Can a bet on beer help SodaStream push forward its turnaround mission?
Turning water into beer may sound like the stuff of miracles, but Sodastream is staking future success on a device that does exactly that.
Last week the brand announced the launch of a new beer system that lets people craft their own alcoholic drinks at home, as the company continues to turn around its fortunes after suffering from plummeting sales of its sugary, syrup-based drinks.
Despite working over recent months to position itself as a sparkling water dispenser – a move that led to a 36 per cent rise in UK sales for the first three months of 2016 – SodaStream is now hoping to appeal to the prospering craft beer sector and tap in to the appetite of customisation and curation according to Yulia Ackerman, global PR, SodaStream.
“You can see in many industries that consumers are going for customisation and make it your own,” she told The Drum. “We have it in TV in Netflix and we have it in SodaStream and this is something that is also moving to the beer industry so we’ve decided to also tap in to that.”
The Beer Bar uses sparkling water and a unique beer concentrate to create a home crafted beer. The first drink out of the Beer Bar is the Blondie, which contains 4.5 per cent alcohol by volume, the average level found in most global beer brands.
While it may seem a bizarre move for a brand that is trying to appeal to health-conscious consumers, SodaStream hopes that the Beer Bar, which the company is marketing as a separate brand, will appeal to everybody of drinking age that “likes to play” with their kitchen appliances.
Also speaking to The Drum Maayan Nave, global chief communications at SodaStream said that in terms of targeting the Beer Bar is “definitely good for everybody”.
“When you talk about the world of alcohol, and when you are talking about home brewing it’s for everybody that likes to play with their kitchen appliances and try out new stuff. We launched in Germany and Switzerland, which are beer capitals, but we know that it has a chance pretty much everywhere, even if you’re not really into alcohol because it’s a playful experience and the taste is great.”
While plans for marketing and advertising the Beer Bar are currently being firmed up ahead of a wider launch, SodaStream will run all communications separately to its overall brand, most likely to keep its newly introduced healthy position clearly defined.
Separately, the brand is exploring opportunities with the Internet of Things and connected devices and has a “very vivid” R&D Innovation Lab testing and playing with different technologies to improve sustainability and design.
Speaking about the future of the brand, Nave added that over the coming years it will focus on sustainability, IoT and “slick” design.
“If I had to bet in how SodaStream will look in two to three years it will be a combination of those three and a very updated design of the machine which we continue to develop over time and trying to be very accurate what our consumers demand.”
Last November SodaStream’s third-quarter profit plummeted by 76 per cent from $9.5m to $2.2m. However, the company showed signs of improvement after focusing its marketing on sparkling water when in the fourth quarter it reported an income of $2.83m compared with a loss of $8.19m during the same period in 2015.