Truly, Twisted Tea Leverages Esports Partnership To Engage Customers

BY ADAM GROSSMAN

The Boston Beer Company’s new partnership focused on non-beer brands with gaming organization and streetwear brand 100 Thieves demonstrates two items. The first is that both alcohol consuming men and women are looking to drink hard seltzer products. The second is that sports partnerships can effectively maximize brand awareness and increase potential consumption for new products.

The idea that sports partnerships can accomplish these goals for hard seltzer products works for both intuitive and non-intuitive reasons. We can start with a focus on maximizing brand awareness for relatively new products such as Truly Hard Seltzer and Twisted Tea Hard Iced Tea.

While achieving year-over-year revenue growth of 202% in 2019, hard seltzer is still new to many potential alcoholic beverage consumers. Hard seltzer products peaked in the summer of 2019 at 5% of beer market share. This helps to show that hard seltzer as a category still has relatively small awareness with potential consumers.

B6A’s research using our Media Analysis Platform (MAP) and Corporate Asset Valuation Model (CAV) has found that partnership activations “woven into cross-platform content for the company’s 95 million followers, including challenges, live streams, and giveaways” are effective at driving brand awareness and customer acquisition. Our CAV research has also shown lifts in brand awareness (in addition to brand sentiment) which have a strong and statistically significant correlation with increases in the likelihood of revenue growth for the beverage category.

Generating lifts in brand awareness, however, is not the only reason that sports assets are a good fit for Truly and Twisted Tea. While the hard seltzer category growth at this scale is new, the product itself has been around since at least the 1990s. One of the reasons is that past products, such as Zima and Smirnoff Ice, did not achieve long-term success because they “suffered from the stigma of being drinks that mostly women would prefer, rather than men.”

One could argue that a female-focused “stigma”, even in the 1990s, should not be a key reason for a product not achieving success. Even that stigma, however, is now contradicted by the data. More specifically, White Claw states that its customers are “fairly” evenly split between women (53%) and men (47%). Our research (seen in a table below) shows that males may even make up a larger percentage of Twisted Tea’s audience.

Even if gender did (or should) not have played a role in past failures of hard seltzer products, one reason for their current success is that hard seltzer typically contains lower calories and carbohydrates than beers and even many light beers. This is critical because as both male and female beer consumers are more concerned with nutrition generally and calorie and carbohydrate counts specifically than in years past. This new focus on “calories and carbs” has been cited as one of the key reasons for the decline of beer-specific sales.

Analysis from our Audience Inference Platform (AIP) demonstrates that Truly and Twisted should disproportionally reach male, young, and diverse demographics through its 100 Thieves partnership. The AIP uses natural language processing (NLP) to read the posts of followers of specific accounts and compare what they are saying to a large data set with known audience profiles to determine demographics. The table below shows the audience composition by percentage across three categories.  

The table above provides further support for Boston Beer’s strategy. Leveraging esports assets will enable Truly and Twisted Tea to generate lifts in brand awareness while also disproportionately targeting demographics that should lead to new sales growth. Using technology and data to drive insights that show how companies can maximize success with partnership spend should in this way be a key strategic tool for anyone working in the sports industry.