In 2025, Red Bull poured roughly 30 percent of its revenue back into marketing just to sell a single can of energy drink. That works out to more than $4 billion a year. The company runs two Formula 1 teams, produces billions of views' worth of content annually through its own media house, and has its name attached to more than 600 events worldwide. It has run this way, without pause, for nearly 40 years — ever since it launched with a single can in 1987.
This past July, The Economist diagnosed the first warning light ever to flash on that machine.
When a Market Matures, the Formula Wears Out
What sets Red Bull's marketing formula apart is that it sold an image instead of a drink. Skydiving, cliff diving, extreme mountain biking, Formula 1 — the brand attached its name to anything thrilling and dangerous. Its one-line tagline, "it gives you wings," is still recognized worldwide four decades later. And the strategy actually worked: Red Bull's share of the global energy drink market once reached 40 percent, and revenue topped €10 billion in 2023.
But several things are happening at once now. The energy drink category has entered maturity, and growth has slowed. Health anxiety about high-sugar, high-caffeine drinks is spreading openly among Gen Z, and consumption is shifting toward vitamin waters and electrolyte drinks. Monster Energy, backed by Coca-Cola, has been quietly gaining share, while newer entrants like Celsius — marketed as "healthy energy" — are winning over younger consumers.
There's a more structural problem too. The extreme-sports image Red Bull spent decades building still resonates powerfully with the generation that grew up inside that culture — but to the generation after them, it's starting to read as "dad's idea of cool." A manufactured image ages, just like anything else.
The More Refined the Machine, the Harder It Is to Redirect
To be clear, few observers think Red Bull is in crisis right now. The brand has picked up similar warning signs several times over the decades and has always adjusted its formula to ride them out. Some analysts even argue that Red Bull Racing's recent F1 seasons have boosted brand awareness rather than hurt it. And the company's diversification into media and sports team ownership is often cited as a reason to stop treating it as a simple beverage brand.
But The Economist's diagnosis isn't about corporate survival — it's about the limits of the formula itself. The more elaborately an image machine has been built, at a cost of billions of dollars, the more expensive it becomes to upgrade or redirect. The more refined a formula gets, the harder it is to question — and without questioning, change comes late.
When something that once worked keeps working too well, there comes a moment when the method itself becomes the obstacle. What Red Bull is facing now looks a lot like that moment.
Surviving Without a Formula Becomes an Asset of Its Own
Bring this story down to the scale of a solo entrepreneur or content director, and the structure looks oddly familiar. Some lean toward finding a proven formula and repeating it; others lean toward sticking with their own imperfect approach over the long haul. Most personal brands sit somewhere between the two.
Red Bull sits at the first extreme. It found a formula, amplified it with billions of dollars, and staked everything on it. At first, that overwhelmed the competition. But once the market matures, a new generation arrives, and rivals start copying the same formula, a formula-driven brand inherits the burden of having to change the formula itself. And the more refined the machine, the higher the cost of replacing it.
There are examples that have walked the opposite path for a long time — people who publish unfinished work, document their failed attempts, and treat the accumulated time of that whole process as the brand itself. It isn't rare to find solo café owners or craft studio operators who have sustained this approach for close to a decade. One recurring idea shows up in the record of a studio that has run this way for years, publishing its process the whole time: it isn't that being imperfect is fine — it's that continuing to show up imperfect may be the most durable form of branding there is. Brands built this way never need to swap out a formula when trends shift, because the continuity itself is what earns trust.
If you're running your own brand right now, a few questions are worth checking. Is what you're doing a formula optimized for a specific platform or trend, or something you could keep doing even if the platform changed? Have the people gathered around your brand followed you, or followed a specific format you produce? And what you've built up over the years — is it a formula, or is it trust?
I suspect that if you weren't able to engineer things as precisely as Red Bull and simply kept working your own way instead, that accumulation may well have turned into an asset by another name by now.
News that the most sophisticated marketing machine on the planet is under threat may land with a different weight for people who have spent years surviving without a formula, on their own terms. Every brand formula has an expiration date — and the more refined the formula, the higher the price paid once that date has passed.
