New campaign aims to counteract threat from PPS sector
Scottish Courage has upped the ante in the premium packaged drink sector by investing £5m in a new press and poster advertising campaign for its Beck's brand.
The UK's best-selling imported lager has introduced the new campaign in an attempt to counteract the threat posed by the increasingly popular premium packaged spirit (PPS) sector and the recent relaunch of rival Holsten Pils.
The "Your bottle of Beck's" campaign represents a significant investment for a brand whose marketing activity has previously been confined to its support for the contemporary arts and its sponsorship of one of the UK's leading arts award, Beck's Futures2.
Maurice Breen, brands director for premium lagers at Scottish Courage, said: "We realised that in the past, Beck's advertising hadn't really communicated in a powerful enough way with our target audience and we were concerned that the there was no obvious personality - it was just an easy bar shout.
"It's a difficult market at the moment that's under pressure from the quality PPS but the core brands are performing very well. It's a challenge for all bottled beer brands and we hope the fridge will re-balance as retailers have overfaced against PPLs. It's a challenge for us to get it sorted out and with Beck's we believe we have the product and the brand to be able to do that."
The "Your bottle of Beck's" campaign, features a series of advertisements in which the design of the bottle is subtly changed to reflect the character of the drinker.
One execution, "Fashion Victim", shows the letters B, E and S scratched from the Beck's logo leaving the silver foil bottle label reading CK, another ad, Paranoid, covers the bottle in bottle wrap.
The campaign, set to run until April 2002 in men's style magazines, newspaper supplements and regional listings titles, is expected to reach 97 per cent of the brand's target audience - 18 to 34-year-old males.
A Metro poster campaign in London and Glasgow has been launched to complement the press advertising while a national 48-sheet poster campaign has been earmarked for September.