Challenge:

BrewDog is a leader in the craft beer sector. Our brief was to recruit a new audience of traditional and premium lager drinkers into the brand through its Lost Lager. How could we best activate a commerce marketing campaign to achieve this, driving awareness and trial and making Lost Lager as synonymous among lager drinkers as BrewDog’s Punk IPA already is among craft drinkers?

Insight:

The lager category is fragmented, with intense competition between brands and a lack of brand loyalty among beer drinkers. However, this nonetheless presented an opportunity to switch consumers into BrewDog’s Lost Lager. We defined the prime prospect as younger adult males (25 – 44 years old) who are frequent premium lager drinkers with (at least once per week) and who are environmentally conscious, given BrewDog is the first carbon negative brewery.

Whilst we found that BrewDog is seen as the leader in the craft beer sector, and a fun and innovative brand by those who have heard of it, awareness and usage of the brand is still low for beer drinkers generally - only 12% had drunk it in the last 12 months.

In a fragmented market with unadventurous consumers, how could we get traditional and premium lager drinkers to try Lost Lager for the first time?

Strategy:

BrewDog’s focus on sustainability makes it unique. While this is an important consideration for shoppers we believed that this alone was not enough to convince our prime prospect to trial it - we know that when it comes to premium drinks, focusing on taste maximises the appeal. This is highest amongst premium beer drinkers, more than any other alcohol, with 75% of drinkers typically looking for a product with better taste.

So we built a clear messaging hierarchy across the path to purchase, highlighting the brand’s unique sustainability credentials (planet friendly lager) while reassuring consumers on taste. To increase the likelihood of conversion, we also aligned the campaign to June promotional dates across the retailers, lowering the price point barrier for consumers.

We knew we would need to make sure that the message was adapted across the entire shopper journey so that it resonated with the shopper wherever they were interacting with the media..

Solution:

To guide our media selection that would deliver against this strategy, we considered the path to purchase in two different phases:

Point of Consideration:

1. Digital Audio: We created a bespoke audio ad highlighting the sustainability and taste credentials, talking to relevant audiences across connected devices (radio, podcasts, music streaming sites). Geo-targeting meant we could reach these relevant consumers closer to the point of buying, and the flexibility of the channel meant we could create 2 separate audio scripts that called out the price and promotion dates of the product in the nearest retailer.
2. Geo-located Social: These sponsored social ads were geo-targeted based on store visitation, whilst overlaying key interest and demographic data from Facebook and Google. We reached our audiences across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, enabling Lost Lager to land its message in a contextually relevant environment and used engaging animations combined with price and retailer callouts to further encourage conversion when shoppers were near to store.
3. Programmatic display ads: We created mobile and desktop display ads that were served in proximity to store, re-targeting shoppers who have previously been seen at our chosen stores as well as those who have recently visited a pub.
4. Deliveroo: By leveraging Deliveroo’s position as the ultimate food company, BrewDog tapped into more impulsive ‘on demand’ missions for our target audience, building relevance across mealtimes and driving higher basket penetration.

Point of Buying:

At the point of buying, we bought in-store point of sale and grocery.com media, ensuring the messaging was adapted to more templated media options with less room for messaging (focussing just on price and clear pack shots of the Lost Lager can given the new size).