Corona

The Ask

With their numerous subsidiary and affiliated brands, creating consumer moments that resonate with the specific experiences portrayed by each brand is of the utmost importance to our client partners at Labatt Breweries of Canada. For Corona, that means merchandise needs to reflect the brand’s mantra to “seek out simple pleasures in places with a slower pace and a relaxed vibe.”

Gift packs have been an effective tactic for Labatt, as they promote shopper interruption and support brand building for retailers like the LCBO. As a part of their premium beer expansion strategy to support trial, category recruitment, and market share growth objectives, Labatt came to our team with a request to execute a seasonal campaign that offered a limited time Corona gift pack featuring a beach towel made of recycled plastic bottles.

The Strategy

The challenge with gift packs is that they can be expensive to execute. The cost of producing the item, along with co-packing and shipping thousands of units, can be prohibitive to the profitability of a campaign. With an execution of this scale, and the need for completely custom design and construction, the most cost-effective and creatively flexible strategy was to partner with a supplier whose expertise was in the custom, overseas factory-to-client supply channel.

Collaborating with a vendor that ensured best-in-class manufacturing and product compliance, our team delivered a proposal that provided in-depth specifications, as well as initial designs and renderings from our in-house creative team. Once concepts were fully ideated and presented to the Labatt team, a few rounds of revisions led to approval to proceed with a pre-production sample of the Corona beach towel. With sustainability being essential to the campaign, the team sent samples to a third-party testing agency to support and confirm that recycled plastic bottles were used to manufacture the beach towels.

Once the sample of the beach towel was approved, it was sent to the packaging manufacturer to confirm that it fit perfectly with the existing beer packaging. With final sign-off, the supplier was given the go-ahead to proceed with production of 15,000 Corona beach towels for an in-pack gift campaign.

The Results

The Corona beach towel campaign launched throughout the holiday season as an Ontario activation, and consumers who visited the LCBO, certain Beer Store locations, and other licensed retailers across the province were able to receive the gift with purchase. Once the beach towel reached retailers, word-of-mouth became a valuable channel for communicating the promotion to consumers, and the campaign successfully created seasonal demand, drove an overall increase of sales, and ultimately increased Corona’s market share.