’s when Red Bull really starts looking like it not only has a set of fluffy white wings, but a halo, too.
Now whether it really ‘gives you wings’, or rather, gives you any energy for enhanced and prolonged performance is another matter that we won’t go into now. I leave it up to much more qualified people to confirm or debunk.
Instead, what I want to analyse here is how Red Bull used semiotic cues (i.e., connotations and associations that we all learn and reinforce within the cultural sphere) to create and sell this entirely new concept of energy drinks— before Red Bull, the drink would only have been seen as some oddly flavoured soda or new fangled Coke.
I want to take you through my analysis and thought processes up until my final argument — that Red Bull established this now flourishing energy drink category by establishing human ‘energy’ as something that can be transferred and topped up, similar to machines, taking inspiration from the Battery category.
It seems ludicrous when framed like this; humans are obviously NOT machines. We’re just soft puny bags of flesh that feel things. Yet we drink Red Bull and other energy drinks, convinced of its product benefits. How exactly did Red Bull manage to rewrite our notions of energy so smoothly? We’ll look into Batteries as the category that inspired Red Bull, in both concept and design. But first a little bit of history.
Energy drinks: not as new as you think
The first energy drink was sold in Japan in 1962. Taisho Pharmaceutical released ‘Lipovitan-D’, a 100ml drink to alleviate physical and mental fatigue. The primary ingredient is Taurine, which is also the core component of Red Bull. However, the similarities end there.
Lipovitan D, as its very clinical and non-emotional name tells you, was sold as a ‘designated quasi-drug’; not your run of the mill beverage. Thus the packaging is also very medicinal, using brown glass to protect the contents from UV rays, as well as its small 100ml size that is meant to be chugged in one go. In terms of the actual drink, it was non-carbonated and rather resembled cough syrups or tinctures.
The original Red Bull energy drink (yes, there is an original that was created in Thailand. An Austrian Dietrich Mateschitz bought it and rebranded it to the Red Bull we know now in 1987) also followed similar codes as you can see in the picture below.
Now why is this history important to look at? Because it tells us the core concept of energy drinks.
Creating a Narrative: a journey with start and goal
If we look at it from a semiotic narrative standpoint, we see it follows a narrative of transformation — the hero (the drinker) who is hindered from operating at full capacity by fatigue, is aided by the sidekick (the energy drink), so that they can regain their full capabilities to conquer the beast (fatigue and the task at hand).
The modern canned energy drink also follows this narrative but the method of how we achieve this transformation has shifted.
Before, it was more institutional, more pharmaceutical, more medicinal. Now, it is more casual, more self-administrative and dare I say, fun. And Red Bull has largely been responsible for this shift. It has almost singlehandedly changed our collective frame of expectations and associations of energy drinks as it reinvented the whole category and carved a unique space for itself.
Creating the concept of transferable energy: (1) naming
Within the category, the term ‘energy drink’ can be considered a crucial part of the product. Text that denotes the category type of ‘energy drink’ is always on the packaging as part of the design.
As inventor of a new category, Red Bull potentially could have discarded the term ‘energy drink’ and made their name synonymous with the product, much like Coca-Cola and Sprite have done. The fact that they deliberately did not, necessitates a deeper look into the word ‘energy.’ To clarify the significance of the word ‘energy,’ let’s first look at the difference in meaning between ‘energy’ and ‘power’, which are terms often used interchangeably.
Energy vs Power
Although similar, they are two very different concepts. Energy, in terms of physics, refers to the capacity of doing work, while power refers to the time rate of doing work or consuming energy. Additionally, while energy can be stored in various forms, power cannot as it is about output capacity.
Therefore, a ‘power drink’ cannot exist on the basis of logic, and an ‘energy drink’ that vitalises you is then literally a storage unit of energy that is waiting to be converted into a different form upon consumption by the customer.
When reframed in this way, energy drinks start to bear a resemblance to another seemingly unrelated but well established category.
I’ve already given it away in the first paragraph but… batteries. Batteries are the epitome of this, as they store ‘energy’ until it is called upon to ‘power’ a device. They even have a similar narrative of transformation — it acts as a sidekick to the hero(any electronic machine or device) and transforms it from ‘dead’ to ‘alive’, allowing the hero to do its job.
This leads me to my main point — that Red Bull, as pioneer of the energy drink category, took significant influence from batteries. The key concept of transferable energy has already been well established by batteries and widely accepted. I theorise this is why the claim of energy boosting drinks was intuitively accepted and even argue that this similarity was actively leveraged by Red Bull by looking at the similar design codes of Red Bull and batteries.
Creating the concept of transferable energy: (2) design
Let’s look at the most common type of AA battery from the two dominant battery brands, Duracell and Energizer.
In terms of form, it is straight, slim, and long, has a metallic sheen, and is cold to the touch.
On the body itself, the brand name takes the centre stage and the typeface is usually bold and sans serif.
Colour-blocking using highly contrasting colours is also a common trait.
Now considering that the ‘new’ version of Red Bull inherited the brand name, logo, and colour scheme from the original Thai Krating Daeng, all that was left to change was the shape of the container itself, the typeface, and the overall layout of various elements. So let’s look at how these respective elements are represented in Red Bull now.
In terms of form, the choice to transition from brown glass bottle to can is notable. Although the new version added fizz to the drink itself and this may also have been a factor for the change, the fact they chose an aluminum can rather than a plastic bottle and did not cover it with print indicates they were after a certain effect
— it now has a distinct metallic sheen and is cold to the touch, like batteries.
Red Bull cans are also notably straight, slim, and tall, compared to traditional soda cans. Just imagine a sprite can or pepsi can.
On the body, Red Bull has high contrasting colours of blue and silver that do not mix and are very clearly separated like both battery examples.
The brand name centric layout is also similar in that it is the focal point which draws the eye. Although its uppercase vs lowercase, the typeface is even similar to Duracell — take a look at their R.
Summary
Given the similar narratives of transformation with batteries being about actual revival (from death to life) and energy drinks only about revitalisation (from fatigued to energised), and their shared concept of transferable energy, it seems viable that Red Bull could potentially have taken batteries as inspiration for their new category. We see this from the numerous shared traits, for various elements of the packaging in form, shape, and design.
When establishing an entirely new category for which no frame of expectations exists like Red Bull did for energy drinks, on one hand it is an opportunity to do something radically different, but on the other it is also important to maintain a degree of familiarity to make sure it is intuitively accepted by the general public. Rooting a product in something familiar is crucial to give it credibility, and Red Bull has succeeded magnificently in doing so.
Like this, the semiotic approach allows us to identify similarities across seemingly distant categories (food&beverages and batteries, who would have thought?) and see the connection points; where inspiration may have came from. Of course, this works the other way round as well, when newly creating a campaign, a brand, a category, or whatever it may be.
A little side note about Red Bull — it roots itself primarily in the concept of transferable energy, but that doesn’t means it ignores the concept of power, i.e. the output rate. After all, a full tank of energy wouldn’t be very useful if its output capacity was minimal. For enhanced performance, a stock of energy needs to be burned at a high rate and Red Bull ensures this image gets through to the consumer with its logo of the two red bulls charging towards each other that is further dramatised by the yellow circle (a sun? an arena?) behind. The bulls are the very image of coiled, muscular energy that is released in short but extremely strong bursts, signifying high output capacity.
