How Poppi built a cult brand by chasing attention, not reach

Executive overview

Most big brands still market from a 1991 playbook that assumed TV dominated attention. That assumption is now lethal. Poppi co-founder Allison Ellsworth and Gary Vaynerchuk break down how attention, community, and cultural agility replaced reach and frequency as the real levers of brand growth.

Brand without product is acceleration toward failure. Product without brand is invisibility. The Poppi story is a case study in getting both right simultaneously — then knowing when to make the jump to scale.

The core insight: actualized reach beats potential reach every time, and right now actualized reach lives on social.

Potential reach vs. actualized reach

• Big brands run banner ads, TV spots, and billboards and count everyone who could have seen them as reached.
• Actual attention was never delivered — money was spent, but nobody noticed.
• Actualized reach is the metric that matters; social is where it's concentrated right now.
• The 1991 How Brands Grow playbook assumed TV could still penetrate culture — it can't, except for the Super Bowl.
• Fortune 500 CMOs often don't know they're running a 35-year-old framework; it's baked into departmental incentives.

Why social still wins (for now)

• Organic social content costs nothing; the upside is asymmetric.
• Every person in business is one post away from a step-change — but execution is the hard part.
• The medium is shifting from social media (follow-based) to interest media (algorithm finds the audience for the content).
• That shift gives brands more distribution flexibility: reach male audiences through reels without contaminating a female-coded grid.
• The phone is the remote control of life — but AI/AR/VR will replace it; go where attention goes, not where it was.

Building the Poppi brand

• Mother Beverage (pre-Poppi) had a great product but a weak brand; both are non-negotiable.
• After Shark Tank, Poppi took nine months off for a full brand exercise before relaunching — including a 180-page brand book.
• Core positioning: soda for the next generation — deliberately chose the word "soda" and a 12 oz can to signal it visually.
• Brand moved from head to heart: grape soda nostalgia, emotional freedom, not functional claims.
• Launched March 2020, week one of COVID; retailers didn't know where to shelve them, but internal clarity on identity held the strategy together.

The 80/20 budget rule for cultural relevance

• 80% of budget and planning maps to known retail windows and cultural moments with months of lead time.
• 20% is reserved for fast, opportunistic cultural bets with no guaranteed ROI.
• Examples: a Love Island Amaya Papaya meme turned into a limited flavor within three months; Lakers sponsorship for cultural association even though Poppi can't sell there.
• The mistake most brands make: not taking enough risk, especially the kind that makes finance and VCs uncomfortable.

Expanding audience without alienating core community

• Poppi's core is the "Poppy girlies" — college women, moms, gen-zennials.
• Expanding to men (Lakers, Inter Miami, Fortnite streamers) was done entirely off the main social feed.
• Core community sees the same brand; new audiences are reached through separate channel activations.
• Result: men discover Poppi through their own channels; the core audience never feels the brand has changed.
• Household purchasing dynamics do the rest — a man's daughter or partner is often already the Poppi convert.

What big companies do wrong

• Subjective opinions make trillion-dollar decisions; politics and seniority override data.
• Incentive structures trap smart people — bonuses tied to TV view counts can't be overridden by individual conviction.
• Corporations bring corporation thinking to startup problems; the skills don't transfer (the LeBron-in-hockey analogy).
• The one exception: study what big acquirers want to buy — reverse-engineer the exit, not their marketing tactics.

Community as compounding asset

• Community requires action, not philosophy — reply to every DM and every comment on your brand, today.
• New Coke was reversed because ~20,000 super-users complained; 20,000 truly engaged people can protect or destroy a brand.
• Gary replied to every Twitter mention for four years; that depth built the foundation that still compounds.
• Small businesses routinely get seven comments and reply to none — that's the gap between brands that stick and brands that don't.

Momentum and timing: the Poppi trajectory

• Shark Tank update aired in April 2020 (month two of COVID) — overnight went from $5k to $250k on Amazon.
• COVID forced digital-first; Allison became one of the first founders on TikTok as a brand.
• Super Bowl ad was bought four days before the Super Bowl — tripled awareness overnight.
• That ad worked because distribution was already in place; awareness amplification only pays off with retail ready to absorb demand.
• Speed of culture, not size of budget, drove each inflection point.

Closing principles

• Founders who don't want to be the face of their brand are making an excuse; if not them, hire someone — the internet moves on in three days.
• Humility is the secret weapon: know your superpower, build a team around gaps, never let ego block growth.
• Don't copy big-company playbooks; learn what big companies want to acquire, then build toward that.
• Scrappiness is a feature, not a bug — Gary learned marketing with no money, which is the best possible teacher.