In a declining market for beer, new audiences are presenting challenges the industry has not grappled with in year’s past, so to tackle these problems, Natural Light would need to start with a careful analysis to identify exactly what issues they needed to prioritize solving.

Natural Light discovered that beer penetration amongst 21-29 year olds is specifically declining and that this demo is critical for the long term viability of the beer category, because if someone doesn’t drink beer at legal drinking age (21) then they are very unlikely to drink beer later in life.

Armed with this insight, the brand dug deeper into the reason why young 21+ consumers were not drinking beer and identified through research, four major components ABV, health & wellness, price and flavor.

Creating a fun, highly accessible flavored beer that filled a gap in the market was the aim. The Strawberry Lemonade flavor was the top polling flavor when tested and we also knew that the 21-29 demo was opting for more flavor-forward, lighter drinks. When combined with a very unique, eye-catching packaging whose color palette helped convey the flavor profile, this product became the magic bullet to address our challenge of decline within that target demo.

Natural Light vetted hundreds of packaging designs to convey the unique flavor. By opting against the packaging trope of fruit, the brand nailed the design that has helped make the flavor so appealing in market; a unique color gradient and impossible to miss flamingos.

The final design added flamingos because they are a relevant image in pop culture and helped convey the strawberry lemonade flavor. Lastly, flamingos, like our drinkers, are social animals.

To determine the name, we took a popular term that fans were already using which we discovered is a common quote through social listening.

Most brands talk about flavor in a dry, boring way (e.g. fruit notes, citrus taste, clean finish). Given this is not applicable to the brand’s core drinker, we decided to be as straightforward and humorous as possible – thus landing on the tagline “for those who like strawberry lemonade, and drinking beer.”

To date, the campaign has collectively garnered over 750 million monthly impressions around it’s launch as a result of this approach and there has been an outpouring of affection across social media for the product.

We’re still gathering additional sales figures since this just launched mere weeks ago, but the early read is extremely strong. The new product is on track to be roughly 3x greater than our internal volume production for the full year 2019.

The brand reported 0.31% share of category in March, now 0.14 YTD.