Although the Dr Pepper brand has surpassed conventional Pepsi, the overall family of Pepsi beverages—from Diet Pepsi to Pepsi Wild Cherry to Pepsi Zero Sugar—still controls more of the total beverage industry by volume (4.6%) than Dr Pepper and its many variations (3.8%), per Beverage Digest. With a 3.4% market share, PepsiCo’s Gatorade line trails Dr Pepper.
One soda’s loss is another’s gain
As PepsiCo adjusts its priorities, its namesake brand has taken a couple steps backward—at least when it comes to marketing.
In 2022, for example, Pepsi ended its decade-long sponsorship of the Super Bowl Halftime Show.
During the first four months of 2024, PepsiCo dedicated an estimated $23 million to advertising Pepsi, according to ad intelligence platform MediaRadar. That’s a 46% decline compared to the same time in 2023, when the company spent $43 million. Dr Pepper’s ad dollars, meanwhile, remained relatively flat between the two periods, decreasing from $34 million to $32 million, around 5%.
Experts stated that when comparing Pepsi to Dr Pepper, it’s important to remember PepsiCo (market cap: $224 billion) is significantly larger than Dr Pepper’s parent company, Keurig Dr Pepper (market cap: $43 billion). This gives PepsiCo, which also oversees a major snacks business featuring Cheetos, Doritos and Tostitos, the capacity to experiment and move resources around as needed. Keurig Dr Pepper, which owns A&W, Snapple and Canada Dry, among other beverages, doesn’t have as much flexibility.
As Brett Cooper, an analyst at New York-based research firm Consumer Edge, put it: “Dr Pepper is a more important brand for Keurig Dr Pepper than Pepsi is for PepsiCo.”
Pepper’s power of weirdness
Search for TikTok videos tagged with #drpepper and you’ll see few faces that look older than 30.
Last December, an 11-second TikTok video showed a toddler sobbing in full meltdown: “I want Dr Pepper!” The video was good for 2.4 million views, underscoring how younger consumers constitute a good portion of Dr Pepper’s fan base. It’s another driving force that explains how Dr Pepper has dethroned Pepsi.
“I think a lot of [Dr Pepper’s resurgence] is being driven by Gen Z—the TikTok nation, if you will,” said Widener University professor Ross Steinman, who teaches the psychology behind consumers’ relationship with brands.
Dr Pepper’s popularity among young consumers even supersedes the top soft drink, Coca-Cola. A 2024 report from consumer analytics firm Civic Science found that “Dr Pepper has a larger Gen Z and millennial customer base compared to Coke, which could account for the soft drink’s growing popularity.”
At the very least, younger consumers have been willing to give the stuff a try. In the past few years, around a quarter of U.S. consumers age 18-34 have said they’d consider buying Dr Pepper when next shopping for a beverage, according to data intelligence firm YouGov. This places the brand well above the category average, which in 2023 was 13%.
