Advertising Plan for the Kentucky Bourbon Affair

Summary

The word “bourbon” will forever be synonymous with Kentucky. Bourbon is ingrained in the culture, history, and aura of the Bluegrass State. It is with this importance of culture in mind that the Signature Seven Advertising Team put together an advertising plan for the Kentucky Bourbon Affair. Our advertising plan focuses on how to best promote the Kentucky Bourbon Affair’s six-day bourbon festival in order to increase knowledge about the company and its event as well as how to best utilize the company’s unique selling points in order to promote their festival over the festivals of the competition.

We are targeting persons between the ages of thirty and sixty-years-old who are employed full-time and have an annual household income of approximately $250,000 a year. This demographic is the audience we believe to be most likely to purchase tickets for the six-day festival who will also serve as return customers. We identified the places we believe The Kentucky Bourbon Affair will be able to best reach this audience. We believe that once knowledge of the festival grows, so will ticket sales. We plan to run our advertising from the month of December through the month of June, as we believe this coordinates with the times of peak ticket sales.

Overview

Our team has composed this advertising plan to discuss our ideas for how to best promote the Kentucky Bourbon Affair. This plan discusses the history of the Kentucky Bourbon Affair and its operator, the Kentucky Distiller’s Association. Additionally, we have provided an analysis of the company’s market, industry, competitors, and brand position. We have come up with what we believe to be the best possible ways for the Kentucky Bourbon Affair to advertise and laid out a budget for carrying out these plans.

Situational Analysis

History

The Kentucky Bourbon Affair is a six-day fantasy camp for true bourbon lovers that celebrates the culture and production of bourbon. The festival began in 2014 in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Congress declaring bourbon to be the only spirit native to the USA. This bourbon camp offers a series of events, all centered around the most notable bourbon brands including Maker’s Mark, Woodford Reserve, Jim Beam, Four Roses, and many more. The festival includes intimate events at distilleries, exquisite dinners, and larger events which and are spread across Kentucky, taking place in popular cities such as Louisville and Lexington as well as smaller cities such as Versailles, Danville, and Bardstown.

The Kentucky Bourbon Affair is operated by the Kentucky Distiller’s Association, a company that dates back to 1880. Prohibition eventually closed this original company, but would also bring it back to life in 1935 when distilling companies decided to work together to end prohibition in Kentucky, thus forming the Kentucky Distiller’s Association. The mission of the Kentucky Distiller’s Association is to defend and protect bourbon, fighting high bourbon taxes and keeping the best bourbons native and true to Kentucky.

Industry Analysis

An $8.5 billion industry, bourbon represents a massive source of employment and revenue for the Kentucky economy. The industry is responsible for approximately 15,400 jobs in Kentucky, accumulating more than $825 million for the state each year. With over fifty distilleries in Kentucky, it is easy to see the popularity of bourbon in the area. Additionally, The Kentucky Bourbon Trail attracts visitors from across the world, bringing in 2.5 million visitors just in the last five years.

Market Analysis

The Kentucky Bourbon Affair believes their target audience to be adults, particularly professional, working people, in the thirty to sixty-year-old age range with a household income of more than $250,000 and who are employed full-time. Additionally, the majority of their attendees come from outside of Kentucky, with sixty four percent of the bourbon lovers coming from out of state. We believe this assessment of the target audience to be accurate seeing as it makes the audience young enough to have an interest in attending festivals, while old enough to appreciate the classic taste of bourbon. The high household income for the audience is also accurate considering the high price of quality bourbon as well as the price of tickets to the events the Bourbon Affair offers.

Competitors

The main competitor for the Kentucky Bourbon Affair is the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, a celebration of bourbon that is also six days long and takes place in Bardstown, Kentucky. Approximately 53,000 people traveled from forty-four states and fourteen countries to attend the Kentucky Bourbon Festival last year. This festival offers a variety of events, some of which are less focused on bourbon than others. This creates both an advantage and a disadvantage for the festival. A huge advantage is that the festival is kid friendly, and even features a free “Family fun area” with activities for children. The event also features concerts, a balloon glow, a golf tournament, a vehicle show, and arts and crafts booths. These various activities give the bourbon lover attending the festival a variety of things to experience. The multitude of activities also creates a disadvantage though, by taking the focus off bourbon, whereas the Bourbon Affair focuses intimately on bourbon and its creation.

The Bourbon and Beyond festival located in Louisville also serves as a competitor for the Affair. This festival specializes in bourbon, food, music, and experiences. This festival is family friendly as well, but all attendees over the age of five require a ticket for admission. The festival offers general admission tickets which are all-inclusive, offering the attendee the chance to experience all of the different events offered. There is an option to upgrade tickets to VIP which garners the attendee access into the VIP area. These all-inclusive tickets are a massive advantage over Affair, where tickets are either a la carte or “Golden.” Since these exclusive golden tickets are limited, attendees are often left with the sole option to purchase tickets a la carte and only attend certain events. Another massive advantage is the music lineup of Bourbon and Beyond which includes big names such as Stevie Nicks, Eddie Vedder, Kiefer Sutherland, and the Steve Miller Band. This festival also offers the chance to interact with master distillers, an opportunity it shares with the Bourbon Affair. However, the Affair’s interactions with distillers are much more intimate, occurring in homes and distilleries rather than in a park in the middle of Louisville.

Brand’s Position

The Kentucky Bourbon Affair offers the unique opportunity to experience and celebrate bourbon with master distillers in an intimate way as well as the opportunity to get a personal look at the production of bourbon. While there are other bourbon festivals, none of them offer the unique and extraordinary opportunity to meet with master distillers on a personal and private level as well as the distinct and memorable experience of tasting bourbon fresh out of the barrel.

Also unique to the Affair are the locations of its events. The Affair’s two largest competitors both take place in singular locations, such as a park. However, while the Affair is based in Louisville, it also has events in the cities surrounding Louisville as well as at distilleries and the homes of master distillers, offering a unique and beautiful festival that celebrates the entire birthplace of bourbon, rather than one city.

One of the problems we saw with the Kentucky Bourbon Affair is that it is somewhat unknown. Unlike the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, the Affair goes relatively unnoticed. This lack of widespread public knowledge is most likely due to the festival still being quite young, with only four years under its belt. In comparison, the Kentucky Bourbon Festival has been around since 1992 and has the advantage of twenty-five years of building up a name.

An opportunity the Bourbon Affair has to build awareness and increase revenue is the inclusion of a merchandise page on their website. This merchandise page would be an online shop where fans of the Bourbon Affair could purchase drinkware, apparel, hats, calendars, bags and other products bearing the logo and dates of the Bourbon Affair.

Objectives

The Kentucky Bourbon Affair’s goal is to persuade past customers to return to their six-day camp every year. They also want to generate traffic for their website in order to increase traffic to Kentucky’s many distilleries. One of our objectives as a group is to increase awareness of the Kentucky Bourbon Affair. We are also responsible for providing appropriate awareness of the Affair by considering the class and respect inherent to the event and the company.

Budget

With our budget of $25,000, we are targeting an audience across the United States. Our main objective is to utilize our budget in a way that can influence the most people but also in the most creative and attractive way. Our advertising campaign will run from December through May.

A large portion of the budget, $17,570, has been allotted for social media marketing, specifically on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Our advertisements on these social media sites will run every other month leading up to the event, becoming more constant as the event approaches.

Another large portion of the budget, $5,400, would go towards purchasing a billboard off Interstate 71 near Prospect, as well one as near Churchill Downs, for the three months prior to event.

A smaller portion of the budget, $1,031, has been allotted for Google Adwords. Allocating these funds for Adwords is a great way to reach an audience already searching for the Kentucky Bourbon Affair or similar events.

Some of the budget, $1,000, is also allotted for event marketing at “Waterfront Wednesday” in May. The money would go towards purchasing a booth or a tent at the music festival to sell merchandise and tickets as well as to provide awareness of the Kentucky Bourbon Affair.

Strategy

Our campaign focuses highly on targeting the wealthy. This means identifying those places that are frequented by the wealthy and incorporating them into our advertising campaign. Specifically, we are targeting wealthy persons residing in cities situated within a five-hour drive of Louisville. We believe these customers closely situated to Louisville are most likely to purchase a large quantity of tickets because they are able to easily drive to the Affair and will have no limit on the amount of bourbon they can bring home, unlike those who choose to fly into the state.

Execution and Tactics

Digital Media

Our advertising team put together a video for the Kentucky Bourbon Affair which asks bourbon fanatics what they love about the classic, all-American spirit. We believe this video is an effective way to reach bourbon lovers and capture their attention. The video celebrates the reasons bourbon is popular, powerful, and prominent, just as the Kentucky Bourbon Affair celebrates these qualities.

We are focusing on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram as the social media sites for our advertising. We believe Facebook and LinkedIn best coordinate with our target audience and our message. Since Instagram and Facebook are closely tied together, it makes since to advertise here as well. Advertising on these three social media sites will help to create awareness of the Kentucky Bourbon Affair.

Email marketing also offers us a reliable, cost-effective way to reach our target audience. Email is a highly targeted way to reach our target audience. It gives the Bourbon Affair the opportunity to advertise to its target audience without its message being lost on those who are not fans of bourbon.

Outdoor

We chose to focus our outdoor advertising on two billboards in two main cities that surround the area where the Kentucky Bourbon Affair takes place. Our outdoor boards are solely focused in Louisville in Prospect and the area surrounding Churchill Downs. We believe these billboards placed in high traffic areas will prompt bourbon lovers in the areas surrounding Kentucky to travel to the state for the Bourbon Affair. These two locations in particular are close enough to the Affair that they will encourage residents or travelers simply passing through to visit the website for the Bourbon Affair in order to learn more about the event and to purchase tickets.

Search Engine Marketing

Google Adwords offers us the opportunity to reach an audience that is already looking for events in Louisville or bourbon-related festivals. Adwords is a program through Google that will help The Kentucky Bourbon Affair to appear at the top of a search result list. When a person located in Louisville, Chicago, Nashville, or St. Louis searches for bourbon festivals nearby, Google will direct them to the Kentucky Bourbon Affair. Adwords not only helps to spread awareness about the Affair, but also helps to reach an audience who are online for the sole purpose of buying tickets for events in their area.

Event Marketing

Part of our campaign involves advertising at Waterfront Wednesday, a musical festival held in Louisville on the last Wednesday of each month during the summer. Our plan is for the Kentucky Bourbon Affair to rent a booth at the festival to disburse pamphlets and other small gifts to those attending the festival. We believe this is an excellent opportunity for the Bourbon Affair to engage with their target market since the people who attend Waterfront Wednesday are already interested in outdoor festivals in Louisville.

Lifestyle Marketing

Advertising at Churchill Downs, particularly during the Kentucky Derby and the Kentucky Oaks races, will enable the Kentucky Bourbon Affair to engage with their target audience in a relaxed, alcohol focused setting. Set just a month before the Bourbon Affair, the Derby and Oaks races are a fantastic opportunity to get in last minute sales. Since it does take place so close to the Affair, this is not a strategy that can stand on its own, but rather one that can lead to the Affair selling any tickets they are left with the month before the event in order to maximize profit.

Partnering with high-end restaurants in Louisville such as Jeff Ruby’s, Ruth’s Chris, and Volare will provide the opportunity to reach the target audience at the restaurants they frequent, and also offer the restaurant a mutually beneficial promotion plan. These upscale restaurants will most certainly benefit from the Bourbon Affair bringing hundreds of wealthy customers into the state. When the bourbon fanatics attending the Affair decide to enjoy a meal while in Louisville, they are most likely going to consider these upscale restaurants over any other eatery the city has to offer.

Disbursing pamphlets at the Louisville Ballet and the Kentucky Center for the Arts performances offers us a unique opportunity to reach our target audience throughout the year. Performances of shows typically take place from October through June, a peak event being Brown-Forman’s production of “The Nutcracker” throughout December, offering advertising in key ticket-purchasing months. Advertising around the holidays encourages people to purchase tickets to the Affair for the bourbon lover in their life as a holiday present.

Most importantly, advertising in distilleries featured on the Bourbon Trail gives us the opportunity to make bourbon lovers aware of the Kentucky Bourbon Affair. The people who frequent distilleries as well as those who travel the Bourbon Trail, are already passionate, enthusiastic bourbon lovers who would love to experience six full days of celebrating and savoring bourbon. Our plan for advertising in distilleries is to make our pamphlets for the Affair available along the Bourbon Trail so our potential customers will be able to take the information home with them. These pamphlets will prompt the customer to access information about the Bourbon Affair in their home environment where they are most comfortable and willing to make travel plans.

Premium

Our plan includes a premium for all golden ticket buyers. This exclusive group will receive a basket containing snacks, a personalized note, a shot glass displaying the company’s logo and of course, miniature bottles of bourbon. We believe this premium will show the Bourbon Affair’s appreciation to the golden ticket buyers and encourage them to purchase tickets again in the future.

Evaluation

Increasing the awareness of the Kentucky Bourbon Affair is the most important goal of this advertising plan. Our plans for increasing awareness all focus on reaching the target audience and making the unique experience that is the Kentucky Bourbon Affair known to them. Our advertising team believes that once more bourbon lovers and fanatics are aware of the festival, ticket sales and attendance will increase.

The success of the campaign will be measured through evaluating the rate of sales during times when the campaign is running. This method will allow the Bourbon Affair to see which advertising vehicles are most effective. We will also be able to evaluate the campaign’s success based on the amount of views, clicks, and comments our promotional video and social media advertisements gain.