Strongbow has been on a journey to become “the world’s most inclusive cider brand” by reorienting its approach to driving accessibility “from the end to the beginning” of the process, says the brand’s marketing director.
While it may previously have been viewed as a “dark, masculine brand”, Rachel Holms, marketing director at parent company Heineken, tells Marketing Week this is a perception it is looking to change.
Strongbow has been on a journey to become “the world’s most inclusive cider brand” by reorienting its approach to driving accessibility “from the end to the beginning” of the process, says the brand’s marketing director.
While it may previously have been viewed as a “dark, masculine brand”, Rachel Holms, marketing director at parent company Heineken, tells Marketing Week this is a perception it is looking to change.
The brand has been around for 60-plus years, and was originally conceived as a “lager replacement”, so it “followed lager cues rather than cider cues”, she says.
But Strongbow has also been a “popularist” brand, one that is not “fussy” and aims to appeal to everyone. Therefore, it makes sense for the brand “to be accessible to everybody”.
“We’re really proud to represent British culture in all its guises,” Holms says.
The brand has partnered with inclusive agency Purple Goat with that goal, and the idea of taking inclusivity from a “bolt-on” to integral through all the brand’s processes.
At the beginning of its journey to drive inclusivity and accessibility, the Strongbow team was not necessarily well-versed in how the brand might achieve this, says Holms.
“We just said, ‘We’re complete novices at this. We don’t know the right words to say. We don’t know the right things to do’,” she recalls.
Brands often struggle to understand how to represent their disabled customers and “to really know what they want, what they need, and how they want it to be communicated to them”, says Dom Hyams, global client director at Purple Goat.
While it is important for brands to represent disabled people with authenticity and “not make assumptions on behalf of the community”, the fear of getting started can sometimes hold brands back from doing anything at all, he says.
“No one’s perfect, and all brands are on a journey, and it’s much more about how you iterate and develop over time,” he says.
Not all about the glossy ad
Driving inclusivity and accessibility through a brand is about more than just producing an ad with some representation, it’s about reinforcing that ethos at every level. For Hyams, the starting point has to be speaking to the communities you’re aiming to represent.
“Once you speak to communities and really understand their wants and needs, then you can start to drive really meaningful work across every touch point, and not just what we see in a big, shiny, glossy ad,” Hyams says.
One way Strongbow has done this is by featuring NaviLens QR codes on its cans, which are high-contrast, smartphone-readable markers designed to help blind and partially-sighted people find products and communicate key information such as ingredients and alcohol content.
It’s also helping remove barriers to disabled consumers accessing pubs; for example, by introducing ramps into venues. Hyams points out that, for a leading cider brand like Strongbow, ensuring pubs can be accessed by everyone isn’t just a step towards driving inclusivity; it makes sense from a brand perspective as it will bring more potential consumers of the brand into venues.
Being inclusive on a glossy advert is really important, because that’s where you hit your mass audience, so that’s what people see.
Sophie Helfferich, Strongbow
While Strongbow is seeking to take its accessible and inclusive ethos beyond visuals, assistant marketing manager at the brand, Sophie Helfferich, notes that the importance of representation shouldn’t be underestimated.
“Being inclusive on a glossy advert is really important, because that’s where you hit your mass audience, so that’s what people see,” she says. “Having disabled people in our adverts, we want that to be intrinsically linked with Strongbow.”
Oftentimes, inclusivity and accessibility can be an afterthought for brands. Having initially been in this position, whether it’s pack designs or campaigns, Strongbow now considers inclusivity from the very first step of the process.
“We flipped it,” Holms says. “We thought accessibility first, design second. So, we were never trying to retrofit accessibility into our marketing plans; it was at the forefront of everything that we did, and that was a game changer.”
As much as it’s been a journey for the brand team, it’s also been a journey that Strongbow has been on with its other agencies, she says, with Purple Goat consulting with the brand’s creative agency from the outset, for example.
“It’s shifted from the bolt-on at the end to right at the beginning,” Holms adds.