Since launching in 2010, Great Northern Brewing Company has become the #1 beer in Australia, #1 beer in Queensland and the crown jewel in Carlton & United Breweries’ (CUB) portfolio. With the tagline ‘The Beer From Up Here’, Great Northern captures the spirit of enjoying life in far north Queensland, with a portfolio of easy-drinking beers designed to be enjoyed in the hot Australian outdoors.

Our challenge?

Find opportunities to capture incremental growth for Australia’s biggest beer brand. How does the biggest get bigger again?

Core objectives

Grow market share in key growth areas

Grow brand health metrics in key growth areas

Increase unprompted brand awareness

If there’s anything Great Northern drinkers love more than our beer, it’s letting the world know about it. Instagram is bursting at the seams with images and videos of our drinkers enjoying Great Northern in the great outdoors with friends. So we thought, why not use those personal stories of time spent amongst the local sights and communities around Australia and share those with a bigger audience?

The campaign was called: Great Northern InstaRadio.

The idea was to encourage our drinker’s to post images of their time enjoying the great outdoors with their mates, turn them into radio ads to detail the story behind the image, and then post the audio and image back onto Instagram.

Great Norther’s audience is defined as ‘Down to earth and practical Australians who love spending time in the great outdoors with friends’. This attitudinal description wouldn’t change, but we needed to understand more about how and where we would derive incremental growth for Great Northern.

Given Great Northern’s existing high sales volumes, we wanted to establish locations where it could be more popular. To do this, we took three years of daily sales data, and made it a per-capita measure based on area boundaries (358 in Australia). This helped us identify two audiences: Grow and Defend. The linking thread of our audience was where they lived and, by extension, the likelihood of them already being a Great Northern consumer.

This location based ‘Grow’ and ‘Defend’ strategy helped define the creative focus, media buy and social targeting for InstaRadio.

Step 1:

We encouraged our drinkers to post an image on Instagram of themselves in the great outdoors, enjoying a Great Northern.

Step 2:

We chose posts from the regions where Great Northern needed to grow and then vividly brought the image to life on radio. These radio scripts created a narrative around the image that felt personal and local to the area.

Step 3:

The Instagram post and audio were edited together and posted back through Great Northern’s own social channels via Insta Stories. Creating the great ‘virtuous circle’ of Great Northern.

Media was purchased and weighted against the requirements of the Grow and Defend strategy. In areas we identified opportunities to Grow the brand, we booked long format placements to tell a richer brand narrative via our radio reads. In areas we knew we were already strong, we booked shorter formats to keep the brand top of mind.

Given InstaRadio was served in specific locations, we could isolate the incremental effectiveness of the campaign.

Objective 1:

Grow market share in key growth areas

Results:

In areas where Growth was the focus, InstaRadio produced an incremental uplift of 86% market share. In areas where defence was the focus, InstaRadio produced an incremental uplift of 43% in market share.

Objective 2:

Grow brand health metrics in key growth areas

Results:

In key growth areas, we saw an average 46% YoY increase in brand health metrics

Objective 3:

Increase unprompted brand awareness

Results:

Unprompted awareness increased grew by 37.5% during campaign period

Other results include:

Campaign measurements were taken before, during, and after launch:

Net promoter score saw a 13% uplift .

Repeat purchase consideration increased from 89% to 92%.

33% of people also claimed to have purchased and/or recommended Great Northern as a direct result of hearing the campaign.