The Bavaria brand is brewed in Holland by the Royal Swinkels Family Brewers, the world’s largest independent family owned brewing group in the world. The brand is well loved in its native Holland and is consumed in 130 territories worldwide.

The Challenge

Like many local brands that go global, Bavaria’s strategy suffered from a few presumptions. Prime amongst these were that the global audience were as familiar with the brand as the local audience. This had led to low brand investment and a misapprehension of who the brand was talking to.

Local markets (120 of them) were responsible for their own marketing budgets generated from local sales, with little to no useful promotional assets coming from the central hub. This led to each market ‘doing their own thing’ - which predictably led to chaos.

The Task

I began working with Bavaria UK who were tasked with marketing and distributing Bavaria 5% and Bavaria 0.0% in the UK market. It quickly became apparent that there was no useful material available so we went back to basics. We did a full audit of the brand, the market and the audience and began to build a strategy. This involved creating four central pillars (Family, Heritage, Independence, Origin) and then building a new brand structure that could actually take some weight. This then led to the RTBs and messaging hierarchy, visual look and feel and finally a multi-year communications strategy.

This proved so successful that I began working through much of the same process with the global team - evetually consulting on multiple territories and finally running the strategic and creative approach for the global 5%, 0.0% and IPA products (excluding Holland).

The Output

Our primary aim was to create brand assets that could be used by multiple territories across multiple media. This meant strategy decks and then films which supported the brand pillars. We knew that the markets were going to need media that could be used in low spend markets, primarily print, POS and digital/social.

We created a new strapline based n the RTBs, replacing ‘Zo’ - which meant nothing outside of Holland, with ‘Family owned, independent since 1719.’ Whilst this was a mouthful, it did the job of explaining that Bavaria was a good brand with a good product. We had found in our research that many of the audience (from the UK to Australia and New Zealand) believed that Bavaria was in fact a supermarket own brand.

From there we had a strategy of getting noticed on low budget through off-the-wall creative, before working with new distributors at Molsen-Coors to get the brand on-trade. This began to give us more brand credibility (all bars exceeding their sales targets by 50-150%).

We then began the rollout to a younger more 0.0% friendly generation through a new branding approach and events based strategy.

Throughout this period I have worked across Europe, liaising with local teams and businesses to ensure that the brand is viewed as one credibly unit, and that each market gets the support that they need to communicate within their budgetary restrictions.