Ranker Spotlight: Sprite

McDonald’s is hoping to find a satisfying answer to a long and hotly debated question: does the Sprite you get at a McDonald’s restaurant just “hit different?”

The fast food mega-franchise offered free Sprite fountain drinks last month on the first day of summer, asking customers to tell them what McDonald’s Sprite tastes like. The offer is referencing an online meme where people use synesthesia to describe the highly-carbonated soda’s unique taste, comparing it to the sound of zippers, velcro, static, or a growling dog.

Why is Sprite at the center of this soft drink debate instead of more prominent brands like Coke or Pepsi? Part of it is the fact that the soda’s crisp, lemon-lime flavor identifies it with the summer season, but it’s also an incredibly popular drink overall, according to some of Ranker’s most competitive soda lists. To get a sense of what drives the popularity of a soda that fans find almost impossible to describe, we’re taking a look at how Sprite ranks on our lists about soft drinks, as well as the tastes and preferences of the brand’s biggest fans.

How Sprite Ranks on Ranker

The first ranking for Sprite that jumps out is its #1 spot on the list of The Best Fountain Sodas (11K votes). This finding seems to confirm the thinking behind the viral McDonald’s campaign: that the greater public recognizes something special about a Sprite that comes from a soda fountain. There are plenty of impressive rankings for the Sprite you buy in cans and bottles, too.

Besides being the #1 overall Sprite flavor (competing with the likes of Sprite Cranberry, Sprite Cherry, and Sprite Ice), the soft drink is also the #1 Best Lemon Lime Soda (15K votes), beating out popular competitors 7UP and Sierra Mist. And though Sprite isn’t #1 on two other lists, they still might be the soft drink’s most impressive rankings: The Best Sodas Of All Time (614K votes) and The Best Soda Brands (50K votes) on which Sprite is ranked #3 and #2, respectively. On both lists, Sprite shares the Top 3 Dr Pepper and Coca-Cola, which means the lemon lime soda is popular enough to transcend the Coke vs. Pepsi debate: in the eyes of the Ranker readership, the question is now, “Dr. Pepper, Coke, or Sprite.”

What Do Sprite Fans Love?

Sprite is one of the most popular fountain drinks, so we know it has a massive consumer base. But what characteristics define that consumer base, and could it possibly be expanded? We found some potential answers to those questions by looking at what other drinks, brands, TV shows, and movies that people who drink Sprite are more likely to love.

Other Soft Drinks

The beverage Sprite fans are most likely to also enjoy is 7UP, a competing lemon lime soda brand, which suggests that fans of Sprite are driven to the soda more by its crisp, summery flavor than by loyalty to the brand. Even outside this particular soda niche, the tastes of this audience tend toward the citrusy: the soda they’re next most likely to love is Fanta Orange. Still, Sprite fans are 3X more likely to also love Coca-Cola, suggesting that this consumer base isn’t entirely composed of people who love light, fruit-flavored soft drinks.

Outside the realm of beverages, Sprite fans are particularly like to love snacks like Sour Patch Kids and Skittles.

Movies and TV

Like the soda itself, the films that are most beloved by Sprite fans have huge audiences and broad appeal. Still,some similarities between the movies suggest the movies most likely to appeal to this group are Independence Day, The Lion King, The Dark Knight, and Titanic. With the exception of The Dark Knight, all these movies were released within three years of one another — all defining blockbusters of the ‘90s. Though Christopher Nolan’s popular Batman film came the next decade, it still indicates that Sprite’s fan base is largely made up of millennials ages 25-40: those who remember hits from the 1990s either from their childhoods or from their adolescence. Reinforcing that takeaway is the fact that Sprite fans are more likely to love The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air than any other TV show.

More recent films and television shows are absent from Insights’ analysis on Sprite fans, which could indicate that the brand has less reach with younger Gen Z consumers. The audience’s love of Christopher Nolan (they’re also drawn to Inception) and Batman movies suggests HBO Max subscribers would be a good place to start finding younger fans — perhaps those who love 2022’s The Batman would be equally given to enjoy the lemon lime soda, just as fans of The Dark Knight and Fresh Prince (also available on HBO Max) are.

These stories are crafted using Ranker Insights, which takes over one billion votes cast on Ranker.com and converts them into actionable psychographics about pop culture fans across the world. To learn more about how our Ranker Insights can be customized to serve your business needs, visit insights.ranker.com, or email us at insights@ranker.com.

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