Stone's & Soda Brand Development ~ Oliver Prenton - Design, Innovation and Art Direction

Known around the world as the ultimate winter warmer and grannies favourite tipple – Stone’s Green Ginger Wine needed a fresh insight and attitude to sell some of their sweet ginger nectar in the boiling hot Australian summer.

Although the brand has been around since well before Captain Cook landed on the shores of Australia most Aussie twenty-somethings had no idea what it was or how to drink it. In addition to this, pubs and bars weren’t stocking it and the shops had relegated it to section in the back next to the meads and other potions more at home in Diagon Alley.

With a small budget we needed a simple strategy that could be built on over time. The core problem seemed to be around serving – something they’d tried to combat in the past by doing a range of complicated cocktails. Our idea was to keep it simple, social and sophisticated. ‘Stone’s & Soda’ was born.

Horizontal & Vertical logos

We wanted to make ‘Stone’s & Soda’ feel natural in the Aussie market, like it had been around for years. The first step was updating the bottle design to use the British heritage; although Stone’s green bottle is iconic it hardly screamed ‘celebratory summer mixer’.

Since we were starting at ground zero we needed to tick off some essentials before we could get to any of the campaign work; repositioning the product in bottle shops and creating a range of collateral (posters, jugs, glasses, coasters, etc) that allowed venues to get behind it.

Collateral concepts

Actual glasses

We continued the simplicity in bottle shops, creating a no-brainer promotional campaign giving away free soda water with every bottle purchased and helping educate at the point of sale. At venues and bottle shops we also educated with a gentle, informative sampling experience.

POS Campaign Concept (Actual campaign used Fevertree)

Sampling moodboard

Once we’d established the basics we created a campaign with the aim of, again, educating Aussies how to drink Stone’s in summer.

“Mix it up for summer”

The campaign ran in the lead up to Christmas and throughout the summer across all media with outdoor and social leading the charge. Influencer marketing was also used to activate new audiences. Smart media placement meant that we only advertised when the temperature reached 26 degrees and over. As we needed to be smart with the budget, other concepts that sadly didn’t make the cut involved heat activated billboards and temperature readers in bus shelters.

4 months worth of social content – designed to be eclectic, fun, engaging and conversational – was created including video, animation, photography and memeable updates.

The simplicity of the strategy and initial launch campaign was well received by both industry and public. For the first time in years pubs are not only stocking Stone’s but featuring it on menus and their Instagram.

As the strategy is intended to develop over time we concepted several branded experiences that will be rolled out in the coming months. ‘Stone’s Garden’ allow them to work with venues to create modern brand experiences in pub beer gardens. They’ll also be creating branded experiences at events using a heritage London bus.