Inspiring Refreshed, Relevant Campaigns

The Challenge

Understand the attitudes and behaviors of young people around the world to inform relevant and refreshed creative campaigns for an iconic whiskey brand.

Over the past few years, this whiskey brand has worked to evolve away from its traditionally “masculine” image, toward a younger, more inclusive brand. As part of this initiative, they wanted to better understand their creative target (bold, independent young people) and how this audience relates to the current brand positioning and creative strategy. They hoped that the insights from this research could help fuel their new creative strategy. Which, spoiler alert… it did.

The Approach

We began by engaging bold, independent young whiskey drinkers across 8 different countries in a 3-day digital diary, to better understand who they are as people and how they engage in life, particularly around some of the brand’s key attributes. This included them giving us permission to follow them across their social media platforms for an entire week to get an unfiltered peek into who they are and their life at the moment. Finally, we invited several people from each market, and a friend, to chat with us about how they live life on their own terms, and the role that whiskey plays in all of it. And, in the spirit of partnership, we shared “Snackable Insights” with the client and agency teams weekly so learnings could be incorporated into on going creative strategy development.

The Impact

We learned that young adulthood can be tough — especially during a pandemic and amidst economic and political turmoil. But we discovered our young whiskey drinkers are determined to figure out who they are and who they want to be in life, with very little slowing them down. They aren’t one-dimensional — and neither is the brand — giving the brand rich opportunity to connect with the target across markets by playing up certain characteristics and occasions for the brand.