When consumers think of Baileys, one thing comes to mind: the holidays. Baileys is the kind of liquor that consumers purchase in the weeks leading up to Christmas and pull out at gatherings in the winter months.
Slowly but surely, the brand’s parent company, Diageo Canada, has been working to get its customers to see Baileys in a different light. The holidays are still the brand’s bread and butter – last fiscal year, 53% of the liqueur’s sales happened in November and December – but Diageo Canada is also earmarking marketing dollars for new sales periods, like spring, to showcase the product in a new way in the hopes of driving non-holiday sales.
The big challenge for Baileys, according to Geoff Kosar, marketing director at Diageo Canada, is the purchase cycle. The brand is well-known, but its purchase cycle is close to a year, meaning many customers buy the bottle just once, usually during the holidays, then not again until the following winter.
“Baileys is so well entrenched within the Canadian market. It’s got top of mind awareness, high household penetration – something like 35% – but one of the barriers we’re continually challenged with is that people don’t know what to do with it.”
For Kosar, shifting the perception of Baileys as solely a holiday brand and showing it in new lights has been a monumental task. “Outside of the holiday season [when] it has such high usage and consumption, people don’t really know what to do with it outside of pouring it in their coffee and drinking it over ice. That’s one of the biggest barriers we face as a brand team.”
That’s why about six years ago, the brand started advertising a new use-case for Baileys: ice cream. Using short “food porn” ads, it showed the liqueur being poured onto a bowl of ice cream. Seeing new sales spikes, the brand has kept with the strategy, gaining a 1.4% sales bump in May and June after it ran an ice cream campaign last year. The campaign made waves internationally too, and has been picked up in other markets, including Taiwan. In the U.S., the brand has also created how-to videos for creating new, less wintery cocktails and desserts like creme brule.
On April 6, the company launched this year’s ice cream campaign with a spot from TraffikGroup. The spot is dead simple: it shows a woman setting out ice cream dishes for a movie night with a friend, then offers the suggested mix – one scoop of ice cream and 1.5oz of Baileys. The final touch: a few berries.
The campaign is running through May, with additional social media creative, OOH, digital ads and point-of-sale merchandising. The brand has also partnered with a national casual dining restaurant chain, which is including a Baileys dessert on its menu cards to encourage more trials. In store, its pairing bottles of Baileys with ice cream bowls as a gift with purchase.
The brand has also been pushing Baileys as a go-to for frozen cocktails with its “Shiver” program. Last year, the brand’s Shiver campaign helped its sales grow 5.6% in the summer months. For Baileys, the more use-cases, the better, Kosar said. Any time the brand can convince a customer to pull a bottle of Baileys out from the liquor cabinet, it shortens the purchase cycle and encourages sales in the non-holiday months.
That was the thinking that led to three flavours moving into rotation in Canada last year – vanilla cinnamon, salted caramel and chocolate cherry. With the brand’s expansion in mind, Kosar said Diageo Canada chose flavours that mix well, appeal to its female 29-34 demographic and can be used outside of the holiday context.
As the company moves forward with its plans to expand the brand, Kosar said it’s constantly looking for and testing new use cases and has several more in the works, including egg nog, new cocktails and other desserts.
