Marketing Excellence Awards Scotland 2009
Category: Design Excellence
Entered by
Matthew Turner, Global Controller – The Macallan,
The Edrington Group
Word count: 1999
50 word précis
For the first time one brand has created 1000 individual works of art. Last summer The Macallan invited Rankin to capture its Estate on film. Each bottle has a unique image plus the original Polaroid. The result, £600K media value in the UK, with coverage in art, fashion and news media.
Executive Summary (200 words)
The Macallan Masters of Photography Rankin Edition is the most audacious and exciting marketing idea in the history of alcoholic beverages. A world first, it represents the coming together of Mastery in two great art forms, whisky making and photography.
Our objective was to produce a piece of globally disruptive design that broadened our appeal to young and fashionable drinkers, generate over £1m of media coverage, build category thought leadership and reinforce our luxury positioning.
The solution was to produce a legacy marketing innovation. We invited fashion photographer, Rankin, to shoot 1000 individual Polaroid photographs during one summer at the Macallan estate. The spread of images covered artistic nude studies of the model Tuuli through to the distillery environs.
These photos appear on 1000 limited edition bottles of Macallan 30 years old Fine Oak. Each displays a bespoke label featuring one of the Rankin images, plus the original Polaroid. The launch was via a bespoke micro site (www.themastersofphotography.com), through exhibitions in London, Moscow and Athens in 2008. Coverage of this offering from The Macallan has featured in publications such as Vogue.com and Dazed and Confused Magazine generating a massive £600K of media coverage in the UK alone, versus a £500k target.
The Submission
Background
Every great luxury brand possesses a brand cachet that makes them unique. It is all about exclusivity, provenance, scarcity, craftsmanship and innovation.
Our marketing strategy is simple: to be the world’s most precious whisky brand. Everything we do as a brand aims to support this. It seems to be working as we have grown 40% faster than the market over the last five years, enjoying record profitability and are currently ranked No 2 single malt in the world by value.[1]
The Macallan has long been perceived as the finest single malt, recognised as an iconic brand within the single malt category. However, quality alone isn’t enough for us.
A luxury brand like Hermés is known for its highly sought after leather goods, hand crafted by artisans in France. Like Hermés, we focus on our unique provenance and craftsmanship. In our case, it’s all about the mastery involved in the creation of our whisky; from sourcing exceptional oak casks, to taking only the finest cut of new make spirit and delivering natural colour and flavour.
Our ‘X’ factor is our use of innovation to reinforce our luxury brand positioning, for example, we joined forces with Lalique, the French crystal makers, in 2005 to create a series of limited edition decanters containing rare Macallan single malt, retailing for approximately $12,000 each. Partnerships should enhance each other’s brand positioning so we take a very considered approach to any association. We only work with partners who genuinely share our values of quality, mastery and obsessive attention to detail.
It is increasingly difficult to stand out in the alcohol sector. Our main competitors have bigger marketing budgets at their disposal, so we have to think more creatively to come up with thought-provoking campaigns, many of which are industry firsts.
Developing a ‘legacy’ marketing idea
Most recently, that took our thinking to how we could come up with a ‘legacy’ marketing idea. We needed a thought provoking and highly PR-able concept that would enhance our cachet by being stylish and glamorous and allow us to generate fantastic publicity around the resulting new product.
The Macallan has a long and illustrious history of involvement with the art world having worked with Ralph Steadman to produce a previous limited edition bottling, decorating a limited number of 1926 vintage bottles with art by Peter Blake and Adami to produce labels for the limited edition 1926 bottle from our Fine & Rare collection.
Peter Blake Adami Ralph Steadman
Bearing this in mind we developed the Masters of Photography series and partnered with Rankin, world renowned for his iconic fashion photography to produce a limited edition bottling, the first in what will be a series of editions by world famous photographers with a new one produced every two years. It was essentially the coming together of two art forms – whisky making and photography. We know that 80% of Macallan whisky drinkers are also interested in art so it was an ideal project to appeal to our consumers.
Over 50% of single malt drinkers in the US are interested in the arts. This increases to almost 80% among Macallan drinkers. This is a significantly higher than the level of interest among the total population which is also the case for photography.
The idea behind the Masters of Photography bottling is to create a limited edition of collectable bottles of whisky. We challenged ourselves to be the first brand in any category to sell 1,000 unique objets d’arts.
Our objectives
• Build a position for us as category thought leaders
• Engage and recruit younger, more contemporary consumers by associating the brand with one of the world’s leading photographers – Rankin
• Position Fine Oak as stylish, contemporary and aspirational whilst building on The Macallan’s art heritage
• Reinforce the brands overall positioning as a luxury brand and drive collectability
• Follow our current PR strategy of one high impact PR initiative a year that can be executed across our global markets each year as the bedrock to our in-market activity
• Generate positive editorial coverage to the value of £1m in fashion, art, photography and style publications (£500k in the UK)
• Drive collectability
The outcome
For the first bottle in the series we felt it was appropriate to work with a fellow Scot and so we chose Rankin. He is very much the portrait photographer of the moment and has a fresh, contemporary, edgy appeal which we felt would be good match with our Fine Oak brand attributes.
Rankin chose to shoot on Polaroid film, mainly in black and white, as many of the worlds greatest photographers have used this medium and he wanted to emulate their work. As Polaroid was discontinued in 2008 he also wanted to use it to mark the end of an era.
We gave Rankin huge artistic freedom. He used the estate as his canvas, from the backdrop of a working distillery to the stunning flora and fauna. Many of the images he shot are enhanced by nude studies of his muse, and girlfriend, the model Tuuli. He wanted to contrast the beauty of the female form with the industrial nature of the whisky making process and its surroundings at the distillery. The ‘hero’ image featured on the bottle used in all our publicity shows Tuuli against the stills where The Macallan clear make spirit is produced – the very essence of what The Macallan stands for.
From the 6,000 images shot 1,000 were carefully selected to appear on 1,000 bespoke labels displayed on bottles of Macallan 30 Years Old Fine Oak. Each unique bottle comes in a black leather presentation box with the original Polaroid and a booklet of authenticity personally signed by Rankin.
We added a further layer of exclusivity by shooting some of the images in colour to create 189 exclusive bottles for Global Travel Retail, so that we could maximise the
buzz and excitement around the project within this opinion leading market.
The limited edition bottles retail at $1700 (£899 RRP) a premium of 100%, but one that we believe offers real value. If you consider the cost of an original Rankin photograph together with the cost of the 30 year old whisky we feel that it is an outstanding investment and a collector’s item.
The Photographer
The Macallan is the world renowned ‘Master of Spirit & Wood’ and to partner with another ‘Master’, fits perfectly with this positioning. Rankin, currently the highest profile Scottish photographer in the world, was invited to be the first auteur in the ‘Masters of Photography’ series.
John Rankin Waddell, was born in 1966 in Paisley, Scotland. The Times said, “It’s hard to overstate how hip Rankin became. One of the few people known widely by a single name – think Pele or Madonna- …whose commercial nous and slickly arresting work invites comparison with Damien Hirst”.
The Packaging
Carried in a leather bound presentation box with silver tooling, to represent an antique camera case, and embossed with the ‘Masters of Photography’ camera shutter logo, each bottle of The Macallan Fine Oak 30 years old single malt whisky displays a bespoke label featuring one of the Rankin images. The labeling is in black and silver livery, as homage to silver halide photography. This is accompanied inside by the original Polaroid, held in a transparent archival storage pouch and an authentification booklet personally signed by Rankin. Internal detailing continues the photography homage with black velvet cloth interior and photo mount corners.
The bottle design, logo and other collateral materials were developed with View Creative and SHOP advertising. Macallan’s in-house packaging team, based at The Edrington Group’s offices in Glasgow, developed the presentation pack and worked with a specialist label printing company, NSD, to ensure the bottle labels had the required picture quality to as closely resemble the original Polaroid as possible.
Each of the 1000 photos were scanned to produce digital files that were then formatted to allow the digital printing process to take place. Each individual label was digitally printed with a picture quality label to replicate the original Polaroid image and is a world first for an alcoholic beverage. This was an extremely innovative approach and to our knowledge the first time an alcoholic beverages company has used this process to produce bottle labels as it makes each bottle genuinely unique.
The label is finished in a bright silver foil and post laminated with a bright plastic finish to replicate the finish of the Polaroid and also protect the label.
Launch activity
The main focus of our activity to publicise the product to a worldwide audience has been to hold a series of launch events in our key markets. We developed collaterals to support the launch activity consisting of the following:
Photography
– Hero image
– Bottle and pack shots
– High resolution images of 30 polaroids for exclusive placement in target publications
– Portrait shots of Rankin
Press materials
– Press release, folder and Q&A’s
– Access to Rankin and Ken Grier (Director, The Macallan) as spokespeople
– Rankin booklet
Event materials
– Invitation design
– Banner artwork
– Goodie bags
– Images on canvases x 50 (1m x 1m in size)
– 5 glass framed collages
– B/w film of Rankin at work at EEH (4 mins long)
– Cocktail and themed canapé recipes
Digital
– Website www.themastersofphotography.com
– E-broadcast
UK Launch – 13 November 2008
In order to meet our objectives of engaging and recruiting younger, more contemporary consumers we hired a London based event and PR agency – Purple – to work with us on the London launch. We chose a gallery space in trendy Shoreditch in the east end of London as the venue. Working with Rankin’s team we chose 50 of the Polaroid images used on the labels and reproduced these as canvases (size) for display.
Five glass fronted montage boards showed further images and we projected a black and white ‘behind the scenes’ film onto one of the gallery’s walls.
We held a press preview at 6pm on the day of the launch event and set up a series of one to one interviews for Rankin and Ken Grier. Our invited guest list began to arrive from 7pm and both Rankin and Tuuli were present to host the launch party which featured the trendy DJ’s New York Pony Club. Approx. 350 people attended the event and enjoyed a range of themed cocktails featuring The Macallan Fine Oak 10 years old whisky and sampled the 30 years old single malt contained in the Masters of Photography bottle.
The exhibition was open to the public over the weekend of 14 – 16 November
Guests at the launch party included well know models, celebrities and members of the media, together with an eclectic mix of stylish and arty people, including Jasmine Guinness, Jaime Winstone and Sheena McDonald.
Media relations
Working with our retained PR agency, The Big Partnership, we issued a series of press releases in the run up to the event to seed stories in long lead publications and generate news coverage around the launch on the 13 November.
The resulting media coverage has been overwhelming positive and we have been featured in a wide mix of online and print publications allowing us to reach out to a new consumer audience, these include: