Alizé brand liqueur launches campaign to recapture black female consumers

By Eric Newman
Adweek.com
(September 17, 2007) Alizé, a line of fruity liqueur popular with urban consumers in the late 1990s that has since experienced a decline in sales, will increase marketing efforts in an effort to reclaim its status among core customers.

A new campaign, "Alizé & Ice," via Altamira, Westport, Conn., will be anchored by a print and Internet push that supports a sweepstakes in which the brand will give away more than $50,000 in diamonds. An ad breaking in such October publications as Essence, Complex and Modern Bride shows an African American couple wearing diamond jewelry, with the Alizé name spelled out in diamond lettering and bottles of the five-SKU Alizé flavors covered with diamonds.

Text offers, "Alizé's exotic flavors and spectacular diamond jewelry are the perfect mix this holiday season. With ice around your neck and in your favorite Alizé cocktail, you are sure to shine." Tag: "Be brilliant." Text directs consumers to www.Alize.com.

Support will include print in trade publications, sampling and retail gift packs that will bundle bottles with two cocktail glasses.

Alizé, owned by Kobrand, Purchase, N.Y., spent $2.2 million on ads in 2005, per Nielsen Monitor-Plus, but under $1 million in 2006 and just $400,000 January-June 2007. Michelle Murray, brand director, said the 2008 budget will increase by as much as 50% over the final 2007 spend.

Other recent changes made to reconnect with the brand's urban demographic include the launch of a vodka-based Alizé Rose and a package redesign with a taller, sleeker bottle, and updated icon and graphic elements that call out the label's French import status.

According to Murray, previous ads for the product took a more mass-market approach, with lanky, cartoon women dressed in flowing gowns that did not adequately target Alizé's predominantly young, female urban audience.

"It's a big departure for us," said Murray of the new efforts. "To further create those lifestyle and cultural connections [meant] featuring the faces of consumers in our ads so that the ads mirror what the people drinking our product look like

...What had been done before was directed toward gaining general market share, but Alizé is really an urban brand and that's where this brand needed to be moved back to."

For Valentine's Day 2008, marketing will use national and local print to promote liquor stores as a gift destination and encourage swapping a bottle of Alizé for the holiday's traditional goodies, such as flowers and chocolates. Select locations will have sampling events for Alizé Rose and offer free Alizé greeting cards.

Since hitting its peak in 1998 with 665,000 cases sold, Alizé fell to 400,000 cases sold in 2005, per Impact's Annual Spirit Study, which are the most recent numbers available.


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