Our objective was to make Busch Beer stand out during the holiday season, when most consumers’ attention is focused on wine and spirits.
The strategy was simple: make something so fun and dumb for the holidays we can’t be ignored. Our idea: The Busch Cooler Stocking. A holiday stocking over five feet long, insulated to keep a 12 pack of Busch beer cans cold for up to four hours. After a couple rounds of R&D to make sure cans fit snuggly but not so snuggly they couldn’t be removed, we went into full production and created 1,000 stockings whose patterned mimicked our spokesperson, Busch Guy’s flannel shirt. We then created four short videos made specifically for Instagram extolling all the virtues and reasons to get one of our stockings – not that people needed convincing. Our videos positioned the Busch Cooler Stocking as the coolest stocking, the perfect holiday gift, the best white elephant gift, and the best thing to bring to a holiday party.
After the stockings sold out – in less than a week and before Thanksgiving – we ran a social contest allowing fans to win one last one. All fans had to do for a chance to win was retweet the post.
With only a 20K media spend the stockings sold out in less than a week, we garnered 62M impressions and left people wanting more. Busch beer received so many calls from vendors and beer shop owners who wanted hundreds of their own for instore sale, it’s very likely Busch Cooler Stockings return for the 2020 holiday season.
