Kingfisher: Tweet God to win beer

On August 2, the brand will select the city that has got the maximum number of tweets and the 30 best tweets from the city will be gratified with the total amount of beer contributed during the week.

What if a tweet to Beer God could fetch 10 ml of beer? Kingfisher, one of India's premium beer brands, plans to flood one Indian city with litres of beer on International Beer Day, which is to be observed on August 2, this year.

The brand has launched a Twitter campaign where it is asking people to post a tweet using the hashtag #DearKFBeerGod. For this, Kingfisher has also launched a microsite (
http://www.kingfisherworld.com/beerday
) that features a virtual beer mug, and each tweet made with the hashtag will contribute to fill the mug with 10 ml of beer. The city which wins will be entitled to be served the same amount of beer which is used to fill the virtual mug. Top 30 tweeples who have participated from the winning city will be the ones between whom the total amount of beer will be divided.

The top 30 from the winning city will be decided by the brand on the basis of content and number of tweets.

Conceptualised by digital agency 22Feet, the campaign started on July 27 and will run till August, 1. The microsite hosts an app that syncs the visitors' Twitter IDs and allows them to tweet using the hashtag and the city they are tweeting from. As a tweet is made along with the city name, the virtual beer mug starts to fill, depending on the number of tweets.

Kingfisher, on August 2, will select the city that has got the maximum number of tweets and the 30 best tweets from the city will be gratified with the total amount of beer contributed during the week. Till the time of filing this report, the brand had already received 2466 tweets resulting in 24660 ml (24.66 litres) of beer.

Speaking to afaqs!, Samar Singh Sheikhawat, senior vice-president, marketing, United Breweries states that the brand has been celebrating International Beer Day every year in a unique way. "In 2011, we launched Heineken on in India on the International Beer Day. Similarly, we wanted to celebrate the day and who else should have done this apart from us. We decided to do a digital campaign as we wanted to make our consumers an integral part of the campaign," he adds.

Sheikhawat informs that so far, Kolkata is leading in terms of number of tweets, closely followed by Bengaluru and Mumbai as second and third, respectively. He says that on International Beer Day, the plan is to make Kingfisher as a brand or the hashtag initiated by it to trend in at least two major cities in the country.

Kingfisher has been quite active on the digital front. Currently, the brand's Facebook page has more than six million fans, making it one of the top 10 brands on Facebook in India (as per Socialbakers.com). Incidentally, this also makes Kingfisher the 3rd largest beer brand globally on Facebook. On the other hand, on Twitter, Kingfisher has a fair presence with about 33,000 followers.

According to a recent survey conducted by Qilo, a marketing communications consultancy, and online research-based advisory Juxt, among the beer brands, Kingfisher leads with 53 per cent of beer drinkers on the internet in India citing it as their favourite brand, followed by Haywards 5000 and Fosters, which together made up for less than half the number polled by Kingfisher.