Baileys is an iconic liquor cabinet staple that is known for being a cozy addition to your coffee. While the brand is known and loved the world over, the core consumer remains over 45. This gave us a clear challenge and opportunity to reach and recruit the next generation of Baileys drinkers.
Baileys decided to target this younger, more diverse audience with its newest innovation: Baileys Chocolate, a decadent liqueur that combines two beloved treats – Baileys Original Irish Cream and real Belgian Chocolate. In order to make a big splash in the saturated US market, we knew we needed to show up in culturally relevant spaces for our desired audience. We needed to create a world around Baileys Chocolate that is playful and sensorial, encouraging them to engage with the brand organically.
Baileys wanted to target a younger audience who didn’t typically consider our brand. Born into the social media world, Gen Z and young millennials are used to playing with their reality and designing it to their specifications. This obsession with creativity gives them new ways to express themselves. Our goal: unlock the next generation of Baileys consumers by helping them indulge in a playful and sensorial world they can make their own.
To bring the world of Baileys Chocolate to life, we leaned into the product truth: Baileys Chocolate allows you to experience chocolate like never before. It’s a luscious interpretation of the world’s most popular flavor and a new way to indulge in a beloved treat. Chocolate’s inherent playful and sensorial nature led to Baileys creating Baileys Chocolate, making those tenets the core of our strategy.
We realized that we needed to partner with a credible source of creativity in chocolate to amplify our story. To begin dimensionalizing this world, we partnered with Internet celebrity chocolatier and reigning King of Chocolate, Amaury Guichon. His elaborate and edible chocolate creations have captured the hearts and imaginations of over 55 million members of our target audience. We knew he was the perfect creative partner to make Baileys Chocolate part of the cultural conversation in a big way.
So, we challenged him with his biggest creative project to date: to build us an entire cocktail bar out of real Belgian chocolate. Over the course of 10 days, Amaury painstakingly crafted a bar, bar stools, bar tools, coasters, garnishes, and Baileys Chocolate bottles out of 100% edible Belgian chocolate. This realistic (yet delicious) bar was then used as the set for our hero film, ‘The Chocolate Bar by Baileys Chocolate’. The making of ‘The Chocolate Bar’ content from Amaury was also created to garner more attention for the launch.
'The Chocolate Bar' was the anchor of the launch campaign. From there, we continued expanding the Baileys Chocolate world further into our target’s world. To support the launch, we took the Chocolate Bar to New York for a launch party, where Amaury bartended with special guest, Grammy-nominated artist Fat Nwigwe. Baileys Chocolate showed up at Art Basel and Phillip Lim’s September show and February installation at New York Fashion Week, where our art and fashion-minded next-gens were flocking. We then created 3D out-of-home billboards in high traffic areas to pique the curiosity and appetites of passersby in New York and Los Angeles. The launch campaign was supported by Amaury’s owned social content, as well as Baileys Chocolate social content, e-commerce campaigns, and PR outreach.
It was clear after the first three months following launch that we were top of mind for the target audience we wanted to reach. We were in every pocket of culture and conversation online that pertained to our next generation Baileys drinkers.
This led to us being the #1 new product in Q3 on Drizly, the world’s largest alcohol online marketplace, popular with our target audience.
The Chocolate Bar by Baileys Chocolate campaign launch garnered over 751.2 million total earned media impressions. The Chocolate Bar video, its key asset, reached over 33.4 million views. The total partnership views with Amaury Guichon topped 300 million across social channels.
In addition, according to internal sales data, demand for the product increased by 91.8% after the initial launch of the campaign and Baileys Chocolate.
