07 May 2025 How UK soda brand Something & Nothing engages its audience

The company’s founder explains how they use email marketing to engage their audience with content that helps them ‘escape the everyday’.…..

Oliver Dixon is the co-founder of the UK-based premium soda brand Something & Nothing, which was launched in 2017.

What’s the idea behind your drinks?

We make premium sodas using only natural ingredients – no added sugar, no sweeteners, and nothing fake. We use grape juice and lemon juice to create the body of the drink, and the lead flavours for all the drinks are inspired by travel. Yuzu is currently one of our most popular flavours. We also have pineapple and pink grapefruit, cucumber, hibiscus and rose, ginger and lime, and we’re launching three more flavours this year.

What inspired you to start the business?

I come from a branding, communications and cultural background. I worked at fashion and spirit brands and before that at Dazed & Confused magazine. I was all about using culture to connect brands with consumers in a very authentic way. So with Something & Nothing, I wanted to create a product and a brand that would create an emotional connection. A brand that works very hard for you without necessarily having to spend lots on marketing.

On a personal level, I was also involved in a bar in East London and I wanted to stop drinking. I was looking for a good drink to have in that sort of convivial environment, but soft drinks had boring flavours, were full of sugar, and nothing had changed for decades.

Traditional sodas are full of sugar, and then a lot of the new ‘better for you’ sodas have stevia in it, which to me had a very unpleasant aftertaste. So it was about ensuring it was all natural ingredients, and using the juices, extracts, and botanicals to create that more elevated flavour profile.

I essentially realized there was space for a grownup, more elevated soft drink that didn’t use added sugar, didn’t use sweeteners, and had flavours that could work well with food, but could also mix well with alcohol and, of course, be great on its own.

Can you tell us about your digital marketing strategy?

I made a decision early on to invest heavily in retention rather than acquisition, which is probably unusual and back-to-front for brands of our size. But we find that that works really well. Retaining and engaging our community is really valuable for us, because then when we drop a new flavour or run a promotion, we get a profound, strong reaction. Email is a massive part of this strategy.

The brand that we’ve created is all about creating a deep emotive connection with our community. And email is the most valuable channel for us in that sense.

People can sign up to our newsletter without having made a purchase, but a pretty high percentage of people have made a purchase. Initially, they’ll get a welcome email which talks about our ethos, a little bit about the brand, the quality of the drinks, and the natural ingredients. 

But then the trick is keeping the content interesting! You can’t keep telling people that you only use natural ingredients and no added sugar and no sweeteners, because that would get boring. So we treat our emails like a magazine editorial…..

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