Welcome to Will It Stick? podcast, where hosts Melissa and Alexis cover creative advertising campaigns, PR stunts, and marketing activations that brands of all shapes and sizes pull, and dive into the research and data to understand if it worked.
White Claw is an anomaly in the marketing world. It’s not often that in less than five years, a new brand can completely dominate a market category in the liquor space. But White Claw has done just that. In less than five years since the brand launched, White Claw has captured 54% of the hard seltzer market.
In the United States, the Alcoholic Beverage Industry is estimated at $222 billion. Ready-to-drink beverages account for $6.5 billion of the market share. While growth in this segment has been steady, growth specifically for hard seltzer has been estimated at 200% between 2018 and 2019 (according to Nielsen data). The demand for the Ready to drink beverage market is forecasted to grow at 4.8% by 2023[1]. For hard seltzer, the product alone is expected to grow to $2.5 billion by 2021.
White Claw was initially considered a “girlie” beverage, but as of today and thanks to comedian Trevor Wallace who created a viral video for White Claw a few years ago, the seltzer brand now has a pretty even 50/50 split between male and female consumers.
White Claw, like Jeep, has become a “lifestyle brand” by creating experiences around the product itself and prioritizing shared moments with friends instead of materialistic goods.
Hard Seltzer has embraced this idea by combining affluent experiences like windsurfing, boating, hiking, etc. with the product itself without spending too much money. White Claw receives 171,000,000 search volume in Google, 12 times the search volume of “SpikedSeltzer” (307,000 results) and “hard seltzer” (13,400,000 results) combined. The brand has really always benefited from earned media, with much of it coming from fans who run social media accounts like “whiteclawmeme” and “whiteclawchronicles.”
Listen to the full episode to hear all of the fun stuff that White Claw consumers have done to take the brand viral!
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Check out some of the great articles we sourced to gather all the facts for this episode.
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AdAge – Natty Light Deploys Comedian Trevor Wallace Stunt Aimed at White Claw
AdRoll – Unrolling: The White Claw Brand
PRNewswire – White Claw Hard Seltzer Launches Irst Global Campaign – “Let’s White Claw”
No Good – White Claw Marketing Strategy: How the Hard Seltzer Brand Manufactured Viral Growth