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Erik: What do you find most appealing about that bottom up grassroots marketing?
The creativity that you can put towards a campaign, I’ll use an example, when I moved
to St. Petersburg Florida I was with a marketing firm that had a client through Brown Forman,
the major spirits brand, parent brand, Appleton Estate Jamaican Rum and Appleton had never
been distributed in the United States prior to the two thousands, they came to us and
said “we would like to get our premium VX Rum brand in the hands of the affluent twenty
five to thirty nine year old consumer”, so they had given us a really nice budget
and they wanted to be events driven, well what did was I created a sixteen city campaign
two cities per month and in each market we were developing three different events, all
geared towards that affluent twenty-five to thirty-nine year old. A Friday night event
was for example was a very high end cocktail party at a hip bar, the Saturday event was
tied to Unique Homes Magazine where they would chose one of their multi million dollar properties
on the market in that particular city and we’d have a really nice open house for a
couple of hours. Sunday night was then followed up with a really neat jazz performance by
an up and coming twenty-five to thirty-nine year old national jazz saxophonist and in
each of those events it was not so much a rum drinking event but what we developed was
a luxury brand tour so that each event we had Jaguars parked out front, we had Panasonic
exhibiting their new Tough Book laptops which was new on the market at that time, also at
that same time Blackberry had just hit the market with their new products which seem
so far back now but it was just a few years ago that Blackberry was a new thing so in
each of these experience, each of these events in over sixteen cities, two per month we left
all of these attendees with impressions not just of Appleton Estate Jamaica Rum but all
these other brands and the brand experiences, it was a win-win for everybody, win-win for
not just Appleton Estate Jamaican Rum but for all the brands involved and everybody
came away with a new knowledge that they had prior to that event.