Poppi's Fan-First Play Earned 34% Category Share Before $1.95B Sale

For marketing and adtech leaders, Poppi's rise before its $1.95 billion PepsiCo acquisition is a case study in shifting social investment from broad reach to depth of engagement. The brand's 34% category share, driven by TikTok and Instagram superfans who shape limited-time products, signals that community-led social can directly influence product pipelines and growth metrics. As large brands begin copying the playbook, the challenge is scaling creator-style speed without losing the authenticity that built the fan base.

Poppi's fan-first social media strategy has evolved from a startup growth hack into a blueprint that some of the industry's largest brand marketers are beginning to adopt, according to Digiday. The PepsiCo-owned brand, which captured 34% of the functional soda category before its $1.95 billion sale, deliberately tunes its TikTok and Instagram operations toward diehard fans rather than the broadest possible audience. Sophia Sesto, who leads the brand's social media, creator and ambassador operations and was hired four years before the PepsiCo buyout, describes the approach as 'community first... pop culture.' The strategy treats followers not as passive consumers but as evangelists, a live focus group and a social listening panel that can prompt real product development, including limited-time offers such as a Love Island flavor launched last summer.

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The PepsiCo-owned brand, which captured 34% of the functional soda category before its $1.95 billion sale, deliberately tunes its TikTok and Instagram operations toward diehard fans rather than the broadest possible audience.

This marks a meaningful departure from reach- and frequency-based social media planning. Instead of optimizing for impressions among mass audiences, fan-first marketers optimize for depth, retention and co-creation. The playbook depends on a 'creator-esque mindset,' as Piet Southey, U.S. managing director at Billion Dollar Boy, puts it. That means social teams must behave like creators: monitor comments as a barometer, respond in real time, and treat platform-native trends as product and content inputs. For Poppi, fan feedback has directly led to limited-time-offer launches, creating what Sesto calls a 'sense of ownership' among followers.

The implications for marketing leaders extend well beyond beverage. If fan-first becomes standard at enterprise scale, social listening shifts from a brand-health measurement tool to a product innovation engine. That forces tighter integration between social, creator, insight and product teams. It also changes how agencies and adtech vendors measure success: community engagement, repeat participation, comment-to-purchase paths and superfan retention may matter more than top-funnel impressions. The strategy also carries clear risks. A narrow fan base can become an echo chamber, cultural cues can be misread quickly, and ceding content direction to communities can trigger brand-safety concerns when a brand is as large as PepsiCo. The article explicitly notes that the approach carries risks, even as large marketers begin to mimic it.

Poppi's trajectory is particularly instructive because it scaled from startup origins. Sesto notes the fans 'have been on this journey with us from the beginning,' which implies authentic community capital built over years. That authenticity may be the hardest asset to reproduce under a large corporation's governance, legal review and quarterly marketing calendar. The question is whether fan-first can survive PepsiCo-level distribution and compliance requirements without losing the speed that made it effective. A limited-time offer driven by comments in 'real time' is a process that may clash with enterprise product development cycles.