CASE STUDY: DULUTH CIDER
BRAND LAUNCH VIDEO
How Do You Launch a Brand Nobody’s Heard Of Into a Market That Already Has Its Favorites?
BACKGROUND
Every new business faces the same problem on day one: no audience, no reputation, no guarantee anyone notices. The answer wasn’t a bigger production budget — it was borrowing trust the community already had.
The Problem
Every new organization faces the same problem on day one: No audience. No reputation. No guarantee anyone notices.
18 months before we opened Duluth Cider only existed in our heads and on paper. So the question was:
THE SOLUTION
We started out with the 5 questions I bring to every marketing problem:
1. What is the goal?
To get the attention of the people most likely to be our best customers. We had to maximize brand recognition and hype among the right audience and at the right time so we could hit the ground running on opening day.
2. Who is the right audience?
Duluth locals across generations — the people who already feel some ownership over what “being from Duluth” means, and who would spread the word to like-minded individuals before the business even opened.
3. What do they care about?
Duluth loves Duluth! They cherish the feeling that something is genuinely theirs, authentically local, not another outside brand parachuting in. Since they had no reason yet to trust us, we decided that we shouldn’t be the ones to tell them at all. We decided to let the brands they already love and trust get their attention first.
4. Where do they spend their time?
We looked at the history of where the most trusted brands in our industry had the most success communicating with their customers, and found our target audience was heavily active on Facebook and Instagram.
5. How do we reach them there?
Video is king on social media. It’s the most sharable delivery method with the path of least resistance. So with a message this important and the stakes this high, the message had to be delivered with a video that could 1- grab attention in the first 3 seconds so it’s not lost in the scroll, 2- build trust in an unknown company, and 3- build so much good will that the viewer just had to share it with their friends.
We caught attention and built trust immediately by asking our audience’s most trusted brands and figures talk about what we all share in common: our love of Duluth.
We built a video that didn’t even mention our company for the first 60 seconds, not until the audience was already primed to trust and care about what we had to say. Check out the video below.
The Results
We launched the video on June 22, 2018, to an account that had posted exactly once many months before. It caught fire immediately: 1,400+ interactions, 300+ comments, and most importantly 400+ shares. All from a brand new account with only a handful of followers.
This brand launch produced significant real-world results, as Duluth Cider reached the end of its first fiscal year already posting a profit on taproom sales alone.
That’s because Duluth Cider wasn’t launching into the market as a stranger. It had already made itself part of the story Duluth was telling about itself.