“I haven’t seen any Rich Energy cans on the shelves”

Many are those who think the energy drink market is easy money, eyeing up the success of Red Bull and thinking “I could do that – how hard could it be?” The curious case of Rich Energy has provided ample proof that it’s trickier than you might expect.

Marketing is one of the keys to establishing a brand such as this - well, that and actually having product to sell, but we’ll come back to that. For some time now, Rich Energy’s approach to marketing and PR has been baffling. When this brand popped up seemingly out of nowhere in the middle of last year, initially positioning itself as a buyer for the troubled Force India team, I (along with many others) diligently rummaged through the company records in Companies House.

These revealed that Rich Energy was hardly rolling in it, certainly not in the sums required to buy a Formula 1 team. Still, those accounts were from 2016, so it was quite plausible for a start-up that’s received outside investment more recently to be in this position. When Haas announced Rich as a title sponsor ahead of this season, you had to assume the team had done due diligence. Surely now it was a case of sitting back and waiting for the product to appear on the shelves.

Well, we’re still waiting.

In the interim, Rich Energy’s marketing strategy has taken on the aspect of a car crash, particularly on social media. Its Twitter presence appears to be operated by its hirsute CEO, William Storey, and faithfully obeys all the tropes of the Donald Trump playbook: Tweeting incontinently at all hours of the day and night, often in an unnecessarily bellicose fashion and not following the niceties of correct spelling and punctuation.

Matters came to a head last week when the account – presumably Storey – parped that Rich Energy was terminating its contract with Haas because of the team’s poor performance. The team fired back with a statement from Rich Energy shareholders attributing this to a “rogue individual” who was being removed from executive power.

Perhaps the shareholders should have changed the Twitter password first because the account then started to thumb its nose at them over the course of several increasingly unhinged communiques. It signed off by boasting, “in light of the treacherous conduct of minority stakeholders the exclusive rights to distribute Rich Energy have been transferred to another company. Mr Storey retains complete ownership.”

Of what, though? I still don’t see any cans on the shelves. And there are more pressing matters at hand. July 11, when this spat kicked off, was also the deadline set by the High

Court for Storey, Rich Energy and Staxoweb – the company that designed Rich’s logo – to pay £35,000 in legal costs for the trademark infringement case they lost last May.

Perhaps the company proprietor would be better served getting his chequebook out than exercising his thumbs on Twitter…