Pernod Ricard boosts marketing for Imperial

Seen here are Pernod Ricard’s Imperial Classics 12-years City Editions.

By Cho Mu-hyun

Pernod Ricard Korea said Sunday that the local marketing effort for its whiskey brand Imperial is yielding positive reaction from consumers.

The distilled beverage maker’s office here has advertised its whiskey differently for each city, launching different editions and embedding them with stories familiar with locals.

The most recent result was its release earlier this month of Imperial 17-years Jang Dong Gun Limited Edition exclusively for the southern city of Busan. The eponymous actor Jang Dong-gun is well loved in the city for his role in the movie “Friends,” in which he plays a gangster there.

Jang has been actively featured on Pernod Ricard’s advertisements since last April, said a company official, and the latest offering aim is to cement the Imperial brands power at the city that leads whiskey trends.

“The synergy between the brand powers of Imperial and Jang Dong-gun has garnered hot reactions from Busan consumers,” said the official.

The limited edition has Jang’s picture in gold on the front of the bottle and his signature on the back. Its bottle is sapphire colored and its wrap around the bottle neck is designed to look like a strip of film, a marked difference from the regular 17-years editions.

The Busan edition for Imperial is not the first of Pernod Ricard’s regional marketing.

Last November, the distilled beverage maker launched Imperial Classic 12-years City Editions that has six variants in design for cities Busan, Jeju, Daegu, Gwangju, Daejon and Pyongchang. Each version has the name of the city it is sold in on the wrap around the bottleneck and individual designs.

“The City Editions served the two purpose of increasing public interest in the city it represents and attract the consumers there,” said the company official.

He stressed that a large portion of the proceeds from these versions were donated or used for social activities for cities they were sold at as well, as part of its efforts to increase communication with different areas of Korea. Pernod Ricard will continue various social corporate responsibility (CSR) activities there as well, he said.

For instance, the profits for the Pyongchang edition went into building a mountain cycling track there. At Jeju it is spent on protecting the environment, and at Daejon it was used to make water quality monitoring devices.

“As a foreign company, to better understand Korea, we expanded our CSR activities outside the metropolitan areas of the capital to different regions,” said the official.