How Veuve Clicquot’s CMO is keeping the 250-year old brand relevant
The yellow-label champagne brand is celebrating its 250-year anniversary. Its chief marketing and communications officer Carole Bildé says selling a lifestyle is key to its success.
The Veuve Cliquot Solaire Culture exhibition will open in London on May 12 / Veuve Cliquot
Veuve Clicquot has opened an exhibition in London Piccadilly from May 12 to June 6 to mark its 250-year anniversary. The traveling Solaire Culture exhibition debuted in Tokyo and Los Angeles in 2022 featuring locally commissioned artists and designers.
The heritage project celebrates the legacy of Madame Clicquot who took over the business in 1805 and invented vintage and rose champagne. An all-female team curated the exhibition and female-only artists were commissioned for it as a nod to Madame Clicquot.
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Carole Bildé, who joined in 2018, is behind the anniversary campaign. She started the project by digging into the Veuve Clicquot archives. “We discovered this richness and all these links to design and beautiful objects, and nobody knows about this. It’s an amazing history with amazing names from the design world like Andree Putman, and Tom Dixon,” she says. “The starting point was asking how we make people know the fantastic history behind this brand.”
It was crucial to Bildé to give Veuve Clicquot’s history a fresh take. “We didn’t want to do something [that felt like] a museum, we wanted to give it a contemporary touch and not something stuck in the past, but something vibrant,” she says. “We wanted to spread this idea of optimism and sunshine and light to the world.”
Contemporary artists were tasked with creating modern interpretations of Madame Clicquot and her inventions. This included a portrait of her in the 1990s and a Manga retelling of the creation of vintage champagne by Moyoco Anno.
Bildé has previously worked at agencies Ogilvy and BETC, as well as the French fashion brand Chloe. Now at Veuve Clicquot, she likes to ask: “What would the world miss about a brand if it had to disappear”. For the champagne brand, Bildé says it would be the yellow color on the label – “the yellow is the starting point of everything”.
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The yellow brand asset is supposed to represent the rising sun and for the exhibition, it’s splashed everywhere. Bildé says the team wanted to bring “optimism, sun and light” to the heart of London. “It’s all about the purpose and the world, who you are, where you are coming from and also what you’re bringing to the world, in a very humble way,” she adds.
Veuve Clicquot’s strategy is to market itself beyond just champagne and sell its brand as a lifestyle. The brand is promoting a “particular way of life,” Bildé explains, “something very chic and cool at the same time – chic and barefoot I like to say.”
Experience marketing and merchandising is key to selling Veuve as a lifestyle and creating “emotional bonds” to the brand. Along with the traveling 250-year anniversary exhibition, in 2022, Veuve Clicquot opened its first hotel in Australia’s Bryon Bay and took over the Orient Express from Reims and Venice with passengers encouraged to watch the sun rise over the Swiss Alpes. Partnerships like the ones with Smeg fridges and the French jacket brand K-Way are also a part of this strategy.
Bildé admits she’s “obsessed” with making sure the brand exists beyond the wine and spirits space but for people to “discover” Veuve in fashion and design. “There is a tradition of marketing champagne for celebration it’s a wine and a fantastic wine and it should accompany dinner and be enjoyed and give a fresh take on champagne and it should exist in this world of gastronomy, fashion, design and luxury.”