Legend Extra Stout has impressively evolved. Once upon a time, it
tried to be the uber trendy option, the one for the adventurous youth with
extreme attitude. You may recall the print advertisement and TV commercials of
those days— starring guys in leather and girls with obvious piercings and heavy
jewellery. Gone are those days. Today, Legend is still positioning itself as
the trendy option, only that this time, it is more in tune with the Nigerian
reality.
The evidence of the brand’s new state of
play is in the series of consumer activation concerts which it is organising around
the country. Legend’s new campaign is running on four legs: a new set of
advertisement spots, the Real Deal Experience concerts, and the Taste and Tell
blind taste test, and a consumer promo.
Although advertising campaigns, concerts,
and blind tasting are not exactly a reinvention of the marketing wheel,
Legend’s tone of voice reflects an updated marketing direction. The concerts,
garnished with a Rotating Bar and games, go to cities with headliners that are most
preferred in those cities. And when they reach those cities, they go to the
places where a certain kind of grit, street cred, and raw Nigerian-ness can be
found. For instance, the Lagos concert held in Okokomaiko, not the spot you’ll
choose if you were staging a run-of-the-mill, me-too brand concert.
So far, there have been four stops on the
tour. Starting from Lagos, the train has gone through Onitsha, Port Harcourt
and Ibadan. While the Lagos concert featured Oritsefemi on April 3, Onitsha
hosted Kcee on April 24, Port Harcourt had Timaya on May 8, and 9ice was in
Ibadan on May 20.
Just before the Port Harcourt show, Legend Brand
manager, Oluseun Lawal said his team was "happy with the mileage the Real
Deal Experience has gained.”
The company is yet to announce more venues,
for the series will not end till December 2016, but it appears they are getting
their money’s worth from the project.
The concert series, for example, works as
an expedient companion piece to the new TV/Web videos, which show young men in everyday
situations that can turn hairy very fast.
In one of the ads, an inexperienced husband
is on the phone, complaining about his wife’s cooking. Then the wife walks in
and hears everything. The advert ends with a poser: “What would you do?” and
then offers three possible escape buttons. If you click the right one, you’re
rewarded with a bold screen text: “Legendary”.
Other TV commercials in the campaign tell similar
stories that resonate with today’s youth population— the ‘razz’-is-the-new-cool
generation, the generation that balances its exposure to global affairs with
self deprecating humour and a keen awareness of its complex local condition.
That’s the one whose language Legend is now speaking. The brand wants them to
believe that it is the real deal, and to prove that, Legend, as they say, is also
trying to “keep it real”.
Part of keeping it real is being able to flaunt
its genuine stout credentials. Legend is absolutely confident of its
exceptional quality that it is risking a blind taste test as part of its
ongoing marketing campaign.
Luckily for them, most of the time,
according to Legend brand managers, consumers who try the blind taste tests
choose Legend as the best tasting stout.
This is good news for Nigerian Breweries,
because, finally, Legend may be living up to that strapline it has carried for more
than 10 years – “the real deal”.
It took them a long time to get here,
though. Since 2007 when the Legend bottle was first redesigned, they have kept
iterating the design and look and feel, until the wide-shouldered bottle was
created in 2009. They later added the gold foil to the neck and further tweaked
the label to increase the size of the nameplate and give a little less
prominence to the torch. Once that was done, Legend started to clearly
distinguish itself from the competition, especially Guinness Foreign Extra
Stout.
Now, all that effort may be paying off.
Legend has not only created a distinctive visual identity, it is also gradually
building a reputation as a brand with an authentic and believable voice. Vindah
and his team see a testimony of the brand’s success in the way the target
market is reacting to their experiential activities everywhere they go.
"With this
stop in Port Harcourt, the Real Deal Experience has picked up its pace,” Vindah
said. “We are so happy with the results and the positive feedback we have had
on the Legend brand and the Real Deal Experience as a whole."
You might have seen this kind of
transformation before, with Pepsi. From the shadows of Coca-Cola, Pepsi emerged
as the edgy, adventurous, and fun cola brand. It now speaks with a voice that
is uniquely its own and you see proof of that in the “PepsiMojis” campaign, for
example. Yes, Coca-Cola did the emoticon thing first, but Pepsi’s emojis come
off as more audacious, literally bolder – they even created a contextual tie-in
with the popular soap opera Empire. Putting
its money where its mouth is, Pepsi paid a ton of cash for five-second
pod-puncher slots that ran during the TV programme.
As it was for Pepsi, it appears, so it is
now for Legend. With a little location and casting twist in the ongoing Real
Deal Experience concerts, Legend is pushing its message as the real McCoy to
the front door of an audience with whom it has longed to have a relationship
for so long.
Inside Nigerian Breweries, makers of
Legend, the marketing executives confirm that this enhanced approach is perfect
for having a meaningful interaction with their ideal consumers.
"The Real Deal Experience is
about making people appreciate realness and authenticity. Bringing fans face to
face with one of their favourite music superstars is a very engaging way of
putting across this message," said Legend Brand Manager, Oluseun Lawal.
The Legendary ads will keep running, the brand handlers say. They will
run alongside the blind taste tests and the Real Deal Experience experiential
concerts. What is most important for Legend and everyone with whom it now
interacts, however, is that it must retain this particular voice in an
increasingly noisy market. So far, this is the voice that is getting more
people to pay attention— the kind of attention that Legend can take to the
bank.
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