While White Claw has become the go-to summertime beach drink, the hard seltzer brand’s latest marketing campaign aims to keep the beverage top-of-mind for holiday season partygoers.
The privately-held beverage brand launched a line of holiday-themed hosting merchandise, such as dinner plates, serving plates, coasters and cloth napkins, for direct-to-consumer sales on its website Whiteclaw.com/holiday-roast. The merchandise displays insults or “roasts,” such as “Cheers to you and your high horse” on a coaster, along with the White Claw logo and the moniker “Close Friends – Roast Friends.”
The idea behind it is that friends who can roast each other are loyal, said Jamie Rath, Brand Director at White Claw, who cited a White Claw survey it conducted for this campaign. With many consumers getting together around the holiday season, the merchandise is a tongue-and-cheek way to keep consumers talking about its brand, Rath said.
“It’s really about serving our brand purpose, about creating those moments of shared experiences between friends,” Rath said.
“Grab Life By The Claw” is White Claw’s “brand platform” and this holiday campaign is an extension of it. “That platform is grounded in providing real moments of social connection to our drinkers and consumers,” Rath said.
For an extra exposure bump, White Claw worked with comedy trio Please Don’t Destroy for the campaign, using them in media materials. What’s more, on the campaign page, consumers can sign up for the comedy group to create a roast about one of their friends. The consumer inputs the friend’s name and selects from a few options for their personality type and interests. The comedy group then creates the roast, and White Claw emails it to the consumer to download. The trio creates the roast, not generative artificial intelligence, Rath said.
Less than a week into the campaign, more than 12,000 consumers have used the “roasting generator,” Rath said.
“We’re absolutely delighted with the campaign,” he said. “We’ve had thousands of consumers go to our website and we’re really excited about the performance of traffic that brought to our site.”
Even though summer is White Claw’s key selling season, it still wants to position the brand as the top hard seltzer for holiday gatherings. Its first drop of the hosting merchandise mostly sold out in the first week, and White Claw is now selling its second drop. Rath said the brand is not concerned about making a profit on the roasting merchandise.
This is the first time White Claw has created this type of merchandise or had this type of campaign, and the brand didn’t have a hard goal. Overall, White Claw is pleased with the results so far. A bump in sales of its hard seltzers from the campaign would be a “great outcome,” Rath said.
