Absolut: getting people talking about vodka again
The vice-president of marketing for Absolut Vodka explains how the brand is solving the category’s biggest challenge.
“Not enough vodkas do a good enough job of injecting personality and aspiration down the category, and it ends up becoming very nascent,” Craig van Niekerk, global vice-president of marketing for Absolut, Malibu & Kahlúa, tells The Spirits Business.
The Pernod Ricard-owned vodka brand started the year off hot – quite literally – with the release of Absolut Tabasco.
Van Niekerk calls the product Absolut’s “big bet for the next three years”, noting the contracted three-year partnership with the hot sauce producer and the brand’s wider intent to make the category “collectively exciting and to get people to talk about it”.
“That’s the challenge I guess we all face cumulatively,” he says of vodka.
For the time being, Absolut will be “extracting the maximum potential” out of the Tabasco deal, with follow-up launches such as a ready-to-drink (RTD) product already in the pipeline.
There’s also a lot of runway with Absolut Tabasco, van Niekerk observes: “We look at what consumers are doing with the product online and you can see how much they want to play with it from a curiosity point of view. The Bloody Mary is intuitive, but when you start to mix in lemonades and all sorts of things, you have a lot of space to play as a consumer.”
The brand has three focus areas for the years ahead, or “major buckets of initiatives,” as van Niekerk calls it, citing the brand’s “limited editions, innovations, and festivals.”
Tabasco falls under the innovation bucket, and while the partnership is top priority for the next few years, van Niekerk shares what’s to come after in terms of innovation.
Flavours: specific drinks and specific occasions
“We’re exploring a lot of the savoury territories, and I think that’s a big shift as well – moving away from fruity flavours to more savoury,” he says.
The challenge for the brand in this space is how it approaches it as Absolut. Van Niekerk explains: “It’s about finding the balance between flavours that are familiar, but then seeing how you can inject an imaginative twist into it.”
He highlights Tabasco as a good example. “It hits the sweet spot where flavour needs to be interesting enough that a premium cocktail bar would want to stock it, and it also needs to be familiar and intuitive enough that a consumer would buy it and know what drink to make it with at home.”
Van Niekerk cites savoury flavours like truffle as an interesting prospect on paper, but whether it can work in vodka, he isn’t so sure. “You can say truffles are popular and premium, so maybe it drives up some aspiration codes and all the rest of it. But what do you do with truffle vodka? What cocktail comes to mind for truffle vodka? You end up in a very niche space.”
Ultimately, Absolut’s strategy takes a number of aspects into consideration. “We have to look within certain demand spaces, and then we want to understand the consumer’s natural behaviour, their intentionality. What are they drinking on that occasion, and what cocktail then is simple, intuitive and has scale,” van Niekerk says.
“We look at the flavour portfolio and say: ‘Okay, so do we have the right flavours to go after a specific drink in a specific occasion that’s connected to the mood of that occasion, whether that’s thrill or chill?’
“That’s how we’re looking at the flavour portfolio on our side,” he continues. “Some things will be three-year big bets that you go after with Tabasco for an earlier daytime social occasion, and [Absolut] Citron is in that space as well. Some of the flavours then play a much shorter-term role, like when the Pornstar Martini was having a big bang, and so Absolut Passion Fruit was released.
“We’re trying to figure out what the staying power is of four core flavours that will go after very specific drinks to maximise the scale from that point of view. And then when can you do quick lifts and implementations on things like the flavours range?”
Artist Editions and festivals
For Absolut’s other focus areas, the brand will announce a new Artist Edition partner this year.
The Swedish brand has previously collaborated with The Keith Haring Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation on these releases, which engage with pop culture icons and celebrate the brand’s cultural ties with the arts.
“The next two partners are already locked up and are going to be quite exciting,” van Niekerk says. “We’ll be moving from legacy artists to living artists, so there’s a bit of a pivot in this space.
“Our artist additions are a way for us to scale commercial opportunities, and they generate a significant amount of business. They also help drive brand closeness and relevancy for consumers.”
The ‘third bucket’ van Niekerk mentions is festivals, where the brand works with some of the world’s biggest in Tomorrowland and Coachella.
For instance, at this year’s Coachella, where it served as the festival’s official vodka, the brand debuted the Absolut Heat Haus, an immersive on-site experience that highlighted spicy cocktails for the Tabasco variant in Absolut Spicy Lemonade and Absolut Pina Picante Vodkarita, while also presenting photo opportunities through its visual appearance.
Absolut also had a ‘grab and go’ concession stand on the festival’s grounds called The Cooler Club, which offered the latest launch in its ready-to-drink line with Ocean Spray: Refreshers. “For every heatwave, there’s a perfect cool-down,” the brand said of the activation.
Of festivals, van Niekerk says of their importance: “That’s about a shift in the release occasion and it’s a great opportunity from a ready-to-drink point of view for sampling, getting liquid on lips and getting new consumers into the franchise.
“I still believe a lot in vodka, and the responsibility my team and I have is to at least make Absolut stand out in the category.”
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