Renju Kurien John

IIDE Super Session Topic

“Building a new Alcobeverage Brand and Category with a strong digital Presence”.

Renju Kurien John, Brand Manager Moonshine spoke at a supersession hosted by IIDE – Indian Institute of Digital Education on How to build a solid digital presence for a product like an “Alcohol Beverage”.
He started by talking about his journey before joining moonshine and post that, where he told us how his roles changed from working on events and occasions to looking after the brand’s marketing as a whole. He said that Moonshine as a company started to spread across seven states during covid including Maharashtra and Goa, to which he continued by saying that alcohol beverage is a complicated space to work on as it has a lot of restrictions and varies from different perspectives of a particular state.
He helped us understand the product they make in detail and how it came into existence being a home brewing project to actually becoming Asia’s first mead.
Talking about the history and making of meads he said that fermenting of honey and its legalization in Maharashtra helped them as well as the farmers while Sula Vineyards was changing perception about alcohol in India Mead is an ancient mythological alcohol beverage in India, to reference being shown in harry potter and game of thrones.
He then spoke about how Moonshine started their digital journey while introducing a new alcohol category during the launch acceptance in the market was important, and hence their digital strategy was always about starting to build the brands purpose by being honest to the followers by focusing on filling the audience with content of buckets of Product, Ingredient, Culture and Delight.
Talking about the digital presence of moonshine they gained about 25k followers over the 4 years. For LinkedIn they use the founder-forward strategy, taking a little young and quirky approach towards Twitter. While Ads have a lot of rules and regulations with social media in the industry.
In the Indian space brands usually use surrogates like music videos to promote beverages but they like to keep it organic while promoting and focusing on Packaging and branding as it is very important in the alcohol industry.
Each platform is different wherein Instagram has helped with most of the brand awareness while Linkedin helping with the credibility.
With different objectives, approaches and audiences, ”Liquid on lips is the formula in the industry decreasing the consumer journey”.
The foremost interesting thing he shared with the students was how Sharktank helped with a huge reach and awareness in the market for their brand. While he ended the session by saying we want to “Market as better beverages and not bitter beverages”.
#DigitalMarketing #BrandStrategy #ConsumerJourney