It wasn’t long ago that that the Kentucky bourbon whiskey brand Jim Beam struggled with declining sales and trailed far behind its main competitor, Jack Daniel’s. It had become known as the cheap “party fuel” and lost its way with Millennials, Louisville Business First Reported.
Enter the agency StrawberryFrog and its modern invention “movement marketing.” The strategy was to reintroduce the bourbon to a new generation—young Millennials, both male and female, with a disruptive marketing campaign around the “Make History” motto, featuring actress Mila Kunis.
“We made history by launching the first marketing and advertising campaign for an iconic American bourbon featuring a woman. We partnered with a genuine bourbon drinker worthy of every female and male’s attention,” StrawberryFrog wrote on The Drum.
Events, TV ads, print, digital, social, posters and an online storytelling experience rounded out the campaign, which was then took off on a global scale. The results—the highest scoring spots Beam has ever tested with Millward Brown, “soaring sales,” and a Gold Effie. Read the full case study.
Not to take anything away from StrawberryFrog’s impressive work, but Jim Beam almost certainly also benefited from the “Bourbon Boom”—huge shifts in consumer tastes and unprecedented international growth for bourbon.
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