CAMERON WILLIAMSON - The Dominion Post | Monday, 31 December 2007
As an export story, it's almost unprecedented, except for the dispatch of coals to Newcastle.
But Londoners are now drinking pints of New Zealand gold medal ale off the taps at a Speight's Alehouse beside the River Thames.
Speight's has achieved the unlikely equivalent of selling ice to the Eskimos by serving draught beer to the English, and cannily employed fiercely loyal expatriate Kiwis to do it.
The sight of a weatherboard Speight's Alehouse sitting beside the Thames at Canary Wharf recently was the opening move in a campaign to export Speight's to Europe. And the way it has been achieved is novel: sending a fully built alehouse on a coastal trader, all the way from Speight's home town, Dunedin.
The Great Speight's Beer Delivery is a story of persistence, determination, stoushes and triumph over adversity - and that's before you hear about the reality-TV style trip that four mates have undertaken to deliver an alehouse to London for a homesick Kiwi.
Of course, the goal of selling beer to the Brits has been wrapped in a story that demonstrates what the brand is all about.
"This is about good mates showing the loyalty, honesty and staunch determination to help out a friend in need," Speight's brand manager, Stu McIntosh, says.
It stemmed from a fairly innocent e-mail from former Dannevirke farmer Tim Ellingham, who was hankering for a cold Speight's after a gruelling day fighting London's dirty, boring grind.
He found himself a bit homesick for the brew, and the crew, he had left behind.
"After dragging myself through the Tube and sitting bored at work, nothing would be more welcome than a cold Speight's at the end of the day," he wrote to the beer makers. But rather than send off a couple of dozen cans to cheer the poor bloke up, Speight's response was to find Tim's best mate, Wellingtonian James Livingstone, and suggest that he and some mates do the honourable thing and deliver the beer in person to London. And not just a couple of slabs, they said: a true mate would do the generous thing and send a whole pub.
The project got serious discussion at Lion, agency Publicis Mojo got involved, and the Great Beer Delivery snowballed into a reality-show behemoth.
Mates were recruited from keen young applicants in a national interviewing drive and from 2009 applicants, 1000 were interviewed, a shortlist of 50 was drawn up and a team of four was selected to accompany James.
They were Mark Wilson, a mouthy Southlander, Taranaki teacher Tim Cleaver, newly married Dunedin IRD manager James Munro, "Big Unit" Lindsay Gilbert. When he became homesick and returned from the Bahamas, Steve Nichol, a farmer from Clark's Junction, Central Otago, replaced him.
Cameramen tracked every activity, every tear and tiff, producing short episodes as the crew sailed across the world, an interactive website built a community of supporters to follow the 25,000km journey, and a suitable ship - the 1000-ton MV Lida - was engaged.
Expats cruising the Internet in London became involved and told their mates, and the campaign became one of the most engaging, viral, friend-get-friend marketing initiatives to hit the Internet waves.
With the arrival in London in October, the journey was complete, and was celebrated with endless "awesome" toasts charged by the 5000 litres of Speight's that accompanied the ship. Then the task of establishing the beer in a permanent alehouse in central London became the focus.
A team of executives from Speight's owner, Lion Nathan, and their planning agents, led by corporate affairs director Liz Reid, entered the equivalent of the lion's den - trying to establish an alehouse in the City of Westminster, an area controlled by a council with the reputation of being conservative and prescriptive, and full of centuries-old pubs (about 2000).
The rather more humble yellow weatherboard two-door pub - with white-framed windows, welcoming wooden bar and shiny copper taps - was trucked from Canary Wharf to the top of an existing Walkabout bar at Temple tube station. It has a six-month remit to seed the ground while a permanent site is developed nearby, probably in the shell of an established pub.
The two-container, blue-and-yellow temporary pub is the 15th alehouse in the concept-bar chain that includes the Shepherd's Arms in Wellington's Tinakori Rd.
But this one is a bit different. It was built, by Speight's preferred team, the Three Bald Men, in two interlocking 12m steel containers. It has been unloaded and reloaded a dozen times during the voyage and will continue to be the forerunner for the five permanent alehouses in five years planned by Lion.
The whanau of friends, contacts and compatriots from the campaign will be at the core of Speight's marketing machine.
Stu McIntosh, in London to lead the last charge, said: "These expat Kiwis are the best brand ambassadors we could hope for.
"There are almost 400,000 of them in England, many in London, and we hope they will bring their English and international friends to enjoy Speight's Alehouse hospitality."
No comments:
Post a Comment