7UP Flipped Its Sip

7UP has changed.

More lime. Less lemon?

And here’s the part I need you to sit with, because I’ve been sitting with it since Monday and I’m not doing well.

They changed the ORDER OF THE WORDS.

It used to be a lemon-lime soda. It is now a lime-lemon soda. Same two fruits. Same hyphen. Somebody picked up the hyphenate, turned it around, and set it back down.

They’re calling the campaign “Flip the Sip.”

And then they stopped. That’s the part that keeps me up. They found the flip. They tested the flip.

Then they walked right past the name.

UP7.

It’s RIGHT THERE. Same three characters, and the dot doesn’t even have to move. Flip the whole name around it, and that dot just sits in the middle, unbothered, the one element in this entire operation that never got the memo.

UP7. Tagline: Same Soda, Other Way.

I’d have had it on a can by Thursday.

Is UP7 a word? No. Neither is Dasani. Dasani is tap water with a rumor attached to it, and not one person on this earth has ever asked what a Dasani is.

Somehow, and because you can’t have just one for an ad agency fee, they created ten packaging concepts, dear reader.

TEN.

A chief design officer in residence and an outside agency in Los Angeles, and somewhere in there a man stood up and presented concept number six.

Six didn’t win. And that guy has told every single person he’s met since that six was the one they should have gone with. It’s still in his portfolio. It’s on his phone. He’ll show you at a party.

I won’t be sarcastic about the new can.

Honestly, the can rules.

Solid green, minimal, logo turned vertical, UP in caps now instead of lowercase.

And the red dot peeks out from behind the U.

Peeks. Out.

From behind.

The U.

There is a designer at that agency in Los Angeles who spent a season of his life on how far out that dot comes. That was the assignment. Slide it out. Slide it back. Too far and the dot’s needy. Not far enough and it’s hiding. A little coy. Just a little. Right there.

Three months. On a dot. I love this person. I want to buy them a drink. Not a 7UP. (But maybe a 7&7?)

And then they had to carry it into a room and get it approved.

I know that room. I’ve sat in that room a hundred times. There’s always a woman at the end of the table with a lanyard and a laptop and nothing else on her calendar today, and I’ve worked for her four or five times now. Different companies. Different names. Same woman.

So I’m going to say the part you’re not supposed to put in writing.

It isn’t the micro-management style I don’t like.

It’s her.

As a human being.

Here’s how it goes. She puts his file up on the big screen. Tilts the head. Lets the silence run a beat too long so the room knows something’s coming. Then... can we try it two pixels to the left?

Not because two pixels left is better. Because she needs everybody watching while she has a thought.

So they move it left. Then they move it back. Then she says, yeah, THERE it is, that’s what I was talking about.

Let’s be honest about the brand equity here.

7UP is the soda you drink when you’re throwing up.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Your mom put a warm flat one on the nightstand next to a saltine and a bucket, and she felt like a doctor, and you felt like a Civil War casualty.

Nobody in the history of the world has walked into a party and said, “Hey, does anybody have a 7UP?”

You get handed a 7UP. Usually by a woman who has already touched your forehead with the back of her hand.

And for this change, they ran BLIND TESTS. People preferred the new one. Said it tasted crisper. More refreshing.

Crisper than WHAT, though? Than the last one you had, at three in the morning, in 1994, with that saltine and that bucket and your mother’s hand on your head?

Somebody wrote the screener for this study. Somebody sat down and typed the questions.

“Have you consumed 7UP in the past six months?”

Check. Yes.

“Please describe the circumstances in this little box.”

A stranger in a strip mall reads your answer back to you.

Little white cups. Windowless room. Seventy-five dollars and a parking validation. That’s a taste test, and depending on the cup, it’s also the worst afternoon of your life.

And not one person in that facility asked the only question that matters.

“Were you keeping it down?”

Here’s the part that actually got me.

7UP was FIRST.

1929.

It INVENTED lemon-lime soda.

And it has spent the ninety-seven years since then losing to the people who copied it.

Now, they call the OG a challenger brand. “Challenger Brand” is what you write on the slide when you invented the whole thing and then stood there for a century watching other people do it better.

That’s not a challenger. That’s your uncle standing over the stuffing, telling the table the recipe is technically his. He’s got the index card. The card’s in the truck. He’s going out to the truck to get the index card.

Nobody asked him to. Everybody keeps eating.

Look at the bodies in this category.

Sierra Mist. Slice. Teem.

TEEM. There was a soda called Teem, and it died, and not one person filed a report.

And Sierra Mist didn’t die, exactly. Pepsi took Sierra Mist out back and came home with Starry, which is what you name the new dog when you don’t want to discuss the old dog.

Starry’s got Giannis. Starry’s got Ice Spice. Starry’s got the NBA and the WNBA.

7UP has your grandmother’s stomach flu.

So the marketing boss says the minute you stop being distinctive in lemon-lime, you stop growing.

Agreed.

Correct.

Airtight.

And the plan for being distinctive is to sell the identical two fruits in reverse order.

Now follow that out with me.

It was the “Uncola.” Today it’s the un-lemon-lime. Keep flipping, and eventually you get the un-7UP, and the un-7UP is a Sprite, and Sprite is the thing that beat it.

The strategy is to slowly become your enemy.

But, in caps.

That’s not a rebrand. That’s a man who flipped his mattress and came into work saying he’s a different person.

Same mattress, Gary.

Same mattress, Gary.

Same.

Seventy-two percent of Gen Alpha and Gen Z go for citrus-forward flavors.

Sixty-eight percent of millennials go for citrus-forward flavors.

Four points to make the point.

That’s the youth insight. That’s the whole thing. Read those two numbers again and tell me what you have learned about young people.

Nothing.

You have learned that human beings like citrus.

The Royal Navy had that data in 1747, and they weren’t even selling anything. They just wanted the teeth to stay in.

And here’s the part I’d have led the deck with, if I were them.

The Navy started on lemons. Lemons worked. Then somebody up the chain swapped the lemons out for limes, because limes were cheaper and easier to get from the colonies.

The limes had less Vitamin C in them. The scurvy came back.

So the lemon-to-lime flip has been run before. It’s been tested. The results are in, and the results are teeth in a cup.

Crisp, though.

Refreshing.

And they had to glue two generations together to even get to seventy-two.

Gen Alpha’s oldest kid has a driver’s license. Gen Alpha’s youngest is in a high chair. Average the license and the high chair, staple the result to Gen Z, and you get a clear view of… everyone?

But okay. Take the finding. Everyone likes citrus. Everyone has always liked citrus.

So the move is more citrus. Right?

No. There isn’t more citrus. There’s the same citrus, rearranged. They brought lime up, and they took lemon down. Two fruits, one can, brand new pecking order, printed on the front so you can see who won.

Ninety-seven years, lemon went first. Ninety-seven years at the top of the hyphen. And in a conference room in 2026, a man in a quarter-zip put up a slide and said the lemon has to come down.

Somebody had to tell lemon.

I want my feelings to move a corporation this hard. I’ve written to several. You know what your feelings get? Fifty-five cents off. Next purchase. Of the product you were complaining about.

If a ninety-seven-year-old soda can flip its sip, so can I.

Same fruits. New man.

I got out the legal pad. I got to ten concepts. Here are four. The other six involved a mustache, and I don’t want to discuss it.

Concept 1: Flip the hyphenate. The pure play. Change nothing, reverse the order. I’ve been a writer-comedian for twenty-some years, so going forward I’m a comedian-writer. Not a Buffalo guy living in Virginia. A Virginia guy from Buffalo. Not a husband who writes. A writer who’s owned. (Said that one out loud in the kitchen. Did not test well.)

Concept 2: Drop the Gerard. Brian Gerard Lewandowski is a name for a man who is the three-named tag for a serial killer. Trim it, and I’m cleaner, faster, one syllable lighter.

Except look at the trend line first. My father was Gerard Donald. His father was Bronislaus Henry. Bronislaus, Gerard, Brian. Every generation quietly filed a little more off. Went a little crisper. Tested a little better with the locals. My family has been running Flip the Sip since the boat.

So dropping the Gerard isn’t a rebrand. It’s round four of the same one.

Rejected. Karie noted that it’s on every book cover, and that Bronislaus never got a focus group.

Concept 3: Lowercase. Everybody did this. The airline, the bank, the cereal, all of them turning at once like a flock of birds that heard something.

brian.

Approachable.

Rejected after I signed an email that way to a client, and they called the house to ask if I was okay. (7UP went the other direction, by the way. Ninety-seven years of lowercase and they’ve finally started SHOUTING. In this economy.)

Concept 4: The dot. Every real brand has one identifier doing all the work. The swoosh. The arches. The little red guy behind the U. I don’t have one. I have a hat, and a hat isn’t an identifier. A hat’s a lid.

Karie says I do have one and I’m not going to like it. It’s the noise I make getting up from sitting down. She says I do it in every room. She says I do it at other people’s houses. She says people know it’s me before they turn around.

Instant recognition.

Zero media spend.

I said I didn’t want to discuss it. Here’s the whole thing.

My daughter turns twenty-eight this year, and she has informed me that mustaches are back. That they look good now. That men are HOT with them. She said this at a table.

Out loud.

To her father.

Here’s what I see. I see a guy in a 1974 adult film. Not the lead. The pool guy. Shirt open, thumbs in the belt loops, one line of dialogue, the entire performance resting on the mustache… and a bit more.

Or, I see a man in 1877 on a penny-farthing. One wheel the size of a hay bale, one wheel the size of a coaster, waxed tips on the lip, pedaling eleven miles an hour directly into a hedge.

It’s the same guy. Same face, same posture, same absolute confidence that the equipment he selected is the correct size for the job.

Some nights I get both at once and the two of them collapse into one film. Period costume, 1974 production values, single location, and a plot nobody involved could describe under oath.

Which means it needs a title. I didn’t have to invent one, because 1877 and 1974 already agreed on it.

Boneshaker.

Real bicycle. 1860s. That’s what they called it. Out loud, in England, in mixed company. The Victorians looked at that machine, reached for that word, and not one person in the room said “Maybe not.”

Works fine in 1974 too. Same word, same guy, same mustache.

Because that’s all a mustache is. It’s an announcement made at the front of the head about business allegedly happening elsewhere.

That’s not a face. That’s packaging.

Pun intended. (I read that one back, then said “Well, that’s staying.” out loud, to the cat.)

So I grew one.

To prove her wrong.

My own blind test, except everybody could see it.

It came in grey. Just the mustache. Nothing else on the entire face. Fifteen days of that, and she looked up from her phone and said, “ Yeah. No.”

Also, note the strategy failure. A mustache is an ADDITION. That’s not a flip. I had a coherent brand position, and then I put a new ingredient on my face like some kind of amateur.

I ran a blind test of my own. A real one. I want that on the record.

Concept 4 needed proving, because I was not prepared to accept Karie’s finding on the word of one woman. So I took it to the only panel in this house that has never once seen my packaging.

Not a pun that time. Regular packaging. The hat, the outside of the man, all of it.

I sat on the kitchen floor with one of our dogs, Remmi, who is blind.

And the hat.

Just a man, a dog, and whatever.

She sniffed my knee. Then she wandered off toward the fridge.

So I stood up. Then I sat back down.

And here she came. Head up, tail going, straight across the kitchen at a sound she has heard nine thousand times and can apparently pick out of a quiet room.

Independent confirmation.

Then she walked into the counter, which she does, because she’s blind, and the lime I’d bought for research rolled off the edge and went under the stove, and Queso (our Chihuahua) barked at the stove for eleven straight minutes. Trouble (the Famous Pig) heard the barking from outside and started oinking, because she assumed it was about food, because it usually is, because she’s 161 pounds now.

Up two. It’s August. Everybody’s up two in August.

In fairness to my doubting her, Karie is my focus group, my brand council, and the only person in this house with a doctorate.

A focus group is supposed to be several people, though. She’s one. I’ve raised this. She says she’s plenty.

And she is, because there are at least four of her in there and they do not always agree.

There’s the one with the doctorate, who wants a source.

There’s the only child, who never had to negotiate for anything in her life and sees no reason to start now.

There’s the one who says “Brian Gerard!”, at which point I am some sort of concern for an action I assumed was benign, and everyone goes home.

Then there’s the fourth one, who has just been waiting on the other three to catch up.

I explained the flip.

I explained the concepts.

I pitched her UP7, free of charge, on behalf of a corporation that has never heard of me.

She asked if that was a vitamin. I explained that a refresh maintains distinctiveness within an existing category, which is a sentence I read on Monday and have been carrying around ever since like a smooth rock.

She listened to all of it.

“You already had a makeover,” she said. “It was called 2003.”

I asked what that meant.

She said I knew what it meant.

I do not know what it meant. I have thought about it for two days.

In 2003 I had a goatee. I had dark brown hair. I had sweater vests, and I TUCKED THEM IN.

Into my pants.

On purpose.

In front of other people.

And I drove a Saturn.

Now, look at that list and tell me which one of those got discontinued first.

All of them.

Every item. The hair, the vests, the goatee, and the car company itself. They took Saturn out back the same as Sierra Mist. They beat it harder.

I was writing promos for a cable network that isn’t there anymore while driving a car from a brand that isn’t there anymore, wearing a vest inside a waistband.

Karie was right.

Again.

The Gerard stays. The order stays. Same two fruits, same sequence, no flip.

And the lime is under the stove.

It went under during the blind test, and it is staying under, because I am not moving an appliance for a piece of produce I bought to win an argument with a soft drink.

Queso’s been sitting in front of that stove for two days. Doesn’t bark at it anymore. Doesn’t leave either. Just sits, facing the gap, first thing in the morning, last thing at night, like a man with a job.

He got a whole new identity out of this.

I got a lime under the stove.

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Coffee me.

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)

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