By James Wells
The WA-based retail group Liquor Barons will concentrate on promoting its brand through a $500,000 marketing plan for the second half of 2017.
Liquor Barons general manager, Chris O’Brien, presented the plan at the co-operative’s Transatlantic conference last week which he described as “re-energised and refreshed” and incorporates a stronger emphasis on the retail brand and utilising outdoor media such as billboards and buses as well as social media.
“Liquor Barons will spend $500,000 in brand advertising between July and November this year – which would be equivalent to at least a $10 million brand expenditure nationally by one of our suppliers – so it is a significant spend,” O’Brien told delegates.
“This advertising will be brand focused. We are going to effectively stop doing product and price advertising for three months, but product and price promotion will carry on as normal. We will reinvest that money, and more in brand advertising between July and November and at that point we will go back into traditional catalogue advertising into that key selling period for Christmas,” he said.
“Most of what we do will be out of home, so we have really spent a lot of time to work out how do we get best bang for buck out of Western Australia. Television is an easy go-to, but as a liquor provider it is very difficult to advertise on television as there are a number of restrictions around when we can be there and what we can say. We have opted for an out of home campaign with billboards and buses supported by radio. The reason we went with outdoor as a primary focus and radio as a secondary focus was that when we look at who is advertising on radio today every man and his dog is there targeting the 21 to 45 demographic which is a significant target market.”
A key feature of the outdoor campaign is a series of ‘themed’ digital billboards which are specifically located in high traffic areas such as highways. This advertising will feature ‘dynamic’ messaging that will allow the ability to change the creative throughout the campaign such as separate messaging for before and after West Coast Eagles AFL games depending on whether the team wins or loses its AFL fixture.
“The reason we have gone with a lot of outdoor media is the sheer scale and size of the characters we will be using. We think that they will be effective and by using some clever taglines and the very impactful Baron characters, this will make the advertising very memorable.”
O’Brien also confirmed that dozens of buses around Perth will be used to market the Liquor Barons brand, including a number of fully-wrapped ‘Maxibuses’.
“This is a real up-weight in the amount of money we are spending on marketing and advertising – and it is a real shift in our strategy to focus on our brand. We know that the average liquor consumer has 2.7 liquor stores in their repertoire and the aim of this campaign is to become one of those liquor stores.
“It is a differentiator position and it is a position that gives us personality and really capitalises on our differentiation by suburb. We know that the Liquor Barons stores are very focused on their local community and this campaign allows us to leverage that.”