Chivas Promotes Male Bonding, E-mail Collection Through Mobile Program

A new mobile program is boosting brotherhood, scotch consumption and the e-mail database at Chivas Regal.

It’s also serving to rejuvenate the spirits brand by promoting it to a younger audience, according to Laurent Cutier, senior brand manager for Chivas Regal at Pernod Ricard USA.

“For any scotch brand, the name of the game is to recruit new consumers,” says Cutier. “We live in a vodka world.”

That said, there’s hope for Chivas’s category: While overall blended scotch sales are declining, premium blended scotch consumption is growing, Cutier adds.

At Chivas, the boost is coming in part from bands of brothers. The company has launched Chivas Brotherhood, an interactive effort geared toward getting young, upscale men to share experiences, hopefully over a bottle of Chivas.

To facilitate enrollment, Chivas is using SnapTags from SpyderLynk. SnapTags are an alternative to QR (quick response) codes. The latter often require smartphones to have a reader or a downloaded app. With SnapTags, any phone with a camera can snap a picture of the image–which incorporates a brand’s logo, as opposed to looking like a crossword puzzle-esque black and white grid – and send it off to a designated short code, or e-mail to the host.

The codes can also be customized so they can be linked to specific channels or outlets, or offer different premiums. The Chivas campaign features six different tags, reflecting the major cities in which the campaign is focused.

Activating a Chivas Brotherhood SnapTag gives consumers a change to register with UrbanDaddy, a e-newsletter service that provides leisure activity, gear and style information on both a geographic and lifestyle basis. The demographic served by UrbanDaddy is “quite perfect for Chivas”, according to Cutier.

All UrbanDaddy information received by consumers through the Chivas Brotherhood program is heavily branded as Chivas-sponsored content, and features a variety of special offers, such as the opportunity to pull together friends for a trip to Las Vegas.

Once enrolled, participants are offered a variety of opportunities to interact with the brand, such as tastings, special eventswinning travel prizes by sharing “brotherhood moments” of male bonding, or submitting photographs of their brotherhoods. Entries can be submitted online at http://www.chivasbrotherhood.com/, as attachments to e-mail or as SMS texts.

Upon request for enrollment, an automatic response message asks for age verification and an e-mail address from the consumer. The e-mail field is a required field on the enrollment form, but enrollees can opt out of receiving marketing material from Chivas beyond the Brotherhood promotion, as well as decline receiving daily, non-Chivas related messages from Urban Daddy.

Responding doesn’t require an app, although one is available. Because of this, SnapTags allow consumers who do not have smart phones – roughly 70% of cell phone users – to participate in the Chivas Brotherhood program.

“The exciting part of this is being able to convert consumers within a retail environment to an e-mail and loyalty program,” says Jane McPherson, CMO at SpyderLink. The in-store displays tout several prizes for sharing brotherhood moments and photographs, including a grand prize of a trip for four to Scotland. It also offers the Chivas Brotherhood URL in small type, but the response push primarily centers around the SnapTag.

The campaign, which will run through mid-June, will be followed by a series of events starting in September and running through the December holidays–what Cutier calls “the whisky season”. While he is reluctant to tip his hand regarding these events’ nature, he will draw in part on those in the Chivas Brotherhood e-mail database who have elected to continue to receive messages from the company to populate them.

The SnapTags themselves are located in liquor store floor displays, as well as in advertisements. They are coded to reflect the general location of the participant: While national, the campaign is focusing on major U.S. cities.

Program goals call for the Brotherhood to generate e-mail quantities in the “high four figures” range. As of mid-May, it was off to a good start, having already generated a low-four-figure level, with more than a month left for it to run. Even better, Cutier describes the nascent program’s unsubscribe rate as “minimal”.