Bacardi invests nearly 50% into experiential marketing: Ayaesha Gooptu

As the wedding and festive season arrive, liquor brands are increasingly looking to connect with audiences. 

Ayaesha Gooptu, Head of Domestic Spirits and RTD for Bacardi India shared that they are aggressively looking to make the most of the Oct-Nov-Dec quarter when everyone steps out either to party, attend a wedding or celebrate a festival via on-ground interactive events which create strong brand value for Bacardi. 

Bacardi India recently hosted a festival called Legacy Rewind 2024 that took the audience on a nostalgic journey through iconic music of India, spanning several decades. Attendees also got to explore the folklore flea market, which featured curated Indian crafts along with street food and carnival games. 

“On-ground events such as these help us position our brand strongly in the market which helps us physically be able to connect with our audience and give them a taste of our brand ethos. We invest almost 50% of our marketing efforts into experiential,” she said.

For Bacardi, the primary motive of Legacy Rewind was for it to be a concert-based event and giving consumers a different kind of experience.

Bacardi’s oldest and most successful experiential marketing experiment was NH7 Weekender which has given great learnings to the brand. The most important aspect is to make your experience stand out, more so when every other brand is trying to ace the experiential marketing game. 

Gooptu explained, “We do a lot of consumer research to try and understand what consumers are looking for and that's what we get them. Innovation, expansion and listening to consumers, I think is the key important to be relevant with them.” 

Next, Gooptu mentioned how post Covid, Indians are into revenge lifestyle. This translates to a situation where since they weren’t able to move out of their confined spaces for about two years, they now want to be able to move out even more and live their life as it comes.

“People have come back to concerts and experiences with a vengeance. They've missed two years, they don't want to miss any more, and they want to make up for the two years that they've missed,” she shared.

Gooptu said they actually speak to consumers a lot during their entire course of building campaigns, etc. and that is when they hear consumers and give them back exactly what they're asking for. So, Legacy Rewind is something that Bacardi is giving back to their consumers exactly what they needed.

This is also the reason why the rise of concert culture has taken place. “Brands like ours are making the most of this trend by hosting such events not just in metro cities like Delhi but also Lucknow and Hyderabad.”

When it comes to other trending consumer behaviour shifts, Gooptu believes people are now more welcoming to experimentational to newer experiences and even flavours of liquor, which fosters an environment for liquor brands to be more innovative.

But, this situation of the market also gives rise to competition as new age brands emerge with unique flavours. On this, Gooptu is of the opinion that competition is good. “It's always good to have people around because it just means that consumers are asking for all of us. That's why there are so many of us who exist today in the market.

“It means that together, we can give back to consumers in whichever way we want to. And we don't need perturbed competition. We just want to do what we think is right for our set of consumers. Now, how we do that is, we just listen to them and bring to them exactly the best possible thing that they are looking for. Similarly, the competition does it in their own way,” she added.

In the coming times, Gooptu considers Legacy Rewind is just the beginning and they are hoping that they can make this only bigger and better as they go forward.

She concluded, “We don't want to do too many new things because, if we know that something is working right, we just want to amplify it in terms of taking it across locations and more. In terms of RTD, the game is to constantly innovate and bring something new. So that's what we focus on.”