The Drink That Wasn't Supposed to Work — And How Red Bull Changed the World

In 1982, Dietrich Mateschitz was tired.

That is not a dramatic opening for the story of one of the most influential brands in history — but it is an accurate one. Mateschitz was an Austrian marketing executive working for Blendax, a German consumer goods company. He travelled extensively across Asia, and like most long-haul travellers, he arrived in Bangkok disoriented, exhausted, and running on very little sleep.

A local colleague suggested he try something. A small bottle. A syrupy, non-carbonated drink called Krating Daeng — Thai for "red gaur," a large, powerful wild bovine of Southeast Asia. The drink had been created six years earlier, in 1976, by Chaleo Yoovidhya, a self-made Thai entrepreneur who had started life as the son of Chinese immigrants, worked as a duck farmer, built a pharmaceutical company from the ground up, and eventually developed a tonic for the people who needed it most: Thailand's truck drivers, factory workers, and farmers who were powering the country's industrial growth on very little sleep and very long hours.

Mateschitz drank the Krating Daeng. His jet lag, he later said, disappeared.

He sat with that small bottle in his hand and realised something that would change the global beverage industry: this was not just a drink. This was a category waiting to exist.

Two Men, Half a Million Dollars, and a Handshake

Mateschitz contacted Chaleo Yoovidhya. He flew back to Thailand. He made a proposition: take Krating Daeng to the world — reformulated for Western tastes, repackaged, repositioned, and rebuilt into a global brand.

Chaleo was hesitant. But Mateschitz was persuasive.

In 1984, they struck a deal. Each partner invested $500,000 of their personal savings to co-found Red Bull GmbH. Chaleo and Mateschitz each held a 49% stake. The remaining 2% went to Chaleo's son, Chalerm. It was agreed that Mateschitz would manage the company and lead the global strategy.

Then Mateschitz did something that speaks to his confidence and patience in equal measure: he spent three years reformulating the drink. The original Krating Daeng was sweet, syrupy, and non-carbonated — built for a Thai working-class palate. Mateschitz added carbonation, reduced the sweetness, refined the flavour profile, and repackaged the product in a slim, silver-and-blue 250ml can that looked like nothing else on a shelf.

He also tested it with focus groups. They told him the drink tasted terrible. They said the brand name was strange. They said the logo — two charging bulls beneath a blazing sun — was too aggressive.

Mateschitz proceeded anyway.

On 1 April 1987, Red Bull was launched in Austria. By the end of 1988, it had sold 1.2 million cans in its home market. A category that had not existed — the energy drink — now had a bestseller and a trailblazer.

The Marketing Strategy That Nobody Had Seen Before

Red Bull's most important decisions were never about the drink. They were about what the drink would mean.

From the very first day, Mateschitz made a choice that defined the next four decades of the brand's growth: Red Bull would not advertise like a beverage company. It would not fight for shelf space against Coca-Cola or Pepsi. It would not run television commercials showing beautiful people sipping from a can on a beach.

Instead, it would become a culture.

The Wings Team and Grassroots Seeding

Red Bull's earliest marketing was almost deliberately unglamorous in its execution, even if the vision behind it was enormous. The brand deployed what became known as the "Wings Team" — fleets of young, energetic brand ambassadors, often university students, who drove Mini Coopers fitted with large Red Bull cans on the roof and handed out free product at universities, nightclubs, gyms, and sporting events.

The strategy was precise and intentional: put the can in the hands of exactly the right people in exactly the right setting. Not television viewers. Not passive consumers. But the students, the partygoers, the athletes, the night-shift workers, the people who were awake and moving and needing exactly what Red Bull offered. Sampling was not a promotional tactic — it was the primary marketing vehicle.

Creating a Category, Not Competing in One

Red Bull also priced itself as a premium product from day one — more expensive than most beverages on any shelf it occupied. This was not accidental. Mateschitz understood that price communicates value. A cheap energy drink is a commodity. A premium energy drink is a statement.

By pricing higher than Krating Daeng (which it left as a lower-cost product in Southeast Asian markets), Red Bull established itself as aspirational — a drink for people who thought of themselves as performers, achievers, and adventurers, not simply as consumers of a caffeinated beverage.

Extreme Sports: Not a Sponsorship, a Takeover

Traditional sports marketing involves paying athletes to hold products or putting logos on jerseys. Red Bull went several layers deeper.

Mateschitz poured profits not into television advertising but into the adrenaline sports that the brand wanted to own: skydiving, mountain biking, snowboarding, cliff diving, breakdancing, air racing, and motorsport. But Red Bull did not merely sponsor these sports. It created its own events — competitions, series, and spectacles that would not exist without Red Bull's investment and imagination.

Red Bull Flugtag, launched in 1992, invited ordinary people to build human-powered flying machines and launch them off platforms into water — equal parts physics experiment and slapstick comedy, and entirely watchable. Red Bull Rampage, launched in 2001, brought elite mountain bikers to Utah's desert and asked them to descend near-vertical cliffs. Red Bull Cliff Diving built an entire world series around a discipline most people had never considered a competitive sport.

The Red Bull Stratos project, executed on 14 October 2012, was the culmination of this philosophy taken to its logical extreme. Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner ascended to 128,000 feet — nearly 24 miles above Earth — in a helium balloon, stood at the edge of the capsule with the curve of the planet visible behind him, and jumped. He fell for 4 minutes and 19 seconds, breaking the sound barrier in freefall without any vehicle — the first human being ever to do so. The event was streamed live on YouTube and attracted over 8 million concurrent viewers, setting a record for live stream viewership at that time. It was broadcast on more than 50 television channels including the BBC, CNN, and Discovery. In the six months following the jump, Red Bull's US sales increased by 7%.

The Red Bull logo was on Felix's suit, on the balloon, on the capsule. But Red Bull never showed a can. Not once.

Red Bull Becomes an Empire

Formula One: Owning the Pinnacle of Motorsport

In 2004, Red Bull purchased the underperforming Jaguar Racing Formula 1 team. In 2005, it acquired a second team — Minardi — renaming it Scuderia Toro Rosso. Red Bull Racing went from a newcomer to the dominant force in Formula 1: winning four consecutive Constructors' Championships from 2010 to 2013 with Sebastian Vettel winning four consecutive Drivers' Championships in the same period. More recently, with Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing won the Constructors' Championship in 2022 and 2023, while Verstappen claimed the Drivers' Championship in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Red Bull now holds six Constructors' Championships. Fielding two F1 teams exposes the brand to over a billion viewers across 180 countries — at a cost that, by Red Bull's reckoning, is worth every cent.

Red Bull Media House: A Company That Is the Content

In 2007, Red Bull formalised its internal content operation into Red Bull Media House — headquartered in Salzburg with a North American base in Santa Monica. It produces feature films, documentaries, web series, and live event coverage. It operates Red Bull TV, a streaming platform offering free content that makes the brand synonymous with entertainment rather than just energy. Red Bull Media House licenses content to broadcasters and creates original programming across extreme sports, music, and culture. The brand does not interrupt content with advertising. It is the content.

A Football Network Built on a System

Red Bull has built an international football network that operates as a vertically integrated talent pipeline. FC Red Bull Salzburg in Austria, acquired in 2005. New York Red Bulls in the United States, from 2006. RB Leipzig in Germany, from 2009. Red Bull Bragantino in Brazil, from 2019. All clubs play a unified style — high-pressing, fast-transition football — so that players can move seamlessly between them. The pathway runs from South America to Austria to Leipzig, and onward to elite European clubs. Red Bull is not just sponsoring football. It is engineering it.

The Numbers That Prove the Model

Red Bull GmbH is headquartered in Fuschl am See — an Austrian village of approximately 1,500 people near Salzburg. It is privately held, with the Yoovidhya family controlling 51% and the Mateschitz family holding 49% following Dietrich Mateschitz's death in October 2022 at the age of 78. His son Mark Mateschitz inherited the family stake.

Since its 1987 launch, Red Bull has sold over 100 billion cans worldwide. In 2023, the company reported revenues of approximately €10.5 billion. The brand's global market share in energy drinks stood at 43% as of 2020, making it the most popular energy drink brand in the world. It is available in over 175 countries.

The category that did not exist in 1987 — that Mateschitz was told had no future, whose taste was condemned by focus groups, whose logo was called too aggressive — is now one of the most valuable beverage segments on earth. And Red Bull remains its defining brand.

More Than a Drink. More Than a Brand.

There is a line that captures the Red Bull philosophy better than any mission statement ever written: "Red Bull doesn't come to the consumer. Red Bull makes the consumer come to it."

From a small bottle of Krating Daeng in a Bangkok hotel to a space jump watched live by millions, from campus sampling tours in Austria to two Formula 1 World Championship teams, from a man's jet lag in 1982 to a media empire generating billions in revenue — Red Bull has done something no other beverage company in history has fully replicated.

It sold a feeling. It built a world around that feeling. And then it made the world come to it.

The slogan has always been the most honest thing about the brand. It never promised a better-tasting drink. It never promised refreshment or relaxation or any of the things most beverages sell.

It promised wings.

And for thirty-eight years, it has found ways to prove, with increasing audacity, that it meant every word.

Founded 1984. Launched 1987. Built in Austria, born in Thailand. Sold everywhere. Stopped by nothing.