What I’ve learned about … selling Kiwi attitude
By Simon Young,
Idealog January/February 2007, page 100. Geoff Ross photograph by Alistair Guthrie
How Geoff Ross tells the Enzed story
New Zealand may be running out of attractive coastline properties, but there’s plenty of unique Kiwi attitude to go around. Nobody knows this better than Geoff Ross, who put New Zealandishness (yes, of course it’s a word) at the centre of the 42 Below brand. A former ad agency suit, Geoff began distilling vodka in a garage in 1996 and sold his first bottle in 1999. 42 Below launched in 2002 and since then has won a string of international awards and found its way into the world’s hippest bars.
So how does Ross give the world a taste of Kiwi?
Green is not enough
“The whole green thing is not enough. It helps for sure, but it’s just a nice introductory opening. Other people have trees and mountains and streams as well, but we’ve got to have something more than that. The world wants to know if we’ve got personality and skills and attitude.
“Sweden has vodka, the French Alps has vodka, there is Canadian vodka, there’s vodka from other pure places on earth, so we can’t just say ‘hey we’re from New Zealand, it’s pure down here.’ That’s going to be nowhere near enough.”
Get an attitude
“We chose what we wanted to express about New Zealand, which was a personality trait. We wanted to express this New Zealand attitude which was kind of an honest, non-PC, lovable larrikin. That’s what we liked the most, so that’s what we drew from.
“In the UK and the US they love the personality and irreverence. There’s heaps of vodka over there and they’re looking for a point of difference. People are so jaded with corporate blandness. They love the irreverence and the honesty that a little lovable rogue like New Zealand can exhibit. They love us for being naïve enough to say what we want—kind of like Croc Dundee goes to New York, this naïve honesty that people actually like.
“People are so jaded with corporate blandness. They love the irreverence and the honesty that a little lovable rogue like New Zealand can exhibit.”
“In Asia, however, they don’t get that, so we go more around the mountains, lakes and streams, glaciers—we weight our message a bit more to that. I don’t know, it’s a sense of humour thing. Asia responds better to the lakes and streams.”
Keep the mystique
“People know bugger-all about New Zealand. They know it’s a little island somewhere at the bottom of the world, and it had something to do with Lord of the Rings.
“Being unknown is kind of a positive, because Germany and the UK are known, but they’re large countries with large populations and large industries and therefore not pure. So an unknown at the bottom of the world is more likely to be pure. They don’t know that for sure, but they probably sense that because of its remoteness. Remoteness is a good thing.”
No-one wants an ugly Kiwi
“We always thought it’d be nice for people to discover 42 Below was from New Zealand as an added benefit, rather than the reason you drink it. It should be a very cool hot slick global brand, and then later you find out it’s from New Zealand as a bonus.”
Comments
Vincent
I like Geoff's idea of using New Zealand not as a provenance but an attitude or flavour. There are some things that fit the "Made in NZ" tag without needing to announce they come from NZ. For example, bungy doesn't need to say Made in NZ, becasue it embodies what NZ is all about. Adn when you find out that it has, that makes a lot of sense. Same with Burger Fuel and icebreaker. There are some things that don't make sense to be NZ branded, such as opera or high technolog—where a NZ association proabbly wouldn't help. But even Karen Walker, who claims to be international rather NZ, has a provenance that makes sense once you see her designs. I wonder what other products woudl benefit from being developed from NZ for a global audience that are not specifically NZ branded. What are the publishing equivalents of 42 Below, I often wonder …
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