SpriteCopied

Sprite is the Coca-Cola Company's second-biggest brand, worth about $20 billion in sales, but until 2022 it had never had one consistent look or campaign worldwide. That changed with Heat Happens, the first global brand platform for Sprite and the first work from OpenX, the unit WPP built after winning Coca-Cola's $4 billion marketing account. Aimed at Gen Z, it reframed Sprite as the way to keep cool in heated moments, mental as much as physical, and rolled out across some 200 markets.

The identity was a collaboration between Coca-Cola's in-house design team and Turner Duckworth. The starburst border that had framed the wordmark was removed; the burst moved onto caps or was used to introduce flavours. The wordmark became a bold, solid italic set on a new horizontal baseline, and the spark was recrafted as a standalone symbol for markets where the brand is already known. Green and yellow remain, with bright green unifying packs and black signalling Zero Sugar. A custom display weight of Aktiv Grotesk, Refraktiv, carries the wordmark's details into headlines.

The most visible change was not the logo but the bottle. Sprite phased out its familiar green PET in favour of clear plastic, which is easier to recycle, with a Recycle me call to action. Global brand director Shrenik Dasani told The Drum the approach would create a consistency of experience Sprite had never had.

Trade coverage centred on the scale of the campaign rather than the design. Turner Duckworth later claimed the work helped bottlers win display space and that Sprite climbed Gen Z brand rankings.

Fox Business noted the irony that a brand defined by green was dropping it as part of a push to go green. Coca-Cola explained that coloured PET, though recyclable, generally cannot become food grade packaging and ends up in single use items like clothing and carpet, whereas clear bottles can be remade into new ones; Fresca, Seagram's and Mello Yello were dropping green too. That is the rare case where an environmental constraint forced the identity to work harder. Once the bottle stopped being green, the logo and label had to carry all of Sprite's recognisability on their own.

Stripping the starburst is the right kind of reduction: the wordmark is strong enough to stand alone, and the spark gives Sprite a shorthand it lacked. Giving up the green bottle, a recognisable asset for decades, for recyclability is the bolder decision, and the identity is built to survive without it.