Heineken

 

Hello everyone, I am back with the third post in this blog I hope you enjoy it. As you probably already know this blog is all about cigarettes and alcohol an the big brands in this industry area. In my first post I spoke about one of the biggest alcohol brands Jack Daniel’s: a spirit brand. This time I decided to look into a drink that is very popular and it is mostly preferred by men. Yes you got it right, it is beer. Beer is the worlds oldest and mostly consumed alcoholic beverage. It is the third most popular drink overall after water and tea. The creation of beer is possibly dating back to 9500 years BC. It is so old that during the building of the Pyramids in Egypt, each worker got a good amount of beer every day, it was refreshing for the workers and it was lifting their spirit. Beer is also very important nowadays, almost every restaurant, bar, pub, hotel, club etc. is selling beer. Beer is a light version of alcohol which is consumed cold, that is why a lot of people have only as a refreshment.

The beer brand which we are going to look into is called HEINEKEN:

 

History:

In 1864 on 15^th of February, Gerard Adriaan Heineken got his rich mother to buy a brewery in Amsterdam called “De Hooiberg”. After that he hired Dr. Elion who developed Heineken recipe and the first Heineken brand beer was brewed. Only two years later in 1875 Heineken won the Medaille D’Or(Gold Medal) at the International Maritime Exposition in Paris, that was a huge success for the company and they began to ship beer in Paris very regularly. With the time Heineken sales topped 6,400,000 litres, which made them the biggest beer exporter to France. The brand kept growing and today it is one of the most successful beer companies in the world.

 

 

 

Facts:

-          After the alcohol ban in America was lifted in 1933, Heineken was the first European beer which was imported to the United States.

 

-          Heineken is famous with it’s green bottle and the red star on it.

 

-          In 2011 2.74 billion litres of Heineken brand beer were produced worldwide.

 

-          In 2011 the total beer production of all breweries fully owned by Heineken was 16.46 billion litres.

 

-          Heineken is sold in more than 170 countries and it is the world’s most international beer.

 

-          The brand is connected with many other beer brands from different countries including Mexico, Africa and China.

 

What does Heineken do to make people buy the product?

Heineken is a premium lager which has been around for over than 150 years, it has established itself as a brand and has proven that it produces high quality beer. It is easy recognisable, the green bottle and the red star can be spot very easily. And of course it does what all the big brands should do, it gets it’s marketing right.

 

Heineken is famous for it’s advertising. The adverts that the brand has are always very funny and clever. For an example my favourite is the one where one woman is showing around her new flat to her girlfriends and in the end she shows them her walk-in closet full with clothes and shoes, and they start screaming  hysterically because they are very excited. At the same moment you hear men screaming as well and the camera shows us the man of the house with his men friends showing them his walk-in fridge which is full with bottles of Heineken.

Commercials like this one make you smile and somehow they make you feel closer to the brand. Heineken also use celebrities in some of their campaigns, for example Jennifer Aniston and Chris Pine.

Except the advertising strategies Heineken has a good PR side as well. The brand does not do a lot of sponsorship but the ones that it does are crucial for the success of the brand. In my opinion the best sponsorship deal they have is the one with Champions League, the biggest club football tournament in the world watched by millions and millions of people around the world. Also lets not forget that beer and football go hand by hand, 90% of the people drink beer when they watch football, it is like popcorn and cinema. Other huge deals that Heineken have are Formula 1, Rugby World Cup and Canadian Grand Prix.

 

Conclusion

Beer has been here longer than most of the things we have in the present world and it will most likely stay a lot more. The way that Heineken promotes the light refreshing alcohol it produces, the sponsorship, the humour and the celebrity endorsement are the key points of their success. At the same time it is seen as a high class beer on a normal price, and that is another reason for people buying it.

Now get yourself a beer, enjoy the rest of your day, and keep an eye for my next post.

Marlboro

No one can explain the urge of smoking to a non-smoker, people say it is a habit, a pleasure, a disease, an addiction, the truth is that it is different with each person. All that we know for sure is that it is expensive, it is bad for your health, and the one of the people around you, seemingly that does not matter too much for most of the smokers. Last time we talked about the giant in alcohol industry Jack Daniel’s. In this article another huge brand will be under our projectors, it is a cigarettes company. This brand has been there for many years and is one of the most successful tobacco sellers.  That is “Marlboro”, a brand which successfully found a way to make people pay a higher price to get a better quality poison.

 

MARLBORO

 

History:

Marlboro is made by Philip Morris USA and it was launched in 1924(93 years ago), it was created specially for women, that is why the slogan was “Mild as May”. The name “Marlboro” was simply taken from a street in London where the Philip Morris factory was situated. All the adverts of the brand were trying to show how girly these cigarettes are, even the filter had a red band in the end of it to hide the lipstick of the women, they were calling that “Beauty Tips to Keep the Paper from your Lips”. In the 1950s scientists stated that smoking is very much responsible for lung cancer. Marlboro took the opportunity to reach a new target market, the brand wanted to reach men and specifically men who are concerned about lung cancer. The cigarettes of Marlboro were filtered and that was considered safer than most of the other brands which weren’t filtering their products at the time. The brand continued to develop in this direction and today we see it as one of the most famous cigarette names in the world.

 

Facts:

-          Marlboro is being sold in over than 180 countries around the world.

 

-          Marlboro is the most famous and best selling product of “Philip Morris”.

 

-          Marlboro alongside Philip Morris gives $25 million per year to charity.

 

-          In 2014 Marlboro sold 391 billion cigarettes.

 

-          Marlboro is the largest cigarette brand in the United States for the last 35 years, it holds 44% of the market share which is more than the next ten brands combined.

 

-          In 2015 Marlboro was valued at $80 billion, that was number ten in the world, it was more than Facebook and Amazon.

 

 

 

What does Marlboro do to make people buy the product?

 

People recognise the good quality, and Marlboro is certainly delivering this quality of tobacco and cigarettes. Customers know what they are getting, they feel insured, they feel that Marlboro is less dangerous just because it is more expensive and established.

Of course the marketing of the brand played a huge role in making Marlboro famous and successful. When the brand switched its target market to men, guys were feeling uncomfortable smoking cigarettes which were originally made for ladies. That is why Marlboro launched an advertising campaign which had various manly figures such as weightlifters, soldiers, builders etc. The cowboy was supposed to be the first in the line. After one year of the campaign, sales were going up and the brand was reaching its objectives, the company dropped all the manly figures except the cowboy. The cowboy became a legend in Marlboro advertising.

 

Other than the advertising of the brand which is now banned by most of the countries, Marlboro used to have a very good strategy in their sponsorship deals. The company was a sponsor to McLaren and Ferrari teams in Formula One. In between 2005 and 2011 Ferrari received around $1 billion from the agreement with Marlboro. The brand was aiming at sports cars and motorcycles, the main goal was to reach the “MEN” target audience and it worked perfectly.

 

 

 

Both Ferrari and Marlboro have red as their corporate colour, the relation between them lasted the longest and I think their sponsorship agreement was the most successful one. Recently Ferrari changed the logo of Marlboro to a barcode, this way they are not harming the regulations reagarding cigarettes promotion.

 

 

 

Other brands that Marlboro sponsored: Yamaha, Ducati, Mitsubishi, Peugeot, Toyota etc.

Conclusion

The cigarette industry is huge and Marbloro are the giants in it. The brand was clinical in making the right choices in the right time. Their advertising and PR strategy was simple but very well executed, which brought the desired results for the company.

 
             Keep an eye for my next blog post which will bring us back to the alcohol zone.