Jägermeister

Hello everyone, this is my last blog post about alcohol and cigarettes. I want to say it was something very new to me and it was an interesting journey. I have never had the chance to write about something that I find interesting and share it with others. Blogging gave me the freedom to do so and I can say that I feel happy that I did it. So apart from that it is time to dive into the world of alcohol for one last time. I covered some very well known brands in my previous posts and I think that sometimes a brand can be so strong that when people hear it, they think of the actual product. And of course the company I will speak about today is my example: Jagermeister

JAGERMEISTER

History:

Jagermeister was introduced to the public in 1935. As you could probably guess by its name, it is was created in Germany. Curt Mast, the original distiller of Jägermeister and son of the founder Wilhelm, was an enthusiastic hunter. The literal translation of the name is “Hunting Master”, that is a title for a high-ranked official who is in charge of things related to hunting and gamekeeping. The term Jagermeister existed as a job title for many years. Due to the Nazzis coming to power in 1934 the job title “Jagermeister” was changed to “Reichsjagermeister” or “Imperial Gamekeeper”, one of the closest people to Hitler, Herman Goring was appointed as Imperial Gamekeeper. So one year later, the alcohol company used the moment and introduced their product called “Jagermeister”, the name was already familiar to Germans, sometimes people were calling it “Goring-Schnaps”.

Facts:

-          Jagermeister is a type of liqueur called Krauterlikor which means herbal liqueur.

-          The ingredients of the product include 56 herbs, fruits, roots, and spices.

-          There was a rumour that Jagermeister contains deer or elk blood.

-          The label contains a poem which says:

“It is the hunter’s honour that he
Protects and preserves his game,
Hunts sportsmanlike, honours the
Creator in His creatures.”

-         There are more alcoholic drinks similar to Jagermeister, but Jagermeister is sweeter tasting than all of them because of the mixture of fruits that it contains.

                                                                       What does Jagermeister do to make people buy the product?

The brand became more internationally famous trough the work of Sidney Frank, who was running an American alcohol import company. He used to promote the drink on the student market, as a drink which is made for parties, something very different in the years back then. New York magazine quoted a market research firm as describing Sidney Frank as a “promotional genius”  for making “a liqueur with such a difficult name, drunk by old German people as an after dinner digestive aid...synonymous with “party”. It is very funny but it worked somehow and now you can’t think of having a shot on a party without having a Jagermeister.

The adverts the company does, are not much different than other alcohol adverts, they all have many people having fun at a bar or somewhere else, but they always finish at the bar being happy having a shot of Jagermeister. One of their campaigns uses the slogan “Hunt or be Hunted” which relates to the deer logo they have. I noticed that all of their commercials happen in a different weather and season, which is clever because this shows that Jagermeister can be consumed at any time any day.

The brand has done many sponsorships, again they were aiming at sports and music. They sponsored a lot of motor racing teams, primarily BMW and Porsche.

The corporate orange is one of the more commonly recognised in motorsports. In 2008 edition of the magazine Autosport listed Jagermeisters orange as one of the twenty most iconic commercial colour schemes. Jagermeister is also associated with German football, the first team they sponsored was Eintracht Braunschweig in 1973, after that other teams quickly followed. At the moment Jagermeister displays its adverts at several football stadiums in Germany. That makes a lot of young people see it.

In the USA the brand was helped trough promotion by Sidney Frank and trough cooperation with heavy metal and rockbands such as Metallica, Motley Crue, Pantera, Slayer, The Bloodhound Gand etc. Jagermeister has been a sponsor in many musical festivals over the world, one of the biggest one is Rockstar Mayhem Festival. People love to drink on festivals, what a better way to promote your alcoholic brand.

Conclusion

In my opinion Jagermeister has done brlliantly to reach the popularity and revenue it has today. I think that the key part again was the promotion, of course the ingredients and the way the alcohol is made are important as well, but I think the promotion played the big role in making Jager as successful as it is. I want to thank you for reading my blog posts and to say goodbye, I might be back with another theme to write about in the future. Until then don’t drink and smoke too much and enjoy life.