Report on the 2008 UK communications campaign of Carling Extra Cold

Table of Contents

1. Research
1.1. Macro environment
1.2. Micro environment

2. Audience

3. Budget

4. Objectives

5. Strategies
5.1. Product life-cycle
5.2. Push vs. Pull
5.3. Positioning

6. Tactics

7. Homepage

8. List of References

9. Appendix
9.1. Appendix
9.2. Appendix
9.3. Appendix

Table of figures

Figure 1: picture of the target group

Figure 2: position of the brand Carling

Figure 3: screenshot of www.carling.co.uk 8 Carling

1. Research

1.1. Macro environment

- smoking ban led to changed pub audience
- rising costs of raw materials
- trend towards growing concerns of health (Appendix ,)

1.2. Micro environment

- the lager Carling is part of the beer market
- beer is the most popular drink in the UK
- increasing share concentration in the UK beer market by brewer, as well as by brand
- Carling is the no. 1 lager within the UK (Appendix ,,)

2. Audience

As it is an alcoholic drink, the only legal target group are people over the age of 18 years. In addition the adverts are specially designed for the United Kingdom.

The advert on TV only shows male actors, that is why only men will be able to identify themselves with the actors. Men are Carling’s target audience, especially men interested in football. These men like watching TV at home as well as watching football in the stadium. Besides football fans, the brand tries to attract men who like music. I assume the primary target group are British men aged 18 to 28 and the secondary target audience are British men at the age of 29 to 35. To inspire the target group Carling is the organiser of the Carling football Cup and acts as sponsor of music festivals.

illustration not visible in this excerpt

Figure 1: picture of the target group

For the target group, football stars or musicians might act as opinion leader, furthermore friends will interact.

The image of the brand is very important for the buying process. For the decision making process the target audience is focused on feeling rather than thinking. Beer is situated in the Foote, Cone and Belding involvement Grid in the sphere of low involvement and feel. The order of the actions done by the consumers are ‘do’, ‘feel’ and ‘think’. In the case of a standard lager beer, like Carling, the situation could be: The buyer stands in front of the shelf and takes a can, after the process of buying and drinking he feels satisfied. As he thinks, the satisfaction comes from the beer, he will buy the same brand next time.

3. Budget

- Companies in the beer market spend about 10% of their sales on advertising. - Molton Coors spend in 2006 $906.9 million on advertising, about 15% of its net sales. - For its 2007 campaign Molton Coors spend £14m. - I assume the 2008 campaign did cost about the same than the 2007 campaign. - Most of the marketing communications budget should be spend for advertising, as the buying process of beer goes along with low involvement. (Appendix ,,,)

4. Objectives

Coors does not give information about the objectives of their campaigns.

As Carling is already the number one beer brand, awareness can be excluded as part of the objectives. Possible objective might be instead, in times of a trend towards declining sales in the beer market, the growth of the market share to stabilise the sales of Carling. If the general market volume for standard lager beers decreases by 2.2% and the amount of sold litres Carling should stay constant, it can be assumed that the objective is a total market share of 14.5% for 2008.

5. Strategies

5.1. Product life-cycle

The position of beer in its product life cycle is situated in the decline section, as the long-term forecast predicts a drop in demand. The forecast sales of standard lager beer for the time period 2007 - 2012 is that it will be decline by 2.2% (Euromonitor International 2008a). In 2012, the average lager drinker will consume 19 pints less than today (Director Publications Ltd. 2007).

The position of the brand Carling in its product life cycle is situated in the maturity section. The brand shares of Carling during the time period of 2003 - 2006 changed from 12.8% in 2003 to 14.0% in 2004, but stayed nearly stable until 2006, with a total volume of 14.2% (Euromonitor International 2008).

5.2. Push vs. Pull

The adopted strategy is a pull-strategy, to encourage products to be demanded. It can be assumed that push is used as well, to achieve synergy effects. As the TV- advertising, as well as the newsletters target group is the end customer, only the PullStrategy can be analysed.

5.3. Positioning

To go against the general market trend Coors latest strategy is to invest heavily in marketing campaigns to enhance the profile of its brands amongst a UK consumer base, which is increasingly turning away from beer (Euromonitor International 2008b).

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