PRIME TIME
South Africans around the country queued for hours on May 1 in the hope of buying bottles of energy drink Prime from select Checkers stores. The success of the launch is a case study in influencer culture, and how social media can drive consumption patterns
y 8am on Monday May 1, more than 120 people were waiting outside the Checkers in The Point shopping centre in Sea Point, Cape Town. Across the country, similar scenes were playing out with snaking queues of parents and teens outside Checkers outlets, ready to rush in to lay their hands on bottles of energy drink Prime Hydration.
For Kelli Dorman, it was an early start. She arrived at Checkers at 5am, eldest son and a friend of his in tow, bringing along chairs for herself and a friend. (Her children had wanted to get there by 3am to secure their place in the queue.)
“We’ve been planning in advance,” Dorman tells the FM, as she slings her packed chair over her shoulder, ready to make a run for it.
Luca Pieterson is also in the queue. He’s here with his boss, whose son invited him. Stephen Frank, who owns a shop in the area, is there with his 10year-old son. Why? “Some famous YouTuber I know absolutely nothing about it,” Frank tells the FM.
Mas-ooda (she declined to give her surname) can answer that question. Her 14-year-old son “is a fan of Logan Paul and KSI”, she says.
The energy drink which comes in ice pop, blue raspberry, lemon lime and tropical punch flavours is the brainchild of US YouTuber Paul and his British counterpart KSI (real name Olajide Olatunji), who between them have more than 40-million followers on the video-sharing site.
Given that number, it was unsurprising that when they launched
Prime Hydration in January 2022, it was a sure hit. Since then, it has generated $250m in sales around the world, according to Paul $45m of that in just January this year.
BPrime “has taken the teen world by storm”, according to Klikd, an online portal that aims to help parents and teachers navigate the world of social media use for children. “It is the most sought-after drink on the planet if you are anywhere between 10 and 18.”
Prime’s success has been put down to Paul and KSI’s audience engagement and savvy use of YouTube’s algorithmic networks. It was a calculated move, as Brand Finance Africa chair Jeremy Sampson tells the FM, given that the target market is all about digital.
“When the two characters [Paul and KSI] combine their resources, it’s a little bit scary what they’ve achieved,” he tells the FM.
If you were among those who had doubts about the power of social media, one look at the frenzy playing out around the country would surely have dispelled them. Little promotion was required other than a product announcement; the real power was the hype generated by a young, online generation who know all about the founders and the drink, and who’ve been wanting to try it for months.
For Checkers, the launch has been “nothing short of spectacular”, says Renaldo Phillips, head buyer of private-label products and imports for Checkers. “I’ve been in retail for almost 15 years and a lot of my seniors for about 30, and [we] haven’t seen anything like it.”
Checkers is coy about the numbers, but Phillips tells the FM that when orders for Prime opened on the company’s Sixty60 app at 10pm on Sunday April 30, the allocated stock sold out in just 90 minutes. By the end of the first week Checkers had sold more than half its original stock, and more is set to arrive in the next two to three weeks.
As is so often the case in South Africa, the idea for Checkers to import Prime first came up at a braai. Phillips was chatting to the 19-year-old son of a friend, who asked him whether the group would consider bringing the energy drink to the country. “He showed me what other places were selling it for; I asked him if he and his friends would buy the product. He said: ‘Uncle Renaldo, I promise that would make our day.’”
Phillips had already heard about Prime, and seen the social media frenzy surrounding its launch in the US and UK. In South Africa, given limited scale, the product had been selling for anywhere from R400 to R600 a bottle and, in some cases, higher. Checkers, however, has been able to mark it at just R39.99.
To lower the price point, Checkers started negotiating directly with Prime’s US manufacturer early this year, and partnered with the company to bring the drink to South Africa. Because Checkers buys directly from the manufacturer and ships the product in large volumes, it is able to negotiate better prices and cut out the middleman.
The product is also brought in by sea rather than air freight, which means it arrives at various South African ports. And, says Phillips, “our distribution network in South Africa is already set up”.
With all this in place, Checkers aims to keep the price at R39.99 as long as no global disaster occurs, he adds.
The retailer’s decision to introduce Prime to the local market is about more than just the product. There’s a broader strategy at play: getting a toehold in the
Gen Z market capturing the attention of the internet generation born between the late 1990s and early 2010s.
“They have so much influence over their families. They want instant gratification; they’re on these trends all the time. It’ sa very exciting market because you have to be on top of your game ahead of it as to how [you] give people what they want,” says Phillips.
“For us this has been a lesson in truly [getting] into understanding Gen Z It’s so complex but exciting at the same time. We’re going to spend a lot more time to understand our Gen Z customers to make them happy.”
For Sampson, the outsize publicity “shows the power of social media. The world has changed, and the speed with which this is happening creates more demand It’s about creating hype.”
More cynically, he notes: “As a colleague says, it proves the power of marketing can still corrupt young minds If you hear something that is worth R600 a bottle now sells for R40, you have to say Alice in Wonderland is alive and well.”
There are other important considerations too. As Klikd notes, children need to understand that it is their engagement that drives the success of social media influencers such as Paul and KSI but also that the platforms on which they engage can contain powerful messages.
As Klikd describes it, audience engagement is the combination of content consumption (watching online videos) and participation (commenting on, liking or sharing those videos). This interaction engages young internet users and can create parasocial feelings between celebrities and fans; social media users feel as though they know the YouTubers personally.
It is this kind of engagement Logan and KSI have leveraged so successfully.
In all, it makes for a perfect case study in marketing, economics and the human psyche, says trend forecaster and Flux Trends partner Bronwyn Williams. Because the drink is not available everywhere, and only in limited supply where it is stocked, it’s considered a scarce commodity which creates the perception of value.
Then there’s the issue of status. Though not R400, even R40 is steep for what is essentially sugar water. The price lends an air of exclusivity, making the product all the more desirable. Displaying a bottle of Prime shows that you are fashionable, you have taste and you have status in society, Williams explains.
Or, put another way, demand for such products increases as their prices increase because “[if] only the wealthy can have them, the less wealthy want them”. The fact that the product is promoted by “elite” influencers and celebrities adds to this aspirational element.
Still, Williams says that as Prime becomes more readily available and the price point falls, the desire for the product will drop too.
Also playing a role will be the issue of whether the quality matches the hype. “I’m hearing a lot of people who’ve tried it once and will never go back,” says Sampson. “That’s the acid test: will they go back and do a repeat?”