Proving "The Bold" are rewarded
Until recently, one big player, with a whopping 80% share, has dominated the Irish Cider category. Orchard Thieves was a brand new cider that wanted to change this. So when Heineken wanted to launch the new cider brand they asked the team to design a digital wallet that allowed people to try a pint any day of the week at thousands of bars around Ireland.
We designed an Industry first, a deceptively simple location-aware pint redemption system that rewarded users who proved they were bold enough to steal from the Den of Thieves. A perfect accompaniment to our ‘Be Bold’ motto that allowed users to start their experience on desktop and finish it in the pub (with a free pint) on their mobile.
The pint redemption process was equally simple. Each pub had signs behind the bar with a unique five digit code. You entered the code into your web browser, it checked your GPS data to ensure you were in the bar and displayed a token for you to show to the barman,
Fraud prevention
We created an animation of the fox that appears in the brands identity. The animation appeared for two minutes then vanished. The coupon was date and timestamped and featured the name of the pub in a prominent position so the barman could quickly verify it by eye, even on the busiest of nights. Other than checking the token, the barman didn't have to tap or click on anything.
Everything was powered by a redemption management system – a bespoke back end tool which controlled user registration, pub participation and pint redemption. This was linked directly to a PII compliant server. This gave us complete control over the number of pints available on any given night - we could overload on sunny days to drive more trial.
The key to solving the challenge to expand market share was sampling. We knew if we could get the pints into punters hands, we were on to a winner.
We considered building an app but it didn't feel right - installing an app requires a lot of extra commitment - it's a real struggle to keep it front and centre on the user's home screen. You end up promoting the app not the product.
Our research showed us that a significantly larger audience could be reached via a mobile website. The advantages were clear – a single codebase for all users (desktop and mobile), instant software updates which wouldn’t require App Store approval and no new software for the user to install on their device.
One of our biggest hurdles was the legendary legal gambit of the age gate; a mandatory component built into all alcohol related websites to check a users age. This would be the first thing that any user would see when visiting the site so I wove it into the narrative. Users were told that only those with the right code could enter the Den of Thieves, a place to pick up free pints, access parties, and giveaways.
The code was your date of birth. So already we were encouraging the user to be bold. Typical drop-off on an age gate for an alcohol brand is between 70-80%. My approach reduced that to 20%.