Breezer aims to take crown
Bacardi Breezer aims to beat US lager Budweiser to become the best-distributed alcoholic drink in the UK.
Breezer is in 56 per cent of the 120,000 licensed venues in the UK. US lager Budweiser is in 69 per cent.But marketing manager Roger Harrison wants to top that.
He said: "We have to increase distribution and this has become a major part of our strategy."
The 120,000 premises include all UK pubs, restaurants and hotels. Key to the strategy is getting Breezer into style bars - a feat which can pose problems.
Harrison said: "It's impossible to get point-of-sale in venues these days but we have been getting the product into style bars in the last year."
He referred to the "solid silver fridges" which do not allow the customer to be treated to an obvious visual product display, unlike their glass-fronted relatives in pubs. "I would not want to change the silver fridges even if I could," added Harrison.
He and his team have had to come up with all sorts of creative new ways to get style bar customers to drink their product.
A link-up with My Wap World and 10 Soho bars allows mobile phone users to access Breezer tokens from the Internet.
The brand is also trying to balance out the gender split of its customer base. Harrison admitted at the moment that Breezer is drunk more by women than by men.
"But men are drinking things these days that they would not have been seen dead with five years ago," he said.
The aim is to get as many men drinking it as women - a rough 50-50 split between the sexes.
To achieve these ends, Breezer commercials have featured sophisticated humour in recent months. This is set to continue later this year.
Harrison said: "We want to inject more adult humour into the ads. This was what we started to do in "Tart" but we want to develop that. We want to make people think. People are more savvy these days. We also want to get across the Latin spirit idea."
