Fizz Buzz Pop!

This rebranding design for Mirinda is gob-smackingly good, in my view. Often global (as this is) means bland and lowest common denominator, but this pop-art pageant of funtime fruitiness hits the highest common factor in the unashamedly day-glo world of soda pop.

It's been a while since I've been in the market, I know (the price of a sweet tooth is catching up with me and I have to watch it). And, according to the marketing press, this new global platform ("Smile Please") is aimed at GenZ (sic) and their anemoia (nostalgia for a time you've never known) for the 80s, 90s and early 2000s before Smartphones took over everyone's lives. 

And yet, this speaks to me too. Even though I am as old as Mirinda itself:

Fizzy drinks have a proustian madeleine effect on me. The first one I remember drinking was this:

On the beach, from a glass bottle, with a straw. And, a couple of years later came Fanta. Another glass bottle, another straw. This time in a marvellous cafe in College Town (Sandhurst) with sausages and crinkle-cut chips. A treat indeed.

 

A childhood in 1960s and 70s England meant a rainbow-load of fizzy pop. The milkman used to deliver Corona, then there was Tizer and R. White's. I was quite fond of the cream soda - I can remember the taste like yesterday, but still don't know what on earth it was meant to taste like, apart from sweet. 

It's a wonder I have any of my own teeth left.

Holidays brought further fizzy delights. In Canada, root beer and Welch's Grape Soda. And the very sophisticated Canada Dry which my parents would drink with Canadian Whiskey. 

Mirinda, I expect, was something I came across on holiday at some point. It was launched in Spain, but bought up by PepsiCo and marketed worldwide, under various names, hence the focus in the re-design on visual rather than text elements.

The name Mirinda comes from Esperanto originally. But I think the rebrand has done something very clever.

Just as our 21st century Esperanto is Emojis, these design elements are surely the international visual language of fizzy pop.