“The Global Sports Drink Market was worth USD 4.62 billion in 2016 and estimated to be growing to reach USD 5.92 billion by 2021” (Reuters). This market has not shown any sign of downward trend since sports drink remains one of the most promising non-alcoholic products. Consumers perceive sports drink as an “active nutrition" product, a healthier beverage than other energy drink or ordinary soft drink, a method for dehydration when doing physical activities.
The coming years are going to observe the “bio" trends among consumers. They are more likely to look for a healthy product, something with fresh, organic origins. The beverage with caffeine, sugar and other “not so healthy" ingredient stand a higher chance to be excluded from consumers' s choices. Brands have to adapt their products to address their consumer's concern.
Let's take a look with these 4 most significant trends, which, more or less, will drive the sports drinks industry
1. Healthy, functional products become the keys
“I think there’ll be healthier products coming to market that will continue to grow the sports nutrition space, highlighting functional ingredients specifically. It could be for muscle recovery, circulation, cardiovascular health, or even bone health. I’m working with a number of companies now that are developing these beverages, and it’ll be interesting to see whether or not Gatorade pays any attention to these smaller competitors.” said Jim Tonkin, president and owner of Healthy Brand Builders (Scottsdale, AZ)
This trends will create an opportunity for smaller brands than Gatorade, Powerade or Isotar to compete in this sport drink market as long as these brands can convince consumers that their recipe is really beneficial for consumer's health.
2. Dealing with sugar
Marketing of sport drink is gradually moving into target ordinary consumers, besides athletes. In particular, consumers who are women or mothers would pay a lot of attention in the amount of sugar that they or their children are going to consume. The keywords such as “low sugar", “sugar-free”, “diet”... tends to be more appealing to customers.
Will McCormack, business development manager, nutrition, Synergy Flavors (Wauconda, IL) says that the concern of sugar is quite remarkable among both manufacturers and customers “When you think about what traditional sports drinks were formulated for, you realize they’re not the kind of beverage that people sitting at a desk all day should be consuming. They were designed for exercise recovery, which is why the sugar content was so high. But now, we’re seeing a lot of requests from manufacturers who are looking to reduce the sugar content and replace the sugar with ingredients like protein.”
Reduce the amount of sugar, find some other natural alternative sweeteners should be the next move of brands to be more customer-centric.
3. Be "clean label", “simple-ingredient” formulation
It is difficult to clearly define clean-label, it can have different meanings from one customer to another. It will depend on their own expectations, wants and perceptions. However, “clean-label" often refers to the number of ingredients used in the recipe of a product and their countries of origin. This concept also includes if the supply chain follows ethical rules, and if a company is socially responsible. Therefore, clean label encompasses a broad range of concepts from transparency, all-natural, organic, non-GMO, free-form to locally grown.
As said by Lu Ann Williams from Innova Market Insights: “It’s not really a trend anymore, it’s the new rules of the game”. According to a 2017 Nielsen study, “clean” products’ sales keep rising compared to traditional products’ sales which are declining. Clean-label represents 33% of the total food and beverage market, 1.2% higher than in 2015.
4. Influencer marketing could be the right approach
The development of a healthier kind of sports drink means brands will have to start marketing their beverages in a unique new way
Consumers now have power over brands. No more bias opinion by commercial interest. In addition, user generated content is becoming a trend, because people tend to believe what their friends say more than what brands are advertising about themselves. How can they trust that a new product of BodyAmor is healthier than the previous one? How can they choose a new-formula drink of VitaminWater, which is advertised to be “clean-label" than the traditional? In those cases, influencer marketing could be an effective channel.
- Mai Do Quynh -
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