Analyses Bavaria

In a long-lasting Dutch tradition brewery’s have similar advertising campaigns during a football tournament. They give away free merchandise with quantities of beer. Free merchandise that symbolises how much they support the national team and enable the beer drinker to further show his individual support as well. An example of this is the Heineken Speaker Hat as shown below. Just like most merchandise in this category it is targeted at men.

In the summer of 2010, just before the World cup in South-Africa, brewery Bavaria launched their merchandise which was targeted at woman. The DutchDress was a clever little thing, because although men drink far more beer then woman do and are predominantly aimed at with beer advertising, woman are just as supportive when it is the national team that’s playing.

Although this was a success-story on its own, I want to discuss what happened during the game Netherlands versus Denmark, during this World cup. The video below shows what happened

Appearantly Bavaria had paid these girls to go the game and cheer for the national team in the dutchdress. Knowing that, photographers and cameramen have a habit for capturing the token “hot” girls in a crowd, this idea wasn’t half bad. Although I still like to think Bavaria planned all of it, I’m afraid no one could have predicted was about to happen next.

The reason these girls were arrested was the fact that the Fifa made a deal with a different brewery for all the advertising rights for the entire World cup. Although no brand name or logo was visible on the dresses they saw this “ambush marketingstunt” as an attack on that contract. whether this is the case or not is a debate for another time. The peculiar thing about this situation is that, by arresting the girls, the Fifa generated far more publicity for Bavaria then they would have gotten if they were allowed to sit out the game. Although Bavaria had to apologise for this incident, they did so with a smile knowing that they would do it again if they could.

Looking from a CMiD’s perspective this is a strange case but nonetheless interesting, because it shows there are still new ways of advertising of which some can be surprisingly effective. The whole thing wouldn’t have worked if they hadn’t had recognisable merchandise in the first place nor would it have been as effective if it had been legal. To continue we use the AIDA-model to analyze in detail.

Atract- Before and during the world cup Bavaria showed commercials on tv, in papers, on the internet and on billboards. In all of these advertisements, hot woman were shown wearing the dress. That showed that woman could look nice while cheering and seduced men into believing that their woman could look nice while they were drinking beer. Thereby luring the target group into buying their products.

Interest- The ads showed free merchandise that came with their beer. In Holland “free” is a word almost as strong as the color orange itself. It was all about letting everyone know which beer to buy to get the best free merchandise to wear during the World cup. The theory was that, while men have a choice in their selection in free orange merchandise, woman would all “buy” this dress, because the choice for womans merchandise is limited. If this was a success there is a potential 8 million people demographic.

Desire- When the World cup was underway, Bavaria dressed up pretty girls and gave them free tickets. Their intention was probably to create more desire among woman to want to wear the dress and thus sell more beer. However, as said before this did not go according to plan. After the arrest there would have been hardly any woman with a desire to swap places with the girls.

Act- You could say that the act-part of the marketing scheme was just off the original target, as local authorities were the ones that took the most action. However, in doing so Bavaria’s name and logo’s were all over the news and as the saying goes;

“there is no such thing as bad press”

Most of the people who heard the story sympathised with the girls and weren’t negatively aligned towards Bavaria. It is save to say the whole affair boosted brand awareness and the image of the brand. Which probably means sales went up.

This System Map represents the way this works. The arrows represent a stimulant for purchase, while straight lines mean there’s a relation present. Because one target group is a stimulant to the other an exponential growth will appear.

Partly because of this campaign Bavaria won a marketing prize given out by the business itself as can be read in this article. http://www.bavaria.nl/#pers (In Dutch). Unlike any other merchandise oriented campaign breweries are able to make the public into walking ads for a while.

“Oeteldress” the successor was released February 2011 to promote the brand during the carnival festivities, which are accompanied with lots of beer aswell.

Conclusion

The Bavaria Dutchdress campaign was tremendously succesful. Whether one suspects them of instigating the incident or not it showed that live stunts could be very valuable. Using the cultural context of the world cup Bavaria is able to address a few core emotions of their target group. When people saw these girls the immediately started filming them and within a few days hundreds of video’s were posted on YouTube, starting a viral campaign in which Bavaria had nothing more to do then lean back as the work was done for them.