Brand Building: Story UK's campaign for The Glenmorangie Company

Objectives

Launch and sell our bottling, and launch world-wide events celebrating the tenth anniversary. Capture data, recruit new members and continue momentum. Drive sales into new online shop to build data and enhance targeting and assign value per member.

Strategy and targeting

A decade on, the Ardbeg Committee is still is a cost-effective, self-perpetuating channel for building loyalty, testing, and cross-selling products. Members spread the word and bring new drinkers into the fold: we recognize they’re a very important audience, and their tenth anniversary was a perfect opportunity to thank them. A new expression of Ardbeg always provokes interest, but the launch of Rollercoaster was our most ambitious to date, with 13,000 bottles. We created anticipation online and hosted anniversary parties around the world, not only to clean data but to meet our fans in local markets.

We consider it our duty to provide our Ardbeggian evangelists with regular news and entertaining communications, written in quirky ‘committee-speak’. As part of an on- and off-line campaign, we sent a mailer to whet appetites, emailed to direct them to the site, and set up a countdown clock ‘outside the gates’ of our Rollercoaster site. Engaging tactile mail packs are a mainstay of our strategy, always anticipated and welcomed, so we created one featuring various Committee Members and distillery figures, with ‘tickets to ride’ and details of when the bottling would be on sale. An email also went to 32,000 Committee Members directing them to the site. There we created a test: a fantastical rollercoaster movie with things from the last 10 years that we challenged diehard fans to recognise.

Database

Collecting metrics from the online shop is allowing us to undertake to integrate the shop with our database for a planned programme of segmentation.

Results

An amazing 11,000 bottles (with a higher ticket value than most, at £50) sold in two weeks, from a stock of 13,000. It’s now the fastest ever sell out! From mailing 50,000 people we had 46,096 visits. Absolute unique visitors: 22,560. Page views: 338,534. Average time on site: 14 minutes. ROI: 850%. Our rate of new members has risen 300% since launch.