Cobra Bite aims lager squarely at the female market…
Cobra has been expanding its range over the last few years to include king and zero ranges and now they are making their second big push with their ‘bite’ range – a lager with real fruit juice aimed at the female market.
The relaunch of the range has included a new more design and a lot of marketing on music channels which try to improve brand awareness of the real fruit content. The adverts also clearly state the drink is perfect for a ‘girls night in’ as well as offering a prize of £1000 and a case of bottles.
With all the diet, zero and reduced alcohol ‘lunch time’ drinks ranges now established this is less of a gamble than their original launch in 2007. However, marketing the drink solely to women seems to be missing an opportunity to me – as the range includes ginger and lime variants which many men wouldn’t be embarrassed to drink, if the adverts weren’t clearly excluding them by stating it is a girls drink… It would have seemed prudent to advertise to all as a drink everyone can enjoy with female friendly but non gender specific advertising.
The slightly confusing thing is that the branding, although containing some pretty illustrative elements, is very non-gender biased. They have used a palette of colours which would be perceived as sophisticated and premium by both genders. Had they used more feminine imagery (perhaps a pattern and floral motif with the fruit used in the drink incorporated into the design) they would have made something which was more eye-catching to women on the shelf. This is not to say that the design is not appealing to women as it is – it just doesn’t look targeted at them specifically. The only aspect of the advert which seems targeted is the mention of a girls night in – a line which could easily be missed by those not paying full attention to the advert, but once established as such will make men unlikely to buy it.
The only drink that springs to mind which has successfully targeted and obtained a large solely female drinking base is Diet Coke (via their Diet Coke Break advertising). These adverts used sassy ‘real’ women in their adverts and a reversal of the usual sexy women to advertise male products approach with humour and satire. Most of the other recent attempts to entice female viewers to start drinking alcohol they wouldn’t usually consider have felt a little too desperate and obvious in their attempt to make drinks female friendly. This seems a strange approach when all inclusive adverts such as the Southern Comfort (although I will never call it ‘SO-CO’), Smirnoff triple filtered and Russian Standard vodka adverts work so well – as do the recent Barcardi series using 3D animated dancing figures. Perhaps with Cobra a more subtle approach mixed with a few virals and tasting sessions/giveaways at female or mixed gender locations might have allowed them to gain a female following (which would then spread by the strongest advertising tool ever, word of mouth) whilst not excluding the staple male audience for premium lager drinks.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWsWlheC5E8&hl=en&fs=1]
links:
Cobra website
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Strange this post is totaly unrelated to what I was searching google for, but it was listed on the first page. I guess your doing something right if Google likes you enough to put you on the first page of a non related search.