Sport Drink Comparisons

For the two food advertisements, I decided to pick to comparable products and see how they compared to each other in layout, design, and message. The two products that I chose were Powerade and Gatorade, two sports drinks designed for athletes. As a bonus, the Powerade ad had a bit of a pejorative ad contained within it about Gatorade, their main competitor.

I will start of with the Powerade ad(s). The main ad features the “new” Powerade bottle with its presumably new or improved ingredients. They have a trademarked name, Ion^4 for the combination of the 4 main ingredients, “…4 electrolytes in the same ratio typically lost in sweat.” The only colors in the minimalistic ad are those found on the bottle, with all writing in the same font as that on the bottle itself. This ad focuses on both a logos and ethos appeal to its audience. It is branded as a sports drink, so it is assumed that one would be consuming it in or around the time of strenuous activity, which in all likelihood means one would be sweating when they would be drinking Powerade. By not only listing the 4 most frequently lost electrolytes when sweating, but also comparing their inclusion and ratio of concentration with their new recipe, a consumer is going to believe their research and believe that this new recipe will perfectly replenish them and restore all lost electrolytes. This is a brilliant marketing tool on the part of Powerade. One of the biggest marketing strategies the food industry uses is the addition of scientific information. Few consumers are likely to be as knowledgeable as a research team for Powerade, so when advertisers use big words like “potassium,” or “magnesium,” most consumers will trust the advertising and buy whichever product uses the biggest, most scientific words.

The second part of the ad ties right in with the ad for Powerade. The makers of Powerade are obviously not allowed to use a Gatorade logo, so they instead use the half of the profile of the famous Gatorade bottle in their ad, just enough of a tease so they aren’t blatantly bashing Gatorade. They point out that Gatorade is lacking both “calcium” and “magnesium” (again, scientific language) and go so far as to call Gatorade “…an incomplete sports drink.” The same logos appeal about ingredients also boosts their ethos, making their own drink seem superior based on its greater range of supposedly vital electrolytes.

The Gatorade ad uses a very different approach to market their beverage. This is the simplest, yet much more complicated ad layout. The background is a famous photo of renowned basketball player Michael Jordan performing a very complicated basketball dunk. No Gatorade product is shown, except for a prominent Gatorade logo on the right of the photo. If we were unfamiliar with the product, we would just see a photo superimposed by a white “G” with an orange bolt inside it. Gatorade believes their own product and brand to be so well known and prominent that by merely seeing this famous athlete, you believe that he was able to achieve it because of Gatorade, and perhaps you could too. Jordan is one of the best and most famous basketball players of all time, maybe if you drank Gatorade you could be too? This is an ethos and pathos reliant ad, they believe that you are familiar with their product and already believe it to be superior, and it makes you want to be proficient and famous like Michael Jordan.

One reason I picked these two ads is because the feature a sports drink of one company or another. What is the most basic principal of sports? Competition. These two products are extremely similar. In a blind taste test, I’ll bet few people who had never tasted it before could tell a difference. Because of this, they need even more drastic techniques to make their product seem better. One of them boasts of superior ingredients, the other boasts of their celebrity endorsement. In the end, I think if you are tired and sweating and yearning for a drink, you would hand whichever was handed to you first. If a real selective process is involved, it would probably be over what flavors are available and which flavor best suits your personal taste. Gatorade is the older of the two brands, so it would make sense that they can use a celebrity endorsement to sell their product. The newer of the two, Powerade, must rely on the particularities of their recipe as their selling point. I think this is a good sampling, as these are two of the biggest marketers to sports fans. Consumers want the product that is best for replenishing them with the best ingredients, or they might just want whichever one their favorite athlete drinks.