Pernod Ricard South Africa imports some of the world’s most famous alcohol brands into the country. To promote these brands they hold events and activations nationwide, year round.

The events take many forms but the ultimate goal is to build brand love amongst consumers by giving them the chance to enjoy Pernod products in the way they were meant to be drunk.

However, The World Health Organisation recently revealed that South Africa is at number four on a list of countries with the riskiest drinking patterns across the planet.

Pernod Ricard recognise that while they are in the business of selling alcohol, it is their duty to encourage consumers to drink their products responsibly.

This can be done simply by drinking water between alcoholic drinks. However our status driven consumers don’t like to drink water because it’s not seen as premium and “cool”.

Our consumers are driven by status, in other words what they choose to drink is driven by how the product looks and its inherent brand values. In order to change their behaviour and get them to drink water, and thus drink responsibly, we needed to make water cool in their eyes

So we launched 141, the drink to drink between drinks.

Our idea was to make water freely available at every Pernod Ricard event, but also make it desirable. We needed to make it so that our consumers would want to have in their hands and be seen drinking it.

And why did we call it 141?

The name of our water doubled as our responsible drinking message: drink 1 water 4 every 1 drink.

Our target audience is predominantly made up of men and women between the ages of 18 to 35. They are driven by status and believe that what they are seen drinking says a lot about them to the people around them, which is why they drink Pernod Ricard products such as Absolut Vodka and Jameson Whisky. Which in turn, is why they don’t drink water while out on the town, because it’s simply not premium and cool enough. Our strategy was to make water desirable to these people, thus getting them to drink water between drinks, which in turn shifted their drinking behaviour.

We were briefed by the Pernod Ricard in November 2017.

We spent 8 months in Research and Development, testing various bottle shapes and substrates, designing the logo and supporting collateral.

We launched 141 in 2018 at The Durban July, one of the biggest horse racing events in South Africa and one of the pre-eminent events on Pernod Ricard’s event calendar. Since then it has been placed at Pernod events around South Africa. So far we have distributed over 12000 bottles.

Our 141 bottle needed to be of the same premium quality as the brands Pernod imports into South Africa. It’s for this reason that we settled on a refillable glass bottle in a single serve, 250ml format. This ensured that not only did the bottle fit easily into consumer’s hands, it fit perfectly into their drinking occasions.

141 was picked up by the media and consumers.

We achieved an Advertising Value Equivalent of: R 1,304,783.14

Reach of: 44 336 639

Impact score: 82% (70% being the benchmark).

And over 12,000 bottles were consumed across our events.