What do Southern Comfort and April Fools' Day have in common? Funny, cheeky and filled with Caramel Comfort, Southern Comfort's newest expression.
With less than 30 days to develop and execute a real-time campaign to launch Caramel Comfort, MWWPR set out to help Southern Comfort ideate a humorous, engaging communications strategy to generate consumer awareness, create media excitement, and drive social buzz around the launch of the latest expression for the Southern Comfort brand.
Leveraging the April Fools' Day media window and a key sales period for Southern Comfort, MWWPR conceived SoCo 2Go – the world's first alcohol drone delivery service. The real-time marketing campaign created intrigue and conversation around the brand and new Caramel Comfort and was executed through creation of original video, photo, social and traditional media content that spread the news of the delivery service.
Objectives for this campaign centered around increasing awareness and excitement for Southern Comfort's latest Caramel Comfort expression, and included:
To successfully launch Caramel Comfort and differentiate it from other brands playing in the April Fools' Day space, MWWPR conducted an extensive media audit to assess what stories were currently trending and receiving high consumer engagement. MWWPR identified a growing interest in unmanned aircrafts and drones among media and consumers, specifically in discussions about quick and easy product delivery…and that's when the wheels started to spin.
Recognizing that several major companies, including Amazon, recently received significant media coverage for their experiments with unmanned drone delivery technology, MWWPR looked to capitalize on this trend for Southern Comfort's debut of Caramel Comfort. We also learned that millennials were invested in the tech news of drone development in the consumer space.
The campaign strategy was also rooted in an understanding of what media Southern Comfort's target audience consumes, therefore research into the outlets and bloggers that millennials follow was crucial.
With millennials always looking for the next big thing, and an emphasis on convenience and speed, the drone delivery idea perfectly intertwined with the direction the millennial focus was headed. Incorporating Southern Comfort into the "drone delivery" conversation launched the brand into the newsfeed of their target, 21+ millennial audience, with a bull's eye focus on 21-24 year olds.
MWWPR developed the concept of SoCo 2Go, the world's first alcohol drone delivery service, accompanied by a socially-driven April Fools' activation anchored by the hashtag, #SoCo2Go. MWWPR bolstered the campaign with a series of sharable, social content, a program launch video, micro-site and comprehensive traditional media and social influencer outreach programs to tease the product leading up to its April 1 reveal as an April Fools' Day joke.
Our goals were to bring Caramel Comfort to life on Southern Comfort's owned social channels and generate buzz about the brand and its new Caramel Comfort product.
Our execution included the following:
The campaign elements created positive online and media conversations about the Southern Comfort brand and its new Caramel Comfort expression. With the SoCo 2Go campaign, MWWPR helped Southern Comfort achieve an incredibly high volume of media impressions and consumer engagement. Specific results included:
