What do you do when you take over a former favourite beer and are charged with reinstating it as Canada’s number one import?

Corona was experiencing strong competitive pressure in the premium import beer category and its brand affinity was waning. The brand needed to take its global identity and customize it for the Canadian marketplace in order to reinvigorate consumers’ engagement with and passion for the brand. By leveraging Corona’s brand ideal, “Corona exists to radiate sunshine to our world,” the challenge was to return the beer to its position as Canada’s number one import through both brand engagement and sales growth.

While Corona has a long-standing brand association with “the beach,” this came to represent the remote, far-off sunny destinations Canadians associate with March Break and winter vacations. Corona needed to find a way to translate its beach equity into a meaningful and motivating way to Canadian beer drinkers. So a campaign strategy was designed around the insight of “Escape”…in a bottle!

The “Escape” mindset became the foundation of the strategic framework. A focus was placed on intercepting consumers when they were escaping from work, the city and the country. In a world where consumers experience a brand and its messaging across a multitude of touchpoints, the goal was to build a compelling and relevant brand narrative that would be consistent and fresh, no matter where and when they were exposed to it. Rather than focus on functional taste or refreshment messaging, the aim was to build an engaging story that would establish Corona as an essential part of summer wherever and whenever Canadians were in most need of an escape.

While OOH used clever, contextually relevant and localized messages, the integrated story was further built in both television and digital with “escape” countdowns to long weekends and vacations. Two-minute mini-episodes on TV allowed consumers to “escape” the entire commercial period vis-à-vis unexpected breaks of cottage solitude. This content was also used to make a 30-minute “Escape” episode that ran on Cottage Life TV.

Frustrated commuters were greeted by Corona’s playful “escape” messages as they embarked on the long drive out of the city to cottage country escapes across Canada. Exteriors of busy commuter buses featured the message: “Please move to the back of the bottle.” A driver on the jammed Gardiner Expressway in Toronto saw a shot of the Corona bottle and lime with the tongue-in-cheek statement: “Not all bottlenecks are bad.” The OOH took full advantage of local placements to make messaging as relevant and personal as possible.

Furthermore, the brand’s ideal of “sunshine in a bottle” was brought to life with the “Corona Sun Beam” – a mobile sunshine delivery vehicle with an innovative mobile installation with a 62-foot telescopic arm and a 240-square foot articulated reflector that brought the sun to even the shadiest patios. The “Sun Beam” experience was shared across Canada through an event video on Corona’s social channels.

After only two weeks in market, the program generated more than 2.6 million earned media impressions, almost 3 million social impressions and nearly 465,000 views (English and French) on YouTube and Facebook combined.

Most notably, halfway into the heavy activation period, the integrated campaign had already resulted in a 17% share lift versus the previous year, solidifying Corona’s lead in the premium beer category in Canada. This has effectively doubled the share gap between Corona and its nearest rival, Heineken, in a mature category where there is high loyalty/low trial amongst regular beer drinkers.

The campaign also generated coverage in several industry publications, including strategy, Campaign, Ads of the World and Fast Company.