Some brands certainly retain customers better than others: OLIPOP holds 42% of its triers against Ghia's 23%, close to double. Even though OLIPOP might be the best in this category, its ceiling is still quite low—the best performer in a five-brand set loses well over half of everyone who tries it. Awareness is where brands diverge most, running from 38 to 99 across the five, a 61-point spread compared to 19 points on retention.
Ghia is the one brand in the set with a genuine awareness issue, and it is a cheaper job than it looks. It is the least known at 38 aware, and the only brand where most people who have heard of it still never try it, even among category buyers: 34% trial among the aware, against 79-93% everywhere else. Nobody is tasting Ghia and turning it down, they're simply walking past it on their morning Erewhon routines. A brand people walk past needs encounter and legibility, which are distribution and pack decisions, not a preference fix.
Gave something up: 59% churn (n=188) · Gave nothing up: 73% churn (n=92) · +14 points difference, small base
| What it replaced | n | Churn |
|---|---|---|
| Soda | 98 | 58% |
| Coffee or tea | 41 | 68% |
| Alcohol | 22 | 55% |
| Energy drink | 17 | 65% * |
| Sports drink | 14 | 79% * |
| Seltzer | 12 | 67% * |
| Food | 11 | 55% * |
| Juice | 7 | — |
| Nicotine / vape | 3 | — |
| Prescription | 3 | — |
| Plain water | 63 | 71% |
| Nothing at all | 34 | 71% |
Gave something up: 66% churn (n=50) · Gave nothing up: 74% churn (n=27) · +8 points difference, small base
| What it replaced | n | Churn |
|---|---|---|
| Soda | 28 | 71% |
| Coffee or tea | 10 | 60% * |
| Alcohol | 5 | — |
| Energy drink | 5 | — |
| Sports drink | 3 | — |
| Seltzer | 3 | — |
| Food | 3 | — |
| Juice | 3 | — |
| Prescription | 1 | — |
| Plain water | 18 | 78% * |
| Nothing at all | 10 | 70% * |
Gave something up: 51% churn (n=63) · Gave nothing up: 75% churn (n=28) · +24 points difference, small base
| What it replaced | n | Churn |
|---|---|---|
| Soda | 34 | 35% |
| Coffee or tea | 13 | 92% * |
| Alcohol | 6 | — |
| Energy drink | 6 | — |
| Sports drink | 4 | — |
| Seltzer | 3 | — |
| Food | 4 | — |
| Juice | 3 | — |
| Nicotine / vape | 1 | — |
| Prescription | 1 | — |
| Plain water | 18 | 61% * |
| Nothing at all | 12 | 83% * |
Gave something up: 58% churn (n=38) · Gave nothing up: 68% churn (n=19) · +10 points difference, small base
| What it replaced | n | Churn |
|---|---|---|
| Soda | 16 | 62% * |
| Coffee or tea | 8 | — |
| Alcohol | 5 | — |
| Energy drink | 2 | — |
| Sports drink | 4 | — |
| Seltzer | 3 | — |
| Food | 2 | — |
| Juice | 1 | — |
| Nicotine / vape | 1 | — |
| Prescription | 1 | — |
| Plain water | 14 | 71% * |
| Nothing at all | 6 | — |
Gave something up: 61% churn (n=28) · Gave nothing up: 64% churn (n=14) · +3 points difference, small base
| What it replaced | n | Churn |
|---|---|---|
| Soda | 14 | 86% * |
| Coffee or tea | 9 | — |
| Alcohol | 5 | — |
| Energy drink | 4 | — |
| Sports drink | 2 | — |
| Seltzer | 2 | — |
| Food | 2 | — |
| Nicotine / vape | 1 | — |
| Plain water | 10 | 70% * |
| Nothing at all | 5 | — |
Gave something up: n=9, base too small to rate · Gave nothing up: n=4, base too small to rate
| What it replaced | n | Churn |
|---|---|---|
| Soda | 6 | — |
| Coffee or tea | 1 | — |
| Alcohol | 1 | — |
| Sports drink | 1 | — |
| Seltzer | 1 | — |
| Plain water | 3 | — |
| Nothing at all | 1 | — |
* base of 10–19 relationships. Rows with fewer than 10 relationships show no rate.
Sub-buckets sit inside their group and are multi-label, so someone who displaced both soda and coffee appears in both rows and the rows do not sum to the group. Anything under 10 relationships shows its count without a rate, because a percentage on n=3 is noise. And one honest limit: the displacement was recorded in section 4, before any brand was named, so a row means “people who tried this brand and whose occasion displaced X” — not “people who replaced X with this brand.”
The widest gap in the study belongs to one brand. For OLIPOP the trade looks like everything: people whose occasion displaced soda churn at 35%, while people who gave up nothing churn at 75% — on 34 and 28 relationships. OLIPOP is a healthier soda, it is bought against a named rival, and where that rival is real the habit appears to hold.
Liquid Death is the counter-case, and it shows no meaningful gap. Its soda-displacers churn at 71% and its gave-nothing group at 74% — a difference of only 3 points. This makes sense intuitively — Liquid Death is water. Swapping a soda for canned water is not the same trade as swapping it for something that tastes like soda, and this flows down clearly into retention data.
Read across all five and the pattern is milder but pointing the same way: 59% churn where something was given up against 73% where nothing was. Treat every one of these splits as a direction to test, not a result: a hundred people is a small base, they were screened to buyers of these five brands in one region, and the same person appears in the pooled figure once for every brand they tried. The category-level version of this pattern is mild for a reason: it averages OLIPOP's strong effect with Liquid Death's absent one. One participant named the hazard more cleanly than we could have: “every time I grab a drink, it is to replace water in my life”. When a three-dollar can replaces tap water, “better” has nothing left to be better than, and the purchase has to survive on taste, ritual and identity alone.
Whether the swap felt deliberate does not drive retention. Thirty-seven participants called it a conscious decision and 22 said it simply happened, and retention is flat across them — 65% against 68% retaining at least one, means of 1.08 and 1.09. That distinction is worth noting, because a brand can put a rival in the frame and cannot make a habit feel intentional. Where no rival was in the frame, people said so unprompted: “I was trying to replace soda with it, but I just liked soda too much”, and “I love the taste of a Diet Coke that comes out of a fountain”.
Two occasions at the far edge are worth recording even though neither generalizes. One participant replaced vaping with flavored functional drinks. Another replaced a prescription. Single cases, but they mark out the real competitive set, which is wider and more winnable than the soda aisle: every other way a person changes how they feel at three in the afternoon.
The uber-masculine brand has near-total awareness (96 of 100) and the strongest
venue-discovery engine in the set:
participants meet it at concerts and festivals where it is often the only water sold. The job it
does is social. It is “water that makes you feel better about not drinking a beer”, or as one participant put it, “like a sober man's water”.
While the brand maintains superb awareness, being aware of a brand is different than
actually liking the brand's image or even knowing what the brand actually sells. Twelve participants
refused or resisted on the name alone, and eleven had the category wrong entirely, six thinking it
an energy drink and four thinking it alcoholic. Liquid Death's retention is the lowest of the four
established brands at 32%, because once
the novelty is spent the arithmetic surfaces: “I'm not paying like three or four dollars for a can of water”.
The deeper risk is identity fit, not price. “I feel kind of corny holding it” and “I don't fit into the stereotype where I feel like I have to fit in by having a canned beverage at, like, a bar” are refusals no
discount reaches.
The move. Keep the name; it is buying trial no media plan could
afford, and the 12 refusers are the cost of that, not a problem to solve. The gap to close is the
second purchase at home, where the drink competes with the tap and loses on arithmetic. Give it a
home occasion with a rival in it — the drink you hold instead of a beer after work, which is
the job participants already describe — and a multipack price that survives comparison to a
case of water.
The most known (99) and most tried (92) brand in the set, with the most stable self-description
in the whole study: a healthier soda. Where it wins, it wins cleanly, displacing a specific
Coke or Diet Coke in a specific moment. One participant's rule is exact: “If I'm eating something that's really heavy or fatty, I'll try to, to drink an Olipop instead of a Coke”.
Its losses are not taste losses. Thirteen participants named price directly, and pack format
compounds it: “it only comes in a four-pack, which I can finish easily in one day”. Where the format fails, the habit never forms.
The one callout is there is a bit of a fuzzy brand boundary. Two participants could not
reliably tell OLIPOP from Poppi and
described buying both interchangeably: “I don't know if that's Olipop or Poppi”.
The move. This brand has the category's best claim position
already: a named rival, in a named occasion, verifiable on the label. Do not spend on awareness at
99 aware. Spend on unit economics — single-serve in the cooler door at an impulse price, out
of the bulk aisle — and on distinctiveness against Poppi, because trial this high with
retention at 42% means the leak is in the repeat, and a repeat you cannot attribute is a repeat you
may be buying for a competitor.
Aware 69, tried 57, retained 22. First trial is driven by flavor range and the glass bottle.
The losses
cluster on sugar content, price against GT's at comparable quality, and bottle ergonomics.
The brand's own name is doing unintended work. One participant read the product as
“it represents like an indulgence while pretending to be a healthy drink”, a judgment made harsher by the health promise in the name. Another described the
packaging as “almost medicinal”, which is a compliment about seriousness and a warning about pleasure at
the same time, and a third found the pack design itself a barrier: “the packaging is a little bit intimidating”.
Its sharpest problem is not rejection but blankness. Asked what stood out, one participant
answered: “It seems as good or as not good, as excellent or as not excellent as the next one”. Against GT's, several treat the choice as no choice at all:
“they are pretty interchangeable in my mind”.
The move. Blankness is a cheaper problem than rejection: 57 people
have tried it and formed no view, which means it is an asset waiting for a reason. Pick one occasion this
brand intends to own and make the pack argue for it, rather than competing with GT's on the shelf
where the tiebreaker is promotion. The sugar figure is the credible claim here, and putting a number
where the health language currently sits also treats the medicinal read.
Aware 53, tried 42, retained 16. The lowest awareness of the three established players, and the most
durable loyalty per person reached. Retention runs on narrative and habit rather than claims:
participants cite fifteen-year routines, “knowing the backstory of GT's mom's cancer”, and the fact that “It's an LA company”.
The category-entry role matters commercially. GT's is repeatedly named as the brand that
introduced someone to kombucha, which makes its awareness ceiling the category's ceiling too.
One structural artifact worth naming: two participants treated Synergy, GT's own
flagship line, as a separate and competing brand: “I think it's, like, Synergy, I think is the kombucha”. The branded house is not reading
as one house.
The move. This is the one brand in the set where an awareness buy
is justified, because what it retains on — founder story, local origin, tenure — is
working on everyone it reaches and only 53 have been reached. The story is the asset, so spend it on
the kombucha drinkers who have never met the brand rather than on the category at large. Fixing the
Synergy boundary is close to free and recovers awareness the brand has already paid
for.
The outlier on both gates. Least known at 38 aware, and uniquely, most people who have heard of
it still never try it: 34% trial-of-aware against 79 to 93% for the other four.
The failure is legibility. Five participants confidently misdescribed it, most often as a
kombucha or a chia-seed drink, including “does Ghia have chia seeds in it”. A name that produces the wrong category
expectation costs a trial before price or taste is ever reached. One participant declined on the
name's sound alone.
The three who retained it describe it precisely and warmly as a non-alcoholic aperitif. The
product is not the problem. Encounter is.
The move. Do not buy preference; buy encounter and legibility. The
three keepers describe the product perfectly, which says the proposition converts once it lands. Say
the category on the front of the pack, and put the bottle where the occasion already exists —
the restaurant and bar moment where someone is not drinking and wants something to hold. That is the
one displacement in this study with a real vice on the other side of it and almost no
better-for-you competition sitting in it.
The drink that replaced something retained 1.16 brands against 0.78 for the drink that replaced water or nothing, on matched trial. For OLIPOP the same split is the difference between 35% churn and 75%.
Awareness is close to spent among the buyers you already have: the top two brands sit at 96 and 99 aware, and retention still tops out at 42%. Whether reach converts people who don't yet buy the category is a real question this sample cannot answer.
Thirteen participants named OLIPOP's price directly, one finishes a four-pack in a day, and bulk-only shelving recurs across brands. These arrive in survey data looking like preference losses; they are format losses, and cheaper to fix.
Two participants could not separate OLIPOP from Poppi, and two treated Synergy, GT's own flagship line, as a rival. That is awareness already paid for and not banked.
31 people here already hold two or more of the five at once, and 34 hold exactly one, so a second better-for-you brand in the same rotation is observed behavior rather than a hypothesis. The largest co-held pair is Liquid Death with OLIPOP at 12 people, and those participants describe the two as doing different jobs, not competing for the same slot.
A buyer who already accepts the category is cheaper to reach than a soda drinker, and the ask is smaller: you are competing for one more slot in a rotation, not for a whole allegiance. The exception is the kombucha pair, where GT's and Health-Ade are decided by whichever is on promotion — there you would be buying a switch, and a discounted one.
More awareness aimed at people already inside the category, where the top two brands sit at 96 and 99 aware. Converting the 12 people who refuse Liquid Death on the name, who are the price of a name that recruits everyone else. New claim language built from the category's own vocabulary, which is the part shoppers already discount. And arguing with the wellness-fatigue minority in creative, which is a tracking question, not a campaign.
This was the Southern California better-for-you read. There will be more — self-funded, fielded in days, published in full, just like this one. Leave your email and each new CPG study arrives the day it drops.
Leave your email → Want a read like this on your own category? Tell us what you sell.Dialogue's AI moderator ran every interview — open elicitation, critical-incident anchoring, five unaided brand deep-dives — averaging 23.7 minutes and a median of 49 participant turns. Brands were withheld until section 5, so the occasion findings are unprompted. 100 Southern Californians: 79 LA / Orange / Inland Empire, 17 San Diego, 4 Santa Barbara / Ventura; 55 women, 43 men, 2 other.
Who qualified. The screener rejected anyone who answered “none of the above” when asked which of the five they had bought in the last six months. So this is a study of the category's own buyers: read every trial and awareness figure as a within-buyer rate, higher than a general population's. What the design buys you is the retention read — the people who churned here are people the category had and lost.
Nobody in this category commissioned this study, and no brand named in it has seen the results before you.
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