Carlsberg looks to stand out from the crowd with focus on experiential
Despite having faced a “tough commercial environment” this year, Carlsberg is determined to ramp up its experiential activity in 2016, planning a big push around the UEFA European Championship to keep brand momentum going.
The beer brand launched its Christmas activity today – a festive follow-up to its “beer poster” experiential ad earlier this year that allowed customers to secure themselves half a pint of lager via a tap located under the slogan “Probably the best poster in the world”.
The Carlsberg Christmas tree was created by Clifford French and is fitted with candle-lit beer bottles, digital festoon lighting and a large beer hop at the top of the tree. The first 100 visitors to the tree also received a hand-blown bespoke glass Carlsberg ‘beerble’, the right time to consume the perfect sample of Carlsberg. Those who weren’t in London were able to win a host of prizes through Carlsberg’s social channels during the event today.
According to Carlsberg UK’s senior brand manager Dharmesh Rana, the brand saw a massive success with the original billboard and wanted to return with a “winning concept” for Christmas.
He told Marketing Week: “We thought: ‘If it’s not broken, don’t fix it’. The opportunity for consumers to try the beer remains at the heart of the activity, but we wanted to give it a festive twist. We’ve had a great year and want to say thank you to our consumers.”
However, the brand is planning to evolve its experiential campaigns and make the ideas “even stronger” for next year.
“We are pulling through ideas from the consumer world and closer to point of purchase. We are currently assessing how we can make a tangible impact on a big scale and put the brand on consumers’ minds,” he said.
According to Rana, the difficult environment that the brand has had to operate in over the last year has made the brand “embrace different technologies” to ensure they stood out.
“It’s been a challenging commercial environment, and from a marketing perspective we’ve seen that as well. But the competitiveness has been good for the industry. We’ve had to change our approach and embraced different technologies. It’s working for us, in a good way. We are seeing our consumer metrics move the right way,” he explained.
The upcoming year will be incredibly important to the brand, as they will be sponsoring the UEFA European Championship in France. According to Rana, the brand is working hard to ensure its activity stands out.
He concluded: “We’ll take our learnings from our activity this year, and will be using social in a different and more dynamic way. You’ll see lots of engaging content-led ideas around football which will dominate for a good quarter.”
