Heritage Drinks salutes its local heroes

It is hard to know what to do with a drinks brand when it has lost a bit of its previous sparkle. Newcastle Brown Ale, Newcastle Exhibition,...

It is hard to know what to do with a drinks brand when it has lost a bit of its previous sparkle. Newcastle Brown Ale, Newcastle Exhibition, McEwan's, Youngers, Woodpecker and Scrumpy Jack are all brands that have seen better days.

Brand owner Scottish & Newcastle's (S&N) solution is to take these brands back to their roots and go local.

With its trading partner Jygsaw Brands, S&N has set up Heritage Drinks to market and sell these 'heritage' ales and ciders. And earlier this month a £2m marketing spend was put forward for Heritage Drinks to back the brands.

As Heritage rolls out PoS to the brands' geographical heartlands and prepares to follow up with new consumer competitions, it is high time to assess the impact the promotions will have. And, perhaps more to the point, ask why these big names were ever neglected to the extent that they have been.

Set up in late 2007, and beginning trading in February, the creation of Heritage Brands was in motion before the joint bid by Carlsberg and Heineken which saw Dutch brewer Heineken take control of S&N's UK brewing and pub operations in March. Rather than being a decision taken by the new owner, it was motivated by S&N's well-established portfolio approach, says Jygsaw Brands' trading director Michael Hardy.

S&N has for a long time sold into pubs on the basis of being able to offer a major standard lager (Foster's), a major premium lager (Kronenbourg 1664), a major cider (Strongbow), and a major ale (John Smith's).

It did not want to allow the promotion of solid regional performers, which nevertheless hold value, to interfere with an approach that made S&N identifiable as the brewer that "covered all the bases".

The likes of Newcastle Brown, S&N felt, warranted a separate vehicle. These had survived admirably for years, without major marketing support in their heartlands of the North East for Newcastle Brown, Newcastle Exhibition and Woodpecker, the central belt of Scotland for McEwan's and Youngers, and England's South West for Scrumpy Jack. For example, Newcastle Brown has a 41 per cent share of the UK's on-trade packaged ale market, according to Nielsen, and Youngers Tartan Ale a 9.3 per cent share of standard draught ale in Scotland.

Now, Hardy hopes that targeting each region in question "will reawaken the awareness in that area, which will, in turn, improve perception nationally.

"With any brand, you have to keep bringing forward new drinkers because, unfortunately, the core customer group eventually starts to disappear for one reason or another," he says.

"That struggle is about widening the engagement - making them more accessible to other consumers."

Going local is a strategy being employed by a number of brands now. However, the former powerhouses of McEwan's and Newkey Brown would do well to go back to their roots. They might like what they find there.

Case study: rewarded for loyalty

One outlet that will benefit greatly from the £2m investment in marketing is John Carrigan's in Hamilton, South Lanarkshire. Owner John Carrigan has always been keen to keep a local feel to his offering by stocking McEwan's 60/- and Tartan, both brands associated with the area.His loyalty, along with other stockists, is now being rewarded.Kits have been designed to not only reward loyal drinkers, but also to create interest among those who do not currently drink the brands, promoting the local heartland of each variant and reasserting the quality message. John Carrigan's shelves will soon be home to new branded glassware, his bar and walls to new PoS material, and his staff will be clad in clothing bearing the logos. McEwan's water jugs will also be rolled out to bars for use with whisky chasers to accompany the ale.

Related topics Beer Cider

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