Every Marketing Expert Told Him the Drink Tasted Terrible and Would Never Sell. He Sold 12 Billion Cans Anyway.

You are Dietrich Mateschitz. The year is 1986. You are an Austrian marketing manager for a toothpaste company, and you have just returned from a business trip to Thailand where you tried a local energy drink called Krating Daeng — “Red Bull” in English. The drink, made from a small company in Bangkok, cured your jet lag in a way that coffee never had. You are convinced you are holding the idea that will change your life.

You commission proper market research. You hire a firm to survey European consumers. They taste the drink, evaluate the concept, and deliver their verdict: Red Bull has “no viable market position.” The taste is described as medicinal and “unpleasant.” The concept of an “energy drink” as a beverage category simply does not exist in European consumer consciousness. One researcher summarizes the findings with particular clarity: “This product will fail.”

Empty Red Bull cans strategically placed in London trash bins to simulate massive popularity.

You read the report. You put it in a drawer. You negotiate a partnership with the Thai founders, Chaleo Yoovidhya, and together you invest your entire personal savings — $500,000 — to launch Red Bull in Austria in 1987. You reformulate the drink slightly for European palates, carbonate it, and put it in a slim 250ml can designed to feel different from any beverage can then on the market. Smaller. More purposeful. The design itself communicates that this is not a soft drink. This is something else.

You do not launch in supermarkets. You specifically avoid supermarkets. Instead, you identify the places where your target customer — young, nocturnal, performance-seeking — actually spends time. You give free cases of Red Bull to university students. You park cars with Red Bull logos and a cooler full of free cans outside nightclubs at 2 AM. You seed the product in ski resorts, in gyms, behind the bars of the coolest clubs in Vienna. You create the impression of scarcity and underground credibility before you create mainstream availability.

The best marketing campaigns are the ones no one expected.

Early adopters — club-goers who mixed it with vodka, students who used it to study through the night, young professionals working long hours — began requesting it by name in bars and shops that didn’t stock it. The demand created the supply, rather than the other way around. When Red Bull finally entered retail distribution, it was entering a market it had already convinced that it was necessary.

“We don’t bring the product to the consumer — we bring consumers to the product.”
— Dietrich Mateschitz, Red Bull co-founder

Red Bull’s marketing strategy, once the brand had established cultural relevance, became one of the most studied in business history. Rather than advertising in traditional media, Mateschitz built the brand through events it owned outright — creating the Red Bull Air Race, sponsoring Formula One teams, and eventually buying sports teams including football clubs and an American hockey team. The brand did not sponsor events; it created the events that defined the extreme sports and adventure culture it had aligned with. Every piece of content produced by these initiatives reinforced the same brand proposition: Red Bull gives you wings.

Today, Red Bull sells approximately 12 billion cans per year across 175 countries. Mateschitz, who put his last $500,000 into a product that market research said would fail, died in October 2022 as one of the wealthiest people in Austrian history. The beverage category he invented — energy drinks — is now a $86 billion global industry that did not exist before he ignored what everyone told him.

Every giant brand was once a desperate startup.