The beauty of PR events aimed at launching a new product have been discussed in previous weeks. However, what do you do when you have a new product to launch, but also, a completely new category to launch it into? Well, this is exactly what happened last month for the launch of Tribe Breweries new non-alcoholic beverage range: Wilde.
An innovator in the craft-beverage scene, Wilde is one of Australia’s leading better-for-you brands, having recently launched Gluten Free, FODMAP friendly beers. However, during COVID and the rise of non-alcoholic beverages, Wilde extended its portfolio to create a new sparkling hop water, and Australia’s first isotonic beer.
While sports and electrolyte beers have been rising in popularity in recent years, Wilde Isotonic was Australia’s first fully isotonic beer, made in conjunction with scientists to ensure it could fully replenish your body with essential fluids and vitamins it may lose through exercise…pretty cool right? Well, whilst cool in theory, launching a new product like Wilde Isotonic also comes with the challenging task of educating consumers around a new type of product and what benefit it serves them in their routine.
Unlike some of our other alcoholic beverage events, as a PR Agency we were tasked with educating consumers about the wider category and ensuring that key messages were strong through all points of the launch. Here’s how we pulled it off:
- INVITING THE RIGHT MEDIA
While many PR agencies might simply have a standard invite list for launch events, for these new Wilde products, it required a specific audience – particularly one that was interested in the non-alcoholic drinks’ movement and health in general. From the get-go, we tailored our invite list to focus on beer reviewers/writers, alongside wider categories such as men’s interest, sport and health & wellness. Ensuring we had the right types of media at our launch event was essential to ensure our information would reach the intended audiences when reviews were written at a later date.
- MEDIA-TRAINED OUR TEAM
When it comes to launching a brand-new category, getting your messaging right is essential. For this, Agent99 met with the Wilde team to ensure they were well media-trained and had the right key messages to communicate with the audience on the night. This meant producing unique taglines for the products, easy ways to discuss the production process, and educating our audience on what the new offering was. We would run several walk-throughs before the night and listen to the team as they presented, providing feedback constantly to ensure we could nail it on the day.
- DEVELOPED SUPPORTING ASSETS
At PR events, it’s important not to overwhelm your guests with too many activities or assets that will ultimately lead to confusion and them not fully understanding your product. While there can be a temptation to hand out lots of flyers, have big banners and posters on display, remember that this is not a sales conference…it’s a media event. We ensured that our assets were simple and strengthened the evening (not detracted from it). For this, we developed a simple well-designed tasting note guide which detailed each of the products’ unique flavour profile and unique characteristics. These were easy to access and understand for all attendees, without overwhelming them.
- LET THE PRODUCTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES
As a PR agency, you know you’ve hit the media jackpot when you’ve got a product that speaks for itself – i.e. one so good that you just need someone to taste it and they’ll understand just how amazing it is. We were lucky to have this for the Wilde launch. Both the new Isotonic and Guru products were delicious on the palate and didn’t taste like many other beverages currently available on the market. Getting liquid on lips was essential to our PR strategy’s success and ensured that attendees could fully understand the complexities of the product.
- BE SO GOOD THEY CAN’T IGNORE YOU
A lot of brands will finish a PR event and think they’ve done enough to cement their position in attendees’ minds. And while this is a hopeful outlook, post COVID-19, journalists are being invited to upward of 15+ events per week, so you need to ensure that you stay on the heart, minds (and lips) of your attendees. A great way we continued conversations post the Wilde event was through media gift packs and the offer to supply free cases of the products for their teams and future events. This was a great way as a PR agency that we could go above and beyond with the brand to ensure journalists remembered who we were and easily get the products out for further sampling in their wider networks.
Ultimately, our tactics paid off, with over 45+ attendees on the launch night including journalists from Daily Mail, 9 News and Australian Women’s Weekly. As a result, we had over 15 pieces of media coverage live within one week of the event, and incredible feedback from attendees about the quality of the products and the excitement about the new category. We were also able to secure sampling in key groups where our intended audience were located including sporting groups and yoga classes.
While no two events have to look the same, tailored PR event strategies are critical to success. It’s not always a one-size-fits-all, particularly when the category is brand new.
If you’d to find out more about Agent99’s PR event services, please get in touch with the team today: https://agent99pr.com/contact/
Agent Em
