Building a New Category Around a 2,000-Year-Old Drink

What happens when a radio comedian, a senior drinks marketer, and a 2,000-year-old Roman hydration recipe collide?

In this episode of That’s What I Call Marketing, Conor Byrne sits down with Merrick Watts and Ed Stening, co-founders of Posca Hydrate — a sugar-free, hypertonic hydration drink inspired by ancient Roman Posca.

Posca isn’t a nostalgia play. It’s a sugar-free, hypertonic drink inspired by a Roman solution to unsafe water — rebuilt for modern life, modern habits, and modern expectations. That means confronting everything from flavour and formulation to packaging, positioning, and retail resistance.

Along the way, Merrick and Ed unpack a set of ideas that matter far beyond drinks:

Why liquid still matters more than marketing.

Why category creation is harder than brand building.

Why refusing “me-too” formats can slow growth — but protect belief.

And why brands should aim for humour, not jokes.

Merrick explains why jokes age quickly, but a sense of humour travels across audiences, occasions, and time and how that thinking shapes Posca’s tone, creative decisions, and internal culture. It’s not about being funny. It’s about not taking yourself seriously while taking the product seriously.

They also discuss building brand in-house rather than outsourcing belief, measuring brand as a startup using Tracksuit, balancing mental and physical availability, and what it really takes to scale a challenger brand globally without losing the story that made it matter in the first place.

This is a conversation about founders, flavour, brand discipline, and the uncomfortable decisions that come with doing something genuinely different.

That’s What I Call Marketing is where marketers come for real conversations about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.

Hosted by Conor Byrne, the show features conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, authors, thinkers and practitioners about what good marketing looks like in practice.

Listen, follow and find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com

Connect with Conor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbyrneirl/

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