I hate Steinlager. I haven’t drunk it for 20 years, not since the splitting headaches it delivered in my youth. Now that may have been a result of some youthful over indulgence but it has been a long held urban myth that good old Steinlager had a little bit of something else added that packed a punch. So it’s with this background that my vote for the marketing launch of 2007 goes to Lion’s launch of Steinlager Pure.
This will be a marketing case study, in terms of how things should be done, for many years. The marketing team that pulled this off should be justifiably proud of a job very well done. To me there are a number of things that came together to make this the success it has been;
- The need – you can’t have a great launch without a clear need. To me this was the desire to buy a big premium New Zealand beer. Many Kiwis for a number of years have been drinking Heineken, Stella, or Becks as their beer of choice. Average beers in their home market but consumed here with enthusiasm. Yes there are a number of other great New Zealand beers around Macs, Monteiths and others, but there hasn’t been a New Zealand beer to lay claim to the premium category.
- The product – you can have a clear need but not get the strategy or the product right. In this case Lion nailed both. Rather than going down the New Coke path they launched a new Steinlager sub brand and executed it well. Great packaging, great story “pure – nothing else added” which addressed the key concerns some drinkers had with the original Steinlager, and lastly it’s a pretty good beer.
- The promotion – the advertising campaign with Harvey Keitel was great. Dark, moody, sophisticated and with someone else telling us that we’re cool and our beer's good. Subtle links to old Steinlager “They’re drinking our beer here”. The key insight the team at Publicis Mojo had was that we don’t believe it when other Kiwi’s tell us something’s good, therefore they had someone international, someone cool tell us instead. And it worked!
So what were the results, well both my local supermarket and bottle store were reporting that it was flying out the door and had taken 50% of the Heineken sales straight away. Talking to one of the team at Lion they hit their 6 month sales target in 6 weeks! And had to start airfreighting in bottles to keep up with supply. Lastly as a nice bonus they only cannibalised 5% of their existing Steinlager Classic sales.
In summary they lined up all the important things here. If anyone of these areas wasn’t right the whole launch could have crumbled. Well thought through and executed, this would be my marketing launch of the year.
Cheers Steinlager.