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The marketer who steered Coors Light’s “cold” ad messaging for years is now taking the same approach to vodka. Andy England—who was chief marketing officer at MillerCoors from 2008 to 2015—is now CEO at Phillips Distilling, a Minnesota-based spirits marketer that under his watch is about to flood the market with new innovations, packaging and campaigns.
That includes a vodka brand called “Cubist” that is specially designed to be stored in the freezer—a ploy that plays off of the custom many vodka drinkers have of putting the booze in the icebox. Cubist packaging uses thermochromic technology that turns the bottle blue when its temperature drops to zero degrees Celsius or below. The brand, which will initially debut in Minnesota and Arizona in August, will use the tagline, “The World’s Most Refreshing Vodka.”
Sounds familiar? It should: Coors Light under England leaned into its classic tagline "the world's most refreshing beer," which was backed by packaging gimmicks such as cold-activated cans and bottles on which the mountains turn blue when the beer is cold.
“Many people like to put vodka in the freezer,” England says on the latest edition of Ad Age’s Marketer’s Brief podcast. “But as far as we can tell … nobody’s ever created a vodka that is made for the freezer. It’s almost like vodka manufacturers or vodka marketers put up with the fact that consumers put it in the freezer.”