When Simply, America’s #1 juice brand, announced it was launching an alcoholic version, Black Twitter (the collective expression of Black culture on Twitter) went wild. Our goal was to use the organic outpouring of love from this community to organically spread the word about Simply Spiked Lemonade.
Nielsen data shows only 32% of Black audiences feel industry representation of their identity group is accurate and in general they feel they have been ignored by brands or at least not spoken to directly. Our challenge was to listen and make them feel seen.
Instead of making these superfans part of our launch plan, we gave them the lead role, building a community around them. We called it 'Day Ones', because they'd been with us since day one. We gave them exclusive access to the product, amplified their voices and engaged with them constantly.
But before any of that, we did our homework. We built a diverse team and created clear guidelines for tone of voice, in particular AAVE (African American Vernacular English), and how to create messaging that feels authentic without pandering.
We built our Day Ones community where our fans already were - on Twitter and Instagram. By turning fans into advocates, they spread the word in other places, like TikTok and YouTube (where we do not have a presence). We were careful in that our community was built on a two-way relationship. Our Day Ones had shown such excitement about our launch that we made sure to pay them back. We told them about releases before anyone else, we gave them sampling opportunities and responded to their jokes with humor of our own. We even sent out physical Day Ones cards to make our community feel real and sought after.
This relationship - along with a targeted influencer approach - spawned unboxing videos, reviews, and a huge amount of user generated content, giving us an incredible number of impressions for mostly organic work which spread far beyond our owned platforms.
Simply Spiked Lemonade became the most successful launch in Molson Coors history. They sold 1.9 million cases in the first 3 months of launch, exceeding our business objective by 323%. That success was in no small part thanks to the success of our Day Ones campaign. We generated over 400,000 impressions on our owned platforms, and 1.2 million views on TikTok, a platform where we don't even have a presence.
Sentiment on the campaign was 87% Positive + Neutral, showing we had achieved our goal of making our audience of Black consumers feel seen and spoken to.
