Café Drambuie activation finds new fans at Puttgarden Border Shop

 Drambuie has extended its latest Café Drambuie retail activation for the Nordics region, in partnership with Scandlines in the Puttgarden Border Shop. 

The travel retail concept features a café bar and a barista on hand to serve a choice of three delicious coffee cocktails to treat travellers as part of a Drambuie 1L bottle price promotion in the run up to the Christmas season. The trial is a continuation of the William Grant & Sons-owned brand’s initial pop-up activation at London Heathrow in October. 

Drambuie positioned its new activation concept, a ‘coffeehouse with a whisky twist’, as a sampling opportunity on the cross-border shopping journey, mainly targeting Swedish and Danish travellers crossing via Germany.  Here, visitors have been able to discover three tempting new ways to serve Drambuie: Drambuie Iced Espresso, Drambuie Iced Coffee and Drambuie Coffee Tonic.  The easy to mix coffee cocktails have been created for coffee and cocktail lovers and to help the brand understand how customers react to the new serves.

The gift with purchase (GWP) offer that Drambuie introduced at the Heathrow promotion is also available at Puttgarden. The miniature whole-bean coffee sack and grinder have helped draw attention to the promotion with customers encouraged to make their own cocktails at home after sampling the new Drambuie serves. One visitor commented: “It's a very easy drink (Drambuie Espresso) to make, and it tastes delicious!” 

In-store for six weeks from 4 November to 12 December, Drambuie sales have seen an impressive uplift. Plus, customer feedback during the promotion in-store has highlighted very good levels of consumer awareness for the Drambuie brand (62% have heard of Drambuie) and over half (53%), would recommend one of the new Drambuie serves to friends. After tasting the cocktails, 80% of customers liked the new serve they tried and 98% agreed they would try it in a bar or at home. 

Hanh Bui, Trade Marketing Manager, said of the Puttgarden Border Shop activation: “In the first few weeks of the activation we’ve seen sales increase significantly. The promotion really resonates with customers who are not only sampling the new Drambuie serves, they are making purchases, because they want to try the cocktails themselves – 98% of samplers told us they were inspired by the serves and they would make their favourite Drambuie cocktail at home.”