Beverage

Challenge

Early Times Kentucky Whisky, a Brown-Forman Corporation brand, was lacking an emotional connection with core consumers as well with younger recruitment consumers. Our client challenged PriceWeber’s Beverage Marketing team to develop a platform that merged two seemingly disconnected consumer insights.

Several years ago, PriceWeber discovered an insight that individuals who purchased Early Times also indexed very high for having dog food in their shopping carts. PriceWeber also had a separate insight that Early Times consumers were very patriotic and had a lot of American pride. PriceWeber connected the dots between those two insights and suggested Early Times partner with K9s For Warriors to hone in on the dog and military/patriotic connection. After two years of partnership with K9s For Warriors, PriceWeber realized the power of this platform and that it could be re-branded to deliver critical brand messages, such as quality and heritage.

Audience

• Early Times has strong retention with current consumers, but as these consumers age and the rise of premium whisky continues to boom, Early Times needs to attract new consumers to ensure the longevity of the brand. For this campaign, Early Times targeted core consumers, attraction consumers and priority markets based on market size and sales opportunities.

Objectives

• Drive approximately 1 million Facebook media impressions to increase awareness and consideration among retention target
• Generate social engagement rates that exceed industry standards (0.24% for Facebook)
• Impressions in top 10 focus markets to drive incremental trial and growth
• Over 5,000 comments and shares for the social media campaign to gain new consumers and maintain similar demographic and psychographic profiles as our targets

Solution

By staying focused on the consumer insight, Early Times was able to engage with consumers by offering an opportunity to share something they love most – their dogs – while simultaneously delivering the “All-American” positioning of the brand.

PriceWeber was able to connect the dots between American heritage and our consumers’ love of dogs. First, PriceWeber evolved the K9s For Warriors partnership by working with the brand to adopt a “distillery dog” from the Kentucky Humane Society. Earl, the Kentucky rescue, was sent to K9s For Warriors to be trained as a military service dog for a post-9/11 veteran. Not only did Earl bring goodwill to the brand, he enriched an already powerful partnership with a valuable charity partner.

The program also included a contest that was inspired by our core insight. The All-American Dogs contest invited the Early Times consumer to share a story and photo of their “All-American Dog.” The winners of the contest received a whisky barrel doghouse and a feature in a 2020 All-American Dogs wall calendar along with a billboard in their hometown featuring their dog.

In addition to the 10 consumers who were selected in the contest, Early Times developed a text-to-win “Distributor Dog” contest for their distributor partners to enter their dogs for a chance to win a feature in the All-American Dogs wall calendar and hometown billboard advertising. This was an opportunity for Early Times to involve their partners who are integral to their business.

PriceWeber utilized award-winning photographer Dan Dry to travel the country to photograph each All-American dog to be featured on billboards, social media, Early Times website as well as the 2020 wall calendar.

Once the social contest had concluded, PriceWeber developed a Facebook and Instagram social campaign which featured each of the winning dogs and developed a targeted media plan with social ads in each key market to boost the featured content.

The strategy behind the billboards and the wall calendar was to gain awareness though Public Relations. In the past, Early Times has had difficulty getting national media coverage with their limited budget. PriceWeber suggested a more targeted plan that could make an impact in markets that mattered most. Early Times needed a hometown angle to garner localized coverage but on a national basis

Early Times also dedicated their website to All-American Dogs, which all media and PR was directed to. The 2020 All-American Dogs wall calendar was available for consumers to download from the website. Early Times also utilized their CRM database to drive traffic to the dedicated promotional webpage.

Results

• In year one, the campaign exceeded goals with over 1.7M impressions and an engagement rate of 14.7% (industry average = 0.24%) for Facebook during the contest period. The social media contest garnered 9,443 entries, over 20,000 shares and over 120,000 likes.
• For the 2020 campaign, PriceWeber secured media coverage of the All-American Dogs contest in 6 states and several national consumer and trade outlets including Adpulp, Spirits Business and SouthernThings.com.
• The earned media this 2020 campaign received included 227,000 estimated coverage views, 101,000 social shares, an approximate online readership of 8.89 million and over 61 pieces of media coverage.