Tasting events are a typical component of the marketing strategy for spirits brands when launching a product. With the advent of social media, typical tastings in recent years have become elaborate affairs, with the focus on creating share-worthy experiences as much as on tasting the spirit itself. So you could say the Macallan is going back to the basics for the launch of its newest spirit, Edition No. 1. Rather than creating splashy tasting events in key markets, the brand opted for a virtual tasting conducted as a Twitter chat. It’s part of a strategy to market the new product to millennials.
“This is a very approachable price point collectible. So we are speaking to the millennials, the consumers we are recruiting, in a medium they are already consuming to bring the knowledge and story of Edition No. 1 to life. It’s just the way our world is and the way our target consumers are communicating nowadays. It’s very much through social channels,” says Samantha Leotta, the Macallan’s brand manager.
Macallan national brand ambassador Craig Bridger and Adam Goldberg of the blog A Life Worth Eating hosted the tasting on Friday, sharing facts about the product and soliciting input from participants. Some of those participants were influencers who received a sample-size bottle of the spirit with instructions on how to set up their tasting area and post comments with the hashtag #MacallanCreates. Leotta says while a virtual event such as this lacks the personal interaction of a traditional tasting, it provides greater social amplification. To date, the brand estimates the 30-minute Twitter chat garnered more than 10 million impressions.
“We see a demand for whiskey knowledge across the demographic that we’re targeting, but they want to learn in a way that’s very digestible. They’re not going to read a long blog post about our history and what makes the Macallan unique, but they will engage very positively with the information we share on our social media channels,” Leotta says.
In addition to the Twitter tasting, the brand created an Instagram campaign for Edition No. 1. Eight wooden casks are used to flavor the spirit, so the brand created eight separate Instagram accounts named for each cask to highlight its unique characteristics, using images and text to describe the sourcing, aging, and bottling process.
“We love Instagram because it’s a very visual medium, and the Macallan is such a visual brand,” Leotta says. “We’ve received tremendous engagement from our consumers. In the last three months we went from 15,000 followers on Instagram to almost 29,000 now."
The Macallan first hosted a virtual tasting last year for the launch of its Rare Cask product. Leotta says the brand’s Twitter followers doubled in the three months after that event and it marked a significant increase in traffic on other social channels and website.
