Steinlager Pure: crafting a hands-on experience
Cheers to your very own piece of New Zealand.
Taking the iconic-in-New-Zealand, but tiny-in-the-real-world Steinlager Pure brand to export was never going to be easy. Especially with a budget that, if spent traditionally, would barely get us one month on a single Times Square billboard.
We went back to the product truth, and designed a B2B2C customer experience to sneak in under the radar and resonate with urban dwellers the world over.
Working backwards through the customer journey, we explored the insight that bartenders and beer drinkers alike love having a story to share. So we created one: when you buy a Steinlager Pure, you’re literally getting your hands on a piece of the purest land on the planet.
It took a while to get past the lawyers, but working with our client (the wonderful Ben Wheeler) we managed to find 120 hectares of native New Zealand forest and wetland, and reserve it in perpetuity on behalf of prospective Steinlager Pure drinkers around the world. The deal: Buy a Steinlager Pure, crack open the coaster that comes with it, redeem the code hidden inside, and you get a unique piece of this iconic part of New Zealand reserved in your name. For real. Buy another, and you add a chance to visit your piece of land.
Steinlager Pure was a niche brand launching into behemoth beer markets like the US, Canada and the UK, so we had to make sure the idea would cut through, and be easy and enticing for bar owners to use. We shot the imagery for the product posters in the forest itself, and divided those images into unique portions. Coasters were cut from those poster images, each containing an innovative snap-to-open code. (Shoutout here to our site-building colleagues at Shift/DAN who did an amazing job under pressure of coding the super-complex back-end for the website.)
So far, so promo – until we added a world-first App to the experience: a view of your unique square metre of native NZ forest, from wherever you are around the globe: immersive, motion-controlled 360º panoramas, live weather feeds, an AR ‘Pure Finder’ that you can use to show your mates where to find your land, and more. Huge thanks to CactusLab for the build of things we outwardly said were possible, but inwardly feared were not.
Of course we added easy ways to spread the word through social networks, and the stretch goal was to build a database in each market for regular dialogue. But making the exchange feel very real for participants was key.
This project is a favourite for me, for many reasons:
Tracking back to the truth to create an experience, when others might make just an ad;
Pushing the craft to the very limit, including the realisation of several world-first examples of tech creating an emotional response;
Keeping a blended team of agencies, suppliers and clients pointed in the direction of success in the face of some strong headwinds;
Keeping an idea Pure.
