Previous promotions for Remy Amerique Inc.'s Mount Gay Rum brand typically targeted the boating and regatta crowd, but a new online sweepstakes in the rum brand's 300th anniversary seeks to expand that audience to include golfers.
Debuting Aug. 1, the sweepstakes offers a chance to win an all-expenses-paid trip to Barbados and golfing lessons from 1991 British Open champion and ABC analyst Ian Baker-Finch.
“The reason we chose golf is because it targets the same yachting demographic but it's a lot more mainstream,” said Robert Tuchman, president of TSE Sports & Entertainment, the New York agency on the account.
To energize this effort, New York-based Remy sent one-shot e-mails this week to 20,000 consumers in its house file to promote the sweepstakes on www.mountgayrum.com. Retail point-of-sale material will help drive traffic online with 1,000 stores nationwide alerting consumers about the promotion.
Professional males ages 30 to 45 are the typical consumers of Mount Gay. Golfers also fit this demographic.
“They're also trying to draw the interest of golf's growing female base,” Tuchman said.
The sweepstakes' qualifiers comprise the usual suspects: name, mail and e-mail address and date of birth. But the three optional questions that follow most interest Remy.
First, consumers are asked to identify the primary influence on their purchase decision when buying a bottle of rum. The choices include taste, price, gift or promotion, brand loyalty and recent advertising.
Next, Remy asks whether, when ordering in a bar or restaurant, consumers order by preferred brand or “rum and …” Finally, participants are asked to rank in order of preference their drinking spirits. The choices are scotch, bourbon, rum, vodka, tequila and gin.
Three grand prizes will be awarded. Each winner gets a trip for two to Barbados in February 2003. This includes roundtrip coach airfare and airport transfers, and five days and four nights in a hotel as well as two rounds of golf on two top Barbados golf courses and a golf lesson with Baker-Finch.
Aside from introducing new drinkers from the golfing demographic and the obvious database-building benefit, the main goal of the sweepstakes is to create awareness for Mount Gay Rum.
“There's so much history behind that brand, but there's clutter in the liquor space so they just want to differentiate their brand,” Tuchman said.
