Backwards lurch to leap forward

The soft drink with a bit of character is all about stubbies, Speedos and 'bring back the mullet'.

One of New Zealand's oldest and best-known brands is getting a facelift.

On February 27, a $1.25 million advertising campaign featuring a new "retro" label for soft-drink L&P will kick off. Bottles with the new label will be in stores from May - elbowing aside those wearing the familiar yellow wrap-around that has sported L&P in fat white letters since the mid-1980s.

The slogan "World famous in New Zealand" is being altered: the phrase "since ages ago" will be tacked on at the end.

The senior brand manager for L&P owner Coca-Cola Amatil NZ, Megan Denize, said the campaign had been designed to remind Kiwis that New Zealand was a great place in which to grow up.

"While New Zealand has a multitude of traditional kiwiana treasures - including gumboots, Buzzy Bees, pavlova and Swandris - there's a younger generation of L&P drinkers who relate to a different and more recent range of icons."

Can a "bring back the mullet" competition and commercials featuring stubbies and Speedos put more fizz into L&P? Or could change put growth of L&P sales at risk?

The two-year-old campaign urging people not to get caught drinking anything else has already helped L&P sales grow 30 per cent during the past two years, well ahead of the overall soft-drink category.

Brand strategist Brian Richards, the man behind the Cervena campaign for New Zealand venison, believed the choice of 1970s and 1980s images was "ill-advised" and not daring enough.

"New Zealand is hung up on this culture of naff, unsophisticated reminders of the 1970s."

But other brand experts thought it was the right decision.

"It's a legitimate thing to do," said Howard Russell, head of branding consultancy Strategic Insight.

"This is presumably an attempt to de-Coke and de-Fanta it ... they're obviously trying to inject a more potent personality [into L&P] and really put some space around it."

He said Bundaberg ginger beer had had success with the same type of strategy, pitching itself as unashamedly staid - but also a product with genuine character.

Sarena Longley, a lecturer at Victoria University's school of marketing and international business, teaches her second-year students about L&P.

"I've got international students who go to Paeroa to stand in front of the L&P bottle," she said. "At the end of the day, they could probably put it in a green bottle and people would buy it if they wanted to drink L&P."

On that basis, joining the trend of local companies going back to their roots would be unlikely to hurt sales. While there was a chance the change would alienate the five-year-old to 15-year-old age group (and others such as recent immigrants who had little sense of the brand's roots stretching back to 1907), Longley did not believe the revamp was a major risk.

Denize said there were several reasons for the rebranding.

"The non-alcoholic beverage category is so saturated with brands that are trying to be cool and contemporary that there is little point trying to modernise this brand," she said.

"We believe we can achieve better stand-out in a cluttered market by doing completely the opposite."

The campaign would target 16-year-olds to 29-year-olds who may be less familiar with the brand's heritage.

The slogan had stayed (with the addition) because "it is so closely associated with L&P that we would be mad to change it".

The three-month gap between the start of the campaign and the introduction of the bottle in stores was intended to minimise the most significant risk the company could see - that consumers might not recognise the bottle.

Many older consumers bought L&P because they remembered drinking it as children and the change had to reinforce the sense of New Zealand heritage among younger drinkers.

"What we needed to do was move the brand forward - or in this case backward," said Denize..

The new label was designed by Designworks, the agency behind the similarly retro feel of Monteith's beer.

Meares Taine is to spearhead advertising for the campaign.