2021 Gold Best Brand Building Campaign

Agency: RAPP

Client: Laithwaites

Campaign Name: Wine Cellar Feeling

Campaign Overview

Laithwaites is the UK's biggest direct-to-consumer wine retailer, with a distinctly middle-class, middle-England and middle-aged customer base.

It needed a new audience – so how could it move from red-chino wearers to Instagrammers obsessed with rosé o’clock?

Strategy

When the nation was forced into lockdown, we were forced to buy our booze in different ways. Suddenly, home delivery of wine wasn't just for middle-Englanders, it became a way of life for a younger, more urban audience.

Laithwaites spotted early on that its audience was changing and wanted to take advantage, so competitors didn't benefit as much.

To continue to attract more new, younger consumers it needed to change the way the brand showed up.

Creativity

To be seen as a more approachable brand, Laithwaites would need to get a bit punchy with the people who were causing the image problem.

With fancy wine cellars and rules about which glass to use and food pairings to follow, they were the antithesis of what the younger audiences were attracted to.

To be less fusty, the brand needed to behave less like a wine brand and more like a craft-beer brand; to democratise wine drinking and show Laithwaites as totally different to all the competitors who were trying to eat its lunch.

The creative approach used good old-fashioned comedy: tackling wine snobbery by lampooning the idea of having a wine cellar, in a friendly and accessible way in TV ads.

In social and CRM, content lampooned conventional wine conversations (like foodpairings), used Dad jokes on Father's Day, showed the reality of drinking wine like cans when camping.

Spotify playlists followed, and finally, moved from red-trousers to rosé in ways that provided the varied conversations that social and CRM require

Results

Proving Laithwaites has all the quality, without the snobbery, saw massive brand shifts.

Unprompted awareness jumped from 8% to 20%. Prompted rose from 39% to 49%.

The campaign impacted consideration, too. 70% of the audience said they'd be more likely to consider Laithwaites and 68% of target consumers said they felt warmer towards the brand after seeing the campaign.

Consumers felt that Laithwaites was ‘passionate about wine’.

The Team

RAPP - Al Mackie, Chief Creative Officer - Jason Cascarina, Deputy Executive Creative Director - Matt Seccombe, Associate Creative Director - Matt Mitchell, Associate Creative Director - Stephanie Hottlet, Head of Production - Caroline Parkes, Chief Experience Officer - Sarah Greeley, CRM Strategist - Vicky Gelling, Managing Partner - Matt Gardner-Lewis, Senior Account Director - Lionel Cull, Senior Designer - Anna Pearson, Senior Director - Dean Kelly, Senior Project Manager - Nicole Waller, Copywriter - Andy Wolf, Motion Designer - Hiten Bhatt, Head of Design - James Shillaw, Senior Motion Designer - Lauren Barden, E-Mail Developer - Casian Pascu, Product Designer - Michael J Ferns, Director

76 - Richard Atkinson, HTML 5

Another Tongue - Julien Ovenden, VO Artist

Alexander Wells, Music composer

Contributors

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