Pressure to stay relevant is ever-mounting for mainstream beers. Thanks in part to the premiumisation and growth of craft beer, and the overall decline in beer and alcohol sales in the past decade. Even as the biggest brand in the New Zealand beer market, Speight’s was feeling the stress of a 1% loss in total volume of sales, as even though more New Zealanders are buying Speight’s, they’re buying less quantity.

Speight’s needed to encourage more beer drinkers to consider them on more occasions. Off the back of a wider campaign around saying cheers to mates who’ve helped you in a tight spot, Speight’s ran a supplementary campaign that allowed fans to dynamically change the Speight’s iconic three star label in a really personal way.

Through a microsite, customers changed the Speight’s label, putting their mate's name there instead. To keep Cheers Beers consistent with overarching brand messaging, Speight’s made a play on their tagline, ‘Good on ya mate’, changing bottle labels to ‘Good on ya [Name]’ along with an option to have a personalised message of thanks.

Cheers Beers was the first-ever personalised campaign run by Speight’s and it was wildly successful, exceeding all KPI targets over the 5-week period. In that time they saw 54,000 unique website visits, a 216% sales increase on orders, a conversion rate of 11% of visits to purchase on the ecommerce site (target was 7%).

Data also revealed that, even with 6,526 personalised boxes of Cheers Beers sold, the limited edition offer did not cannibalise on regular Gold Medal Ale 12-pack box sales during that time. In fact, the beer drinking audience lifted from 13% to 17.8%, meaning that over 60,000 Kiwis bought Speight’s in the campaign period. In the end, they not only met, but surpassed brand challenges by a longshot.