Britvic looks to challenge ‘negative imagery’ around energy drinks with Purdey’s brand push

The campaign, created by Iris and called ‘Thrive on’, will launch in April this year and features actor Idris Elba.

As part of the campaign, a series of short films will be released which include Elba. It will also be backed by an outdoor campaign and digital support as Britvic looks to raise awareness of the brand and boost penetration, which is currently “very small”.

According to Britvic’s CMO Matt Barwell, the time was “absolutely right” to launch a big brand campaign around Purdey’s, as the energy drink was “ahead of its time” when it first came to market.

He told Marketing Week: “What you’ve seen over that period of 30 years is that more people aren’t drinking alcohol, mainly for health reasons. As a result, there is a bigger demand for great tasting non-alcoholic drinks.

“We have also seen an incredible growth in the energy sector in the UK. But energy drinks tend to give you a high and a low, and are packed with taurine, sugar and caffeine. So there’s a massive opportunity for a more grown-up energy drink proposition that’s not surrounded by that negative imagery.”

The campaign represents the largest investment in the brand’s history by Britvic, with Barwell seeing it as a real growth driver for the brand.

“I want this to be a scale brand by 2020, and the opportunity to double or even treble it isn’t beyond possibilities,” he commented.

“Where we get the product well distributed and visible, it performs incredibly well, so the opportunity to broaden it is huge.

“We are seeing an increasing fragmentation of brands in the soft drinks industry, and therefore being able to target specific usage occasions and demographic groups and behaviour types is going to be more important.”

Targeting adult consumers

Barwell told Marketing Week in January last year that the soft drinks brand was keen to make a big push for adult drinks to tap into a “poorly served” demographic.

According to the brand’s CMO, Purdey’s is “the next piece of that adult journey”.

He concluded: “We are very excited about the progress we’re making by segmenting the adult space and by understanding what are the right offerings to satisfy that non-alcoholic space. Consumers can expect to see even more innovations in the pipeline.”