Look at me / While the main point of this campaign is to promote responsible drinking, by visually differentiating itself from its competitors Aguila is more likely to catch people’s attention and drive sales at the point of purchase. In Les Binet and Sarah Carter’s book How Not to Plan: 66 Ways to Screw Up, the Adam&eve DDB duo stress that most people don’t devote much brainpower to what they buy but that people are led by feelings, hunches and intuitions. Their advice: ‘Create brands that stand out, even when people aren’t interested in them. Create an emotional “halo” to influence people who don’t care about our products. And then provide rational arguments to convince the few people who do care. At the right time – and when they are interested […] Adding interest to things that people don’t care about is one of the most important functions of advertising.’
By grabbing people’s attention and then giving people a reason to purchase the product (i.e. they get something free in return), Aguila is able to influence people’s buying behaviour to drive the purchase of its own product.
A nudge in the right direction / One of AB InBev’s Global Smart Drinking Goals is to reduce the harmful use of alcohol by at least 10% by the end of 2020. However, simply telling your customers to be responsible when drinking is hard.
According to behaviour scientist David Halpern, in his book Inside the Nudge Unit: How small changes can make a big difference, if you want to encourage a behavioural change without mandating or instructing it, you can do it by ‘mak[ing] it easy, attractive, harness[ing] social influence and choos[ing] a time when most receptive’. In this case, Aguila is able to ‘nudge’ people towards drinking more responsibly by offering people free products in a simple, fun way, at a time when they are more likely to listen to the message - all the while maintaining a supportive, rather than condescending tone towards is target market.
