• Premium cider brand Magners wants to secure customers and distribution across the UK
• It uses premium TV spots to educate trade and public about the brand and back up its sales team
• The brand has rolled out nationally and is now the number one selling packaged long alcoholic drink in GB (source: AC Nielsen)

The challenge
Cider was a tough market for Magners to enter.
It not only had to battle with negative connotations surrounding the category but also a dominant player in the shape of Strongbow.
The marketing therefore aimed to create a new category, premium cider, and it had to make it attractive enough to persuade not just traditional drinkers to swap brands but for lager, beer and stout regulars to also convert.
A key aim was to position Magners as a drink for the whole year and get away from the traditional summer spike in demand.

The TV solution
TV was the backbone of the strategy for a number of reasons. Firstly for creative reasons it would allow the brand to demonstrate the proper way to drink Magners; by decanting a pint bottle into a pint glass half filled with ice.
Secondly for strategic reasons, TV would give the brand gravitas and scale helping to drive scale as well as reassure the trade customers.
TV advertising would be used as a key element in trade sales allowing sales teams to reference key spots in premium programming as evidence of the support behind the brand.
Thirdly appearing on TV enabled Magners to reinforce its premium credentials with consumers. By hand-crafting a schedule that included fewer but bigger and better spots in key male environments such as sport as well classic upmarket programmes such as quality drama, film and documentary.
TV also gave Magners flexibility allowing the brand to get its message across region by region until national distribution enabled it to become a network advertiser. The brand launched in Scotland in 2003 and moved to London in Spring 2005 and built distribution to become fully national by Spring 2006.
To encourage all-year drinking four seasonal bursts were used to keep Magners top of mind.
Other media activity included outdoor both small ads in on-trade environments to drive choice as well as key large format sites to reinforce the premium position and let drinkers know that Magners had arrived.
Premium press advertising combined with radio as an additional call to action completed the schedule.

Results
Magners has been a huge success and has rejuventated the cider category with sales up 10% year on year. Beer sales are down 1% year on year over the same period. AC Nielsen attributes this turnaround to the Magners effect.
Magners is now the number one selling packaged LAD (Long alcoholic drink) in the on-trade, selling more bottles than Becks, Budweiser and Stella Artois.
In the two most established markets Scotland and London, Magners is a top 10 "beer", a remarkable achievement as competitors sell mainly on draught.
Econometric modelling by Media Planning Group in the more established markets suggests that TV advertising has delivered a return on investment of £26 for every £1 spent on media, a remarkable achievement for an FMCG brand.