Substituting Recovery for Red Bulls

How a sleeping company can conquer the market for Personal Energy Management (or why sleeping is the key to being awesome).

Energy shots and drinks are a flooded market (pun intended). It’s time to look away from the Red Bull culture and start looking at the performance and renewal culture.

No company leads in the performance/renewal culture vertical. No company is the go-to company for Personal Energy Management.

Red Bull is great—I like it. But stuff like Smart Energy Shots are excessive. It’s telling how much we’ve become dependent on simulants and chemical treatments to keep us going. When our biological rhythms are telling us otherwise. I get it—hell, I bought this bottle because I thought it would be a great Vodka mixer.

Does that sound remotely like a good idea?

Anybody remember Sparks? It’s 6% malt liquor mixed with caffeine—and packaged to look like a battery! I used to love that stuff.

Look at Smart Energy Shots—it’s shaped like a wine bottle! It’s packaged as if it’s meant to be part of my cocktail chemistry. And it’s an another unfortunate example of how far we've trudged along this energy drink pipeline.

People need to sleep more—but we aren't. One of the benefits posited by technology advancing was supposed to be a life of rest and leisure. Our idea of the “office of the future” keeps getting pushed back because it’s never really achieved. For all this technology—we’re working more, not less.

When does the merry-go-round stop and kick us off? What happens when we collapse from caffeination—bankrupt and broken because we can’t manage our own energy effectively anymore?

This is Lark’s opportunity.

I use Lark. And I LOVE IT! I’ve used Lark for over two years—and it’s helped me become an early riser. When I used to hate mornings and acted I was an Owl (though I still have problems breaking that habit on the weekend because I’ve spent over a decade enjoying late risings and installing social jet lag for Monday).

Lark is the antithesis of the energy shot industry. It’s the antithesis of pushing ourselves beyond our biological limits until resiliency goes into remission.

Lark can swoop in by using one of the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: The Law of the Category.

No one company—or group of companies—wins in the category of personal energy management. It’s our future—we are operating beyond our biological limits with significant technological assistance. That micromanager working 65-70 hours a week on email has to sacrifice somewhere. Techies pushing to be ramen profitable could be sacrificing creativity for their personal clock.

Sleep is indispensable. It anchors personal energy management.

Sacrificing on sleep wrecks energy management everywhere. If Lark changed their pitch to focus on those people sacrificing sleep to be more creative and perform better—that positioning would create surprise and dissonance in their audience. And its solution would make people healthier! Not addicted, ranting, or over-supplemented.

And it opens up Lark to work with other companies to become a coalition, total-package provider of energy management (every company must remember the Law of Line Extension—Lark shouldn’t make non-sleep supporting products). Imagine a Lark + WellnessFX relationship—where a doctor could look at both datasets and help design a medical plan to help you get more and better sleep through your metabolic profile!

Don’t you owe it to yourself to be a better sleeper and performer?