Me and my other Me is the story of how an incredibly well-know brand as Ballantine’s is in Spain became a popular brand, a brand people actually talked about. Scotch is the #1 spirit in Spain, yet the brand had a global creative strategy that had failed to resonate among Spanish audiences for many years. How could we turn a global creative strategy designed to please every market but too generic to actually please real consumers into something people in Spain would want to engage with?

In Spain, the brand is available in every bar, yet Spanish consumers have no clue what Ballantine’s stands for. Maybe this explains why Ballantine’s market share lags behind the leading whisky brand in Spain, J&B.

In 2015 Ballantine’s introduced a new global brand platform: Stay True. However, the concept had had little impact for the brand in Spain.

In 2020, Pernod Ricard felt there was an opportunity for Ballantine’s to speak up and connect with Spanish audiences in a meaningful way, driving brand preference and, hopefully, trigger sales in the all-important Holiday season, when 30% of yearly sales happen.

The brief was straightforward: how can Ballantine’s make the Stay True idea relevant to consumers in Spain and get them to drink the brand more often?

The whisky category in Spain was declining -3% year on year. Only super premium scotch was thriving. Ballantine’s market share had lagged behind the leading brand J&B for many years. Ballantine’s consideration was +1 vs J&B, however its ratio of brand consideration / actual consumption was -4pp lower. That meant that whisky drinkers regularly considered ordering Ballantine’s, yet felt other brands represented them better.

Whisky is a spirit that says a lot about the person drinking it. However in Spain it was unclear to consumers what Ballantine’s stood for. For a brand that had such a massive distribution, people had little to say about it.

Ballantine’s needed a brand effort to help bridge that gap that prevented consumers from ordering Ballantine’s as much as Pernod Ricard needed.

The ultimate goal was clear: to drive brand preference and eventually trigger sales by being meaningful to drinkers in Spain.

The issue with Ballantine’s was the lack of meaning the brand had in Spain. Stay True was a hollow brand idea as it lacked resonance among Spanish audiences.

The brand had communicated in a way that felt dated: through global advertising campaigns and sponsoring music events. It was very discursive, and people did not care any more about whisky brands telling them to “stay true”.

That was the starting point for us: what did “Stay True” even mean? In the times of fake news it’s hard to talk about truth unless your brand is The New York Times.

Instead we decided to stop thinking about universal truths and make truth something personal: we need to be true to ourselves first and foremost.

That reframed the whole problem: just as whisky was a drink that people tend to drink by themselves, we needed an idea that audiences could relate to individually.

Absolutely everyone can relate to the fact that we do not behave the same way on social contexts, when we’re seen by others, and privately. And this is particularly true online: the things we share on social media have nothing to do with our search queries on Google.

This insight was brought to life through a study that put face to face individuals with avatars of themselves that reveal who they are when nobody is watching.

“Me and my other Me” is a study that, through psychology and data analysis, shows the lack of authenticity in all of us by confronting the incoherence between the social self and the private self.

By means of the study, “Stay True” then became an invitation to reflect upon our personal incoherence and how this makes us feel. The ultimate question being: would you have a drink with yourself?

The release of the study made Ballantine’s “Stay True” idea relevant to Spanish audiences as it triggered a large number of conversations on social media, particularly on Twitter, where the engagement rate grew +212% vs the previous year.

However its profound cultural relevance and impact are revealed by the 260,000+ times it was shared on WhatsApp, the most popular and intimate social network in Spain, and the +9 million views in the first 48h upon release.

Upon its release, the share of conversation of Ballantine’s across social media in Spain skyrocketed to 91.3% vs 8.7% for J&B. And more importantly, Ballantine’s became the number 1 whisky brand in market share in the Spanish market for the first time ever… despite having a media investment -56% lower than J&B.

On a final note, the study is being replicated in representative samples in order to be evaluated as a potential diagnostic tool.