Absolut fortune: One liquor’s success story
Published on 02/12/2001 under Branding
It’s a pleasure recommending an advertising insider’s book that’s well-written, full of delightful anecdotes and packed with relevant messages for marketing communicators of all disciplines.
The book I’m talking about is ABSOLUT: Biography of a Bottle by Carl Hamilton, and even though it was published in the United Kingdom, you can find it from online sources and in leading U.S. bookstores.
Hamilton tells the story of Absolut Vodka’s U.S. introduction and its 20 years of unexpected and unsurpassed success. It’s a great story with many twists and turns, although you could argue the author takes a few unnecessary detours here and there.
But I couldn’t put it down. I think this book should be considered required reading for marketing practitioners, because it contains so many different flavors of marketing wisdom. For example, it clearly emphasizes the importance of a good product name and demonstrates the meandering path we often take in selecting one. In the case of Absolut, they seriously considered some truly wild names, like “Damn Swede” (playing on a Viking heritage) and “Royal Black” with black bottles and black currant flavoring.
Hamilton’s book also shows the value of product positioning. Smirnoff was solidly established as the category leader; no imported vodka had ever achieved any significant sales faced with this dominance. The Swedes decided to position their product as “the Chivas Regal of vodkas,” providing a premium-priced product strategy that guided decisionmaking for all other promotional activities.
One of the most compelling lessons is the necessity to fight for something you believe in, even though everyone else is determined to shoot it down. Gunnar Broman, the Swedish ad man who represented the Swedish Liquor Board, campaigned tirelessly for the unusual, “ugly” bottle. Virtually everyone else tried to kill it or change it. It was “too invisible,” “too chubby,” “too short,” “too much like a blood plasma bottle” and, most insultingly, “too much like a receptacle for urine samples.” The lengthy debate over whether it should have a label is laughable knowing now how incredibly popular the label-less clear bottle has turned out to be. It generated some serious heartburn at the time, however.
The most obvious lesson is the value of great advertising, and Absolut Vodka has
benefited from some of the most consistently brilliant advertising this industry has ever produced. But it might not have been that way at all; some of the early campaigns presented were downright weird. One proposed approach from N.W. Ayer took dead aim at the dominant Russian (and psuedo-Russian) vodkas with headlines like, “Russia Makes Better Tanks” and “While the rest of the world was making absolute war, we were making Absolut Vodka.”
Luckily, creative teams at TWBA ultimately took over and have nurtured the famous two-word approach using plays on the product name that never seem to grow old. From “Absolut Warhol” to “Absolut Manhattan” (a Central Park aerial view) to “Absolut Style” (a 10-page insert in Elle) the campaign has sparkled with creativity that somehow stays fresh, year after year. There was even one ad with the famous bottle missing (“Absolut Larceny”).
Since its beginning two decades ago, the company has commissioned Absolut paintings, quilts, weather vanes, sculptures, chairs, even a corn field in Kansas, all reinforcing the Absolut bottle’s distinctive shape.
If there ever was a case study that demonstrates the value of a highly creative program consistently administered for an extended period of time, this is it. Absolut has taken a colorless, tasteless, odorless liquid and made it the object of our desire. They took on entrenched competition with no budget, no history—they didn’t even have the right lineage—and they won big.
But it almost never happened because no U.S. distributor wanted to take a chance on a Swedish vodka. Delegations from the Swedish Liquor Board made numerous trips to all the major players and were turned down repeatedly, even derisively.
Finally a minor distributor, Carillon Importers, decided to take the product on. But even this introduces yet another ironic twist: Up until the Carillon decision, Swedish ad agency Carlsson & Broman had been working with N.W. Ayer in New York to develop the introductory campaign. Unfortunately for them, Carillon insisted on using their own agency, Martin Landey, Arlow. In short order, Broman and Ayer were out of the picture.
Many of the interesting anecdotes have to do with the unpleasant gamesmanship that goes on in the egocentric world of advertising: the putdowns, the maneuvering, the well-timed comments that stop ideas in their tracks. This is really a nasty business when you think about it. But as long as it’s happening to someone else, we can laugh and move on—or at least learn from their misfortunes.
Many business-to-business marketers might wonder why I’m making such a big deal out of a book about vodka advertising; after all, it’s consumer advertising. It’s not like us; we do serious ads filled with product features and benefits directed to technical audiences of engineers, scientists, plant managers, and so forth. We refuse to acknowledge the advertising’s influence on any decision we’ve made lately, choosing instead to believe that customers gather all the competitive data, weigh the pros and cons of each product alternative and make rational, logical decisions based solely on facts.
Yeah, right. Out of the other side of our mouth, we bemoan the fact that product
differences are harder and harder to define and that it really is becoming a commodity marketplace.
The next time you hear somebody say something like that, remember these three words: colorless, tasteless and odorless. I’ve written in the past about creating preference for a brick (see “Brick brand’s mighty—yours can be, too,” Nov. 22, 1999). Now, I’m telling you about creating preference for a colorless, tasteless, odorless liquid.
Certainly your product or service has more going for it than that. Isn’t it time you gave this differentiation thing a fresh look? Absolut-ly.