Brand transformation
In 2020 Asahi Super Dry came to us with a clear ambition: to be the world number 1 in Premium Beer by 2030.
The challenge was to develop a positioning, rooted firmly in the product and the taste experience which would work hard against our target audience of Enrichment Seekers: curious people who ask questions and don’t just accept the status quo.
Our positioning also had to capture the provenance of the brand and an aspect of Japan which the rest of the world would understand and see as ‘true’ and motivating. And we needed a campaign that could work across a range of different markets where the brand is at different levels of maturity and awareness, developing work that could work as well in the UK and the US as it did in China, South Korea and Japan.
To do this meant we would need to transform the brand on number of levels:
1. Moving it from a locally activated, non-centralised structure (markets largely doing whatever they felt was right for the brand in their market) into something strategically unified and consistent across more than thirty markets worldwide.
2. Taking it from a beer with relatively low awareness, enjoyed infrequently and associated almost completely with Asian food, to a premium beer to be enjoyed in a broader range of occasions
3. And shifting the beer from a functional taste message to a brand with a genuine emotional connection.
Cultural curiosity
We undertook quantitative and qualitative work in our key markets to understand our ‘enrichment seeker’ audience, their attitudes to beer, their perceptions of Asahi and their understanding of Japan and Japanese culture. The result was a positioning born of the ‘Joy of Discovery’; a mindset driven by the curiosity we saw in our target audience and one that led to the unique taste of the beer at the point of inception. And of course, Japan is known to be a veritable font of exciting, unknown and therefore fascinating cultural ideas and innovations, just waiting to be discovered.
Going global
We developed a Big Organising Idea, brought together with the endline ‘Discovery is Calling’ and a consistent brand world, look and feel and personality we call ‘The Living Night’ - a world which brought to life the excitement, intrigue and adventure of Tokyo after dark. Our 360 global tool kit covered over two hundred assets, spanning AV, print, social content, experiential, point of sale and influencer, with bespoke versions for Asia and a suite of creative work that could be implemented through the line in the form of a Playbook. We have recently gone live in the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Hungary, France, Spain, Hong Kong and Taiwan in what is the brand’s first ever global campaign.
