Vodka’s New Clothes

06 November 2005 By db staff writer

“standfirst”>As premium mutates into super-premium, it’s becoming increasingly important for vodka brands to explain their credentials. Not easy for a colourless, odourless liquid, says Tom Bruce-Gardyne

White Whisly? No taste. No smell.” With this simple slogan, Ed Smith a South Carolina salesman, helped drive Smirnoff sales in the States and drag vodka out of its ethnic ghetto into the mainstream. That was in the 1930s when vodka was a very new vice in the West, except among Russian and East European émigrés. Some 70 years on, Smirnoff has become the biggest-selling international spirits brand in the world having overtaken Bacardi.

For Philip Almond, European brand director at Smirnoff, success has come from a combination of “the oldfashioned shoe leather of building a spirits brand in the on-trade and great advertising and communication”.

For most of its history vodka advertising has been a triumph of style over substance. This is by necessity as much as design if you consider the drink’s legal definition. Taking that of the American Bureau of Firearms, Tobacco and Alcohol, vodka is a neutral spirit without any distinctive character. This hardly sounds a promising platform on which to construct an effective advertising campaign. Not surprisingly, most brands have chosen to associate themselves with a glamorous lifestyle rather than the contents of the bottle. The alternative can sound woefully inadequate.

Take the following recent example of a copywriter screwing up: “The use of demineralised water removes all trace of colour, taste and odour allowing the true essence of vodka to shine through.” And what would that be exactly?

Yet as vodka matures and goes premium, the need to talk up quality has become a driving force for the two brands dominating the category – Absolut and Smirnoff. “In a way the Absolut campaign has always been about quality,” says Michael Persson, the brand’s marketing director. The first ad by the agency TBWA ran in The New York Times in 1980. It featured a pack shot beneath a halo and script on the bottle mentioning the “grain grown in the rich fields of Southern Sweden” and “400 years of Swedish tradition”. The bottle has been the hero of the awardwinning campaign ever since.

Absolut art

By 1985 it was clear Absolut had achieved cult status when Andy Warhol gave it the same treatment he had given Campbell’s soup. It was the start of a long collaboration with artists, writers, DJs and fashion designers. Absolut Warhol also marked the transition to a more abstract approach using the bottle shape rather than the bottle itself. This led to the Cities campaign, begun in 1988 and still going, the latest being Absolut Warsaw. Using local themes has helped to localise an international campaign. “People feel ‘this brand belongs to my city’,” says Persson.

The creation of a superpremium category in the late ‘90s shook up the whole market. When Grey Goose was launched in 1996, its owners, the Sydney Frank Corporation, needed to justify its $25 price tag, double the market leader, Smirnoff. Help was at hand in the shape of the Beverage Testing Institute of Chicago which ran a blind tasting at Frank’s bequest. The Goose came out tops – a fact exploited to the full in all the brand’s subsequent advertising. To those promoting a cultural icon like Absolut it must have looked worse than tacky. But it clearly worked since US sales shot from 50,000 cases in 1998 to 1.4 million in 2003. The following year Bacardi bought Grey Goose for a cool $2 billion.

Absolut was stung into action as Richard Lewis, the account director at TBWA, recalls. “Some of the creatives,” he writes in his book Absolut Sequel, “argued this wasn’t a quality issue. Rather it was about coolness and trendiness; because Absolut had become so mainstream and ubiquitous like Nike or Coke, it had just become cooler to order Ketel One or Grey Goose.” While that may have been true, Absolut could hardly admit it. To retaliate it began developing a super-premium line of its own, Absolut Level, which eventually appeared last year. And in 2002 it launched the Heritage campaign linking the brand to its roots and providing consumers with carefully mined nuggets about its quality. Among them, the fact that every bottle is rinsed with Absolut before filling.

Being such a global spirit, provenance has rarely featured in vodka advertising until now. “I think more consumers are ready for it than before,” says Persson.

In the UK, Absolut Source featured billboards with a bottle of Absolut stuck like a pin into a map of the world. The pinpoint being Ahus, Absolut’s hometown in southern Sweden. “It’s not so much about provenance or geographical association, it’s a combination,” explained Absolut’s CEO, Bengt Baron, at the time. “Wherever you go in the world and you consume a drop of Absolut vodka you know it comes from the same quality-assurance team, has the same winter wheat and has our own water … and [we] believe that Sweden has a quality feel to it.”

Being made in 16 locations around the world, Smirnoff cannot point to a single source, not that Philip Almond sounds too bothered: “If it was a major driver for consumers obviously I would be concerned. It isn’t, so I’m not.” Smirnoff’s Russian heritage obviously does matter, however, as Barry Sherridan, the brand’s VP for communications, explains. “We are trying to establish a mental link, sort of the way Coca-Cola would seem a quintessentially American product and it doesn’t matter that it isn’t made there.”

The $400m relaunch of Smirnoff two years ago included a new, patented bottle to help it stand out from the crowd of Smirnoff look-alikes. In the US there was a need to fight back against brands like Absolut, Skyy and Finlandia, while in the UK it had to reinforce its premium credentials over ownlabel. Sheridan says, “Overall there has been a reasonably strong shift towards quality credentials. I think every brand needs quality as a foundation because, eventually, if you are just running on image people will get a little tired and will look at you a little harder and start wondering why I’m paying X amount for this brand.”

To be a completely mainstream brand and retain a premium price is one of the greatest challenges in marketing. The most successful example in the UK is the “reassuringly expensive” Stella Artois lager. Smirnoff’s UK ad agency, J Walter Thomson (JWT), used humour to good effect in its If Smirnoff Made… campaign. Sadly, the one featuring a man sliding down the banisters in his birthday suit with the strap-line If Smirnoff Made Painkillers was quashed by Ofcom and never shown. The latest ads have strayed into a surreal Cold-War landscape complete with Russian dolls and heavily-armed guards in the Not The Usual campaign. They could almost be out-takes from old Bond movies where Smirnoff, shaken not stirred, was a perennial piece of product placement until 2003. According to Harry MacAuslan, a managing partner at JWT, the ads represent “tense drama loaded with atmosphere” and embody “Smirnoff’s values of sophistication, cleverness and unexpectedness.” The latest Smirnoff TV ad highlights the fact the brand is triple-distilled.

Meanwhile, in the US, where an estimated 90% of Smirnoff is drunk mixed, consumers are being urged to take it straight. “Perhaps the best way to mix the award-winning Smirnoff is not to mix it at all. And drink it neat,” runs the copy in one of the current print ads. But Philip Almond says, “That’s not an encouragement to drink it neat necessarily. The point it is trying to make is that Smirnoff is a brand that is good enough to drink neat.” This January the brand received a boost from The New York Times which rated it tops in a blind tasting of 25 vodkas. An endorsement, which if chosen to use in the advertising, would seem to carry more weight than some testing institute in Chicago.

Over at Absolut, the job of stamping the unique bottle shape on the consciousness of vodka drinkers has long been achieved in its core markets of the US, Canada and the UK. But maybe the advertising is now so intrinsic to the brand that no-one would dare try something radically different any more than they would tinker with the production process. In the US the 25-year-old campaign helped take the brand to a peak of 4.6m cases in 2000, since when it has stalled. Critics accuse the bottle campaign of having nothing new to say, but Persson retorts, “They are only thinking of the print communication. There are so many other aspects to Absolut’s advertising these days.” He won’t give details of plans for 2006, but says it will be “revolutionary”.

Life is very different for the stampede of freshly-minted brands. The New Zealand vodka, 42 Below, was launched in 2002 by Geoff Ross, a former account director at Saatchi & Saatchi. “We think our particular consumers actually reject mass marketing. They want to discover a brand, so you’ve got to talk to them in a far more intimate nature. To buy a bill-board above Times Square saying Drink This Now in a very Unilever or Proctor & Gamble type approach, erodes your story.” Instead, he has favoured viral marketing on the internet and strategic sponsorship deals including the Venice Biennale. Others have chosen to sponsor music as with Finlandia and The Big Chill. Polstar and Solidarnosc are also into party sponsorship and events. “By only choosing specialised events to sponsor or host, we stimulate word of mouth and get the right crowds talking,” says Jeremy Agnew about Solidarnosc’s approach. “This creates a longer lasting loyalty in the early years than hundreds of 2D images in magazines.”

In the US the super-premium sector is now well-established, though individual vodkas fall quickly in and out of fashion. In Absolut Sequel, Richard Lewis recalls the advent of this new market for expensive vodka: “Each brand wanted to grow big by emphasising they were small. Small company. Distilled in small batches. Handcrafted. Old-world recipes.” The trouble with this approach is that as you grow big it becomes ever harder to hang on to your homespun credentials. And the more mainstream you become the harder it is to justify a super-premium price.

The UK market for superpremium vodka is much more embryonic. It may not develop along American lines as British drinkers may prove rather more sceptical. Brands will have to work harder to convince consumers that their gorgeous packaging and handcrafted brilliance are worth paying the extra for. Inevitably, the battleground is mainly in the fashionable ontrade where trends are set. Being seen in the right bar is crucial, but costly. Top London bars charge anything from £40,000 to £100,000 for a single listing and bar owners are adept at playing suppliers off against each other.

Crazy, wacky, vodka loons

To build distribution, companies employ vodka dealers whose freewheeling style seems more suited to maverick newcomers than say, Diageo. In February The Sunday Times quoted one dealer, a former DJ, saying, “We triggered a breed of personalities who weren’t corporate, who liked to have a laugh, a jig-about, and knew what was going on. All the other sales guys were still dusting the dandruff of their shiny suits.”

Another technique is the sort of guerrilla marketing used by Wokka Saki, where a kimono-clad model pitches up in a blacked-out limo to deliver bottles to select bars in key cities. Being a blend of British vodka and Japanese saki, the new brand is undeniably different. It will certainly need to be in markets as saturated as Britain and the US.