Conquerors from the north

If I was to tell you that there is a cider brand sold in UK pubs that has 50 different fan clubs devoted to it on social networking website Facebook, which brand would you think it is?

Magners? Nope. What about Bulmers Original? Wrong. And you wouldn't be any warmer if you went for the more premium ciders like Aspall or Weston's. In fact, you would have to look well beyond these shores.

The brand is, in actual fact, Swedish cider Kopparberg. Not only does it have 50 fan clubs on Facebook alone but each one has up to or more than 1,000 members. So what you have is more than 50,000 people on the site bothering to join up to a group devoted to a cider brand few in the UK would have heard of a year ago. That is success in the purest sense of the word.

If 2006 was the year of Magners, then 2007 is the year of Kopparberg, even more than Bulmers Original. For while the Scottish & Newcastle brand has delivered incredible growth figures, it has had a marketing budget to match.

Kopparberg has achieved a UK distribution of seven and a half thousand pubs in the space of nine months without producing a single piece of UK screen advertising.

And this is distribution across major tenanted estates such as Punch Taverns and managed groups like Mitchells & Butlers - and the distribution, stresses national sales director Adrian Hirst, is sustainable: "All our deals are long-term and not 'quick-wins' - contracts have already been signed for next year."What's the secret?

So Davin Nugent, managing director of Cider of Sweden (Kopparberg's UK distributor) what's the secret? Actually, if you ask him the question, he is magnanimous, suggesting that much of the success is down to good timing and quality of the product that he and Adrian had to go to market with.

"I think the timing of our launch helped - St Helier and Brothers had already come out which gave pear cider some legitimacy," he says. "But more than that it is the quality of the product coming in from Sweden. I think if it was just down to the pear cider then Brothers and St Helier would be doing the same as us. I think being a pear cider 'opens the door' for you but it is the brand that is so strong for us."

Let's spin back a bit. Kopparberg is a small town in the Bergslagen district in central Sweden. In 1882 several cider breweries began to appear - over time they clubbed together to form the Kopparberg brewery.

In the following decades of its existence it has been a mainstay of the Swedish cider market.

No doubt a move into the UK has been discussed at head office in Kopparberg for some time now, but it has always been deemed to be a risk, due to the fundamental differences between traditional dry British cider and the sweeter taste of Swedish pear cider.

When the brand officially launched this year, Adrian acknowledges it was a pretty tough sell.

"It was a very hard slog," he says. "The biggest problem we had was with the managed and freetrade accounts, which were very slow starters.

"The whole concept of sweeter Swedish cider was alien to the traditional dry cider taste of the English and Irish.

"We were quite forceful - telling buyers 'when you introduce this to your customers you will come back and thank us'. And that is exactly what happened."

Adrian has a wealth of contacts in the industry, having previously worked at Whitbread/Interbrew, Halewood and Red Bull UK. There is no doubt this has proved to be invaluable.

"We did have a lot of good contacts in the industry and that really does help," he admits. "It won't get you the listing but it may well get you that first meeting quicker than someone else."

It is also true that, initially at least, Davin and Adrian were seen as something of an intriguing oddity by retail buyers, worn out by the relentless, repetitive meetings with people offering products with no point of difference.

"I think, at the start, people in the trade were intrigued by this small myth that built up of two guys going round in a car selling Swedish cider," says Adrian. "But once we started to succeed that 'age of innocence' died very quickly and we had to prove ourselves."

And prove themselves they absolutely have. But they will have to continue to do so if they are to have continued success, something they are all too aware of.

They have perhaps taken something of a risk by launching a mixed fruit variety of Kopparberg, a product that has been massively successful in Ireland. Are they not concerned they will undermine their core pear offering?

"If we brought out four more flavours it might be a problem," says Davin. "We are not going to react to what the rest of the market is doing. We brought out the mixed fruit here because it has done very well in Ireland. And we are confident it will work as we spent a whole year building up for the possible launch of a new variant."Confident in its prospects

As you read this, you might imagine Davin and Adrian to be cocksure and overconfident that Kopparberg is here to stay. Well think again. They both have too much experience in the industry and know how something can be flavour of the month one minute and lose favour the next.

And while they undoubtedly have great faith in their product they are concerned that the current explosion of pear cider brands could mean problems further down the line for anyone who does not stay focused.

"We really do think next year there will be a big shake-up of pear cider brands - some will survive, some will not," says Adrian. "And we are convinced that Kopparberg will be in the long-term repertoire of consumers because of the way we are marketing ourselves now."

And marketing is the key word, as it is believed that a new print advertising campaign will be unveiled in the coming year. It will focus on the very things that Davin and Adrian believe give Kopparberg its point of difference: its imported status and authenticity.

It is a strategy that has already paid big dividends for the brand and, who knows, we may find 50,000 more members of the Kopparberg/Facebook fan club by this time next year.