Ranbir Kapoor and Rashmika Mandanna: 7UP’s Bollywood Refreshment Strategy

Discover 7UP’s Bollywood refreshment strategy with Ranbir Kapoor and Rashmika Mandanna. Explore their celebrity partnership, memorable advertisements, campaigns, and how 7UP connects with younger Indian audiences.

A carbonated soft drink is not a hard product to explain. It is cold, fizzy, and meant to cool you down. The harder task is making that simple idea feel fresh advertisement after advertisement, year after year, without repeating the same visual of a bottle sweating with condensation. In April 2024, 7UP tried to solve that problem by pairing Ranbir Kapoor and Rashmika Mandanna, fresh off their on-screen pairing in Animal, as its new brand ambassadors for a summer campaign built around the line "Super Duper Refresher."

The interesting part of this partnership is not simply that two well-known Bollywood actors appeared in a soft drink advertisement. It is how 7UP used their existing on-screen chemistry, and their individually distinct public personas, to build an entire seasonal campaign around one core idea. How exactly does 7UP use Ranbir Kapoor and Rashmika Mandanna to give a fairly simple refreshment message its own recognisable Bollywood identity?

Why 7UP Chose These Celebrities

PepsiCo India's own explanation for the pairing was direct. Shailja Joshi, Category Lead for Cola and Flavors at PepsiCo India, described refreshment as the leading driver in the clear beverage category, and said Ranbir Kapoor and Rashmika Mandanna were chosen specifically because their "infectious energy" complemented that positioning.

A few factors support that reasoning beyond simple recognisability. Both actors had just appeared together in Animal, a major 2023 release, giving 7UP a pairing with genuine, recent on-screen chemistry rather than two unconnected celebrities placed together for the first time. 

Their combined visibility also spans different segments of a mass, pan-India audience, useful for a product sold at the scale a mainstream soft drink requires. And both bring an energetic, contemporary screen presence suited to lighthearted, situational advertising rather than serious or aspirational storytelling.

How Ranbir Kapoor Fits 7UP's Brand Personality

Ranbir Kapoor's specific contribution rests on a persona built around easy, expressive humour rather than measured seriousness. In the campaign's first film, he appears surrounded by stacked 7UP bottles, shouting "Khandala Waterfall" in deliberately eccentric attire to grab attention, a performance that leans entirely on his comfort with exaggerated, self-aware comic delivery. That willingness to appear slightly ridiculous on screen, rather than composed or aspirational, suits a brand trying to make refreshment feel spontaneous and fun rather than a serious functional claim.

How Rashmika Mandanna Fits 7UP's Brand Personality

Rashmika Mandanna's role plays against Ranbir Kapoor's exaggeration rather than mirroring it. In the same film, she rebukes his "Khandala Waterfall" claim and questions the absurdity of the moment, giving her character a grounded, skeptical energy that balances his antics. Her own comments about the shoot pointed to this dynamic directly, describing the set's energy as fun and the films as having strong "summer relevance" for her existing audience. Her broad recognition across both Hindi and South Indian cinema also gives 7UP a wider regional reach than a Hindi-film-only pairing would offer.

Ranbir Kapoor and Rashmika Mandanna Collaboration Ads for 7UP

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The April 2024 "Super Duper Refresher" push, conceptualised by Leo Burnett, rolled out as two separate brand films rather than a single advertisement, each built around a different comic scenario but sharing the same underlying structure: an implausible claim, scepticism, and a 7UP-triggered payoff.

In the first film, Ranbir Kapoor's "Khandala Waterfall" declaration amid stacked bottles is met with Rashmika Mandanna's disbelief, before the joke resolves around 7UP delivering the promised sense of refreshment. In the second, set in a scorching desert, Rashmika Mandanna's car has broken down and left her exhausted by the heat, until Ranbir Kapoor arrives, jokingly renaming the desert "Goa Beach," and offers her a chilled 7UP, promising it will transport her there. She is, again, sceptical before the drink delivers on the joke's premise.

Both films use the same creative mechanic: an exaggerated, clearly false claim from Ranbir Kapoor, grounded pushback from Rashmika Mandanna, and 7UP positioned as the thing that actually delivers the escape being joked about. The product is not simply shown; it is built into the punchline itself; each ad's humour only resolves once the drink is introduced. This gives the beverage a more active narrative role than a typical soft drink close-up would, tying the joke and the product together rather than treating the product as a separate, tacked-on final shot.

Two Bollywood Personalities, One Refreshment Proposition

The campaign's underlying logic runs from celebrity personality through storytelling to a consistent product message. Ranbir Kapoor's exaggerated energy and Rashmika Mandanna's grounded scepticism do not need to represent identical qualities. Their contrast is what generates the joke in each film, while 7UP's refreshment proposition remains the fixed point both stories return to. This lets the brand express one consistent idea, escape and refreshment, through two distinct comic registers rather than repeating a single tone twice.

How 7UP Uses Celebrity Branding in Beverage Marketing

Mass-market beverage brands often turn to celebrities because the product itself offers little room for differentiated claims; taste and carbonation vary only slightly across competitors. A recognisable, well-liked pairing gives 7UP a distinct advertising identity that a generic refreshment scene could not provide on its own. But visibility alone is not the point. The creative idea, two contrasting personalities delivering a joke that only resolves through the product, is what makes the celebrity presence functional rather than decorative.

7UP's Refreshment Strategy Through Celebrity Advertising

Both films frame refreshment as an experience of escape rather than a simple functional benefit. The "Khandala Waterfall" scenario and the desert-to-"Goa Beach" transformation each associate 7UP with an imagined change of scene, turning an ordinary, hot moment into something momentarily transporting. This positions the product around a feeling, a burst of relief from heat and monotony, communicated entirely through the two actors' interplay rather than direct claims about taste or ingredients.

Ranbir Kapoor and Rashmika Mandanna as 7UP Brand Ambassadors

Both actors are described in 7UP's own campaign materials as brand ambassadors, not simply guest performers in a single advertisement, and PepsiCo's messaging frames the pairing as an ongoing identity for the brand's summer communication rather than a one-off placement. This kind of continuity, built on their earlier Animal pairing and extended into a dedicated seasonal campaign, gives 7UP consistency across television, digital, and outdoor formats under a single recognisable duo rather than a rotating cast of unconnected faces.

What Ranbir Kapoor and Rashmika Mandanna Teach Us About Celebrity Marketing

A few broader points emerge from this pairing. Celebrity selection benefited from an existing, documented on-screen chemistry rather than two names combined for the first time. Contrasting personalities, one exaggerated, one grounded, can express a single brand proposition without needing to match each other. And building the product into the joke's resolution, rather than showing it separately, gives a celebrity-led beverage ad a more integrated commercial purpose than simple visibility would achieve.

Conclusion

7UP's pairing of Ranbir Kapoor and Rashmika Mandanna gives the brand a way to communicate refreshment through a recognisable, contrasting comic dynamic rather than a generic beverage scene. His exaggerated energy and her grounded scepticism work against each other just enough to create a joke, one that 7UP resolves each time, tying the product directly to the punchline rather than treating it as an afterthought.

For a mass-market beverage brand, the lesson here is not that fame alone drives a strong campaign. It is that pairing personalities whose real dynamic already works on screen, and building the product into the resolution of that dynamic, gives a familiar refreshment message a distinct and genuinely functional way to communicate.