Sonic Turns Drink Customization Into Traffic Strategy
Restaurant chains are increasingly looking beyond burgers, sandwiches and value meals to create new reasons for customers to visit. Specialty beverages have emerged as one of the industry’s most active battlegrounds, and Sonic Drive-In believes its long history of drink customization gives it an advantage.
The trend extends well beyond another seasonal menu cycle. The U.S. nonalcoholic foodservice beverage market generated $264.1 billion in 2025, representing approximately 23% of industry revenue. Circana data cited in recent reporting also shows that case volume for “dirty sodas” (soft drinks mixed with cream, syrups or other flavors) has increased 318% over the past two years. Sonic is trying to turn that demand into more visits, higher spending and stronger differentiation across its network of more than 3,400 restaurants.
Beverages Create New Reasons to Visit
Fast-food chains traditionally used drinks to complete a meal. Increasingly, the beverage can be the primary reason for the transaction, creating customer occasions that are not tied to hunger or conventional meal periods.
Specialty drinks can generate afternoon trips, after-school visits and other occasions that fall between breakfast, lunch and dinner. They can also encourage more frequent visits because customers have multiple flavors and combinations to try.
Marion Campbell, Sonic’s vice president of integrated marketing and communications, said the broader quick-service industry is still determining how to make specialty beverages a central part of its business. Sonic, by contrast, has spent years building customization into its menu and operating model.
Customers can combine sodas, slushes, lemonades, teas, flavor add-ins and toppings into a wide range of personalized drinks. That makes customization part of the customer experience rather than a temporary response to the dirty-soda trend.
It also changes the competitive frame. Sonic is not competing only with other burger chains. Its drinks put the brand into consideration alongside coffee chains, drive-thru beverage concepts and convenience stores seeking the same incremental customer occasions.
National Marketing With Regional Context
Sonic’s “Hotumn” campaign shows how beverage marketing can also become more geographically relevant. While many brands begin promoting conventional fall flavors as summer ends, much of Sonic’s core Southern footprint continues to experience hot weather.
The campaign acknowledges that disconnect by combining fall-inspired flavors with cold drinks and messaging designed for customers who may be ready for fall culturally but not meteorologically. It gives Sonic a consistent seasonal platform while making the creative more relevant to the markets where it operates.
That approach resembles the weather-triggered retail media strategy being used by Ace Hardware. National campaigns do not necessarily need different products in every market, but the message, timing and featured item can reflect local conditions.
For brand marketers, the opportunity is to move beyond a single promotional calendar applied evenly across every location. Weather, regional tastes, local events and store-level demand can all help determine which products receive media support and when that support should appear.
Customization Still Has to Work at the Local Level
The strength of Sonic’s strategy ultimately depends on execution. Every additional flavor, cream or topping creates another choice for the customer, but it can also add inventory, preparation and training requirements for individual restaurants.
That makes beverage customization both a marketing advantage and an operating challenge. As CKE’s approach to scaling local marketing also demonstrates, national strategy depends on technology, operations and local execution working together. A campaign can generate interest nationally, but customers experience the promise one location and one drink at a time. Inconsistent preparation, unavailable ingredients or slower service can quickly turn personalization into friction.
The most useful measurement will therefore go beyond impressions or sales of a featured drink. Sonic can evaluate whether beverage campaigns generate incremental visits, attract new customers, expand activity outside traditional meal periods and increase total spending without creating unacceptable operating costs.
Specialty drinks may look like a product trend, but the larger opportunity is behavioral. They give customers another reason to visit, more control over what they order and an experience that can change each time. That combination can make customization a repeatable traffic strategy for brands, provided the operators at the local level can consistently deliver it.
