Absolut: Biography of a Bottle

Rating:
Summary: The Form of Pure Image!
Review: In Absolut: Biography of a Bottle, Mr. Hamilton has written a thorough, fascinating account of how one of the most popular brands in the United States was established in the last 22 years. This book is a must read for anyone who has enjoyed the famous Absolut advertising campaign featuring the bottle shape, and those who want to understand more about the process of successful brand building.

I was an executive at Heublein, makers of market-leading Smirnoff Vodka, from 1974-1977, and found this story fascinating for how overwhelming odds against success were overcome. In this review, I will add some perspective that the author omitted.

Liquor is one of the most difficult areas in which to create a new consumer brand. The hurdles are many. You cannot advertise on television or radio. Most people are not very experimental in the liquor they will try. You cannot go door-to-door dropping off samples like soap powder. Distribution is very expensive and hard to acquire. Establishing profitability with a new brand can take many years, and there are many failures. As a result, the market leader in most categories in 1950 is still the market leading brand today. For imported spirits, the country viewed as the most "legitimate" historical source always dominated the imported category. For vodka, what country do you think of? Certainly, Sweden was probably not first in your mind in 1978.

Absolut was brilliantly developed, but Absolut was also lucky. As the Cold War continued and the Afghanistan War began, Americans had reason to question their ties to Stolychnaya, which had been the leading vodka import. President Reagan's characterization of the U.S.S.R. as an "evil empire" certainly aided that perceptual shift. Absolut had been established by that time on a brand platform of being different, a classy version of the Marlboro cowboy. The style of the product, the package, and the advertising all "whispered" to you about being subtly different while all the other vodkas shouted in vibrant colors with gaudy labels in similar bottles.

Interestingly, Heublein used a very similar approach to that employed by Absolut with packaging and positioning to build its mustard, Grey Poupon, into the market leader at the same time that the company was ignoring Absolut. The story of Grey Poupon is developed in part in The 2,000 Percent Solution.

What is even more remarkable is that Absolut was developed to be an export brand without a base in Sweden by the national Liquor Monopoly there, which had a strong heritage of keeping drinking under control. At many key points in the brand's development, the Swedes took large financial risks with little prospect of success. Who says that government agencies cannot be entrepreneurial? You will enjoy reading about Lars Lindmark who spear-headed this initiative as head of the Monopoly.

But the heart and beauty of this story is how the brand platform, positioning, and the rest were established. The results were astonishingly good, but the process was inevitably messy. Most consumers have not thought very much about how brands come to be like our friends. This book lays out many of the best practices involved. Get many of the top creative people involved, let them compete for inspiration, test out the results, and keep refining around the core ideas that resonate the most strongly with some people. I was extremely impressed by the role that Gunnar Broman played in the early development of the brand as head of the Swedish agency, Carlsson and Broman. Most brands are mostly developed by internal staff. Quite simply, an advertising agency usually doesn't have the skill to pull off all parts of the task. N.W. Ayer also helped a lot. But what will impress you is how many people contributed in important ways. Much of the advertising we now admire was developed at TBWA, which was the successor agency after a conflict occurred for N.W. Ayer. The task of finding an importer was long and involved. Dichter deserves a lot of credit for establishing the right research methods to find people who were deeply interested in the brand, despite many people being turned off by it. With a brand, you shouldn't try to please everyone.

The bottle stories are priceless. I won't spoil them by telling you about them in detail. But you will find that the developers of Absolut vodka had to overcome a lot of stalled thinking on the part of those they were working with. You will love the many photographs of the bottles and advertising while they were under development, including the famous Andy Warhol ad.

There is another personal reason why I enjoyed this book. Our older daughter (now in her third year in medical school) is very anti-drinking. Despite this, the walls of her room during high school were papered with Absolut ads. For one birthday, I gave her an empty Absolut bottle, which is still in her room at home. This deep impression of an advertising campaign on an anti-alcohol teenager had always impressed me. Reading this book helped me to better understand her attraction to the campaign, and to understand her better.

After you finish this exciting story about developing this fun brand, ask yourself how you can apply the lessons here to making an important task something that everyone wants to do. Who can help you with that? What is the purest form of the concept?

Have Absolut pleasure from this book!

Rating:
Summary: Absolut Creativity!
Review: Mr. Hamilton has written a thorough, fascinating account of how one of the most popular brands in the United States was established in the last 22 years. This book is a must read for anyone who has enjoyed the famous Absolut advertising campaign featuring the bottle shape, and those who want to understand more about the process of successful brand building.

I was an executive at Heublein, makers of market-leading Smirnoff Vodka, from 1974-1977, and found this story fascinating for how overwhelming odds against success were overcome. In this review, I will add some perspective that the author omitted.

Liquor is one of the most difficult areas in which to create a new consumer brand. The hurdles are many. You cannot advertise on television or radio. Most people are not very experimental in the liquor they will try. You cannot go door-to-door dropping off samples like soap powder. Distribution is very expensive and hard to acquire. Establishing profitability with a new brand can take many years, and there are many failures. As a result, the market leader in most categories in 1950 is still the market leading brand today. For imported spirits, the country viewed as the most "legitimate" historical source always dominated the imported category. For vodka, what country do you think of? Certainly, Sweden was probably not first in your mind in 1978.

Absolut was brilliantly developed, but Absolut was also lucky. As the Cold War continued and the Afghanistan War began, Americans had reason to question their ties to Stolychnaya, which had been the leading vodka import. President Reagan's characterization of the U.S.S.R. as an "evil empire" certainly aided that perceptual shift. Absolut had been established by that time on a brand platform of being different, a classy version of the Marlboro cowboy. The style of the product, the package, and the advertising all "whispered" to you about being subtly different while all the other vodkas shouted in vibrant colors with gaudy labels in similar bottles.

Interestingly, Heublein used a very similar approach to that employed by Absolut with packaging and positioning to build its mustard, Grey Poupon, into the market leader at the same time that the company was ignoring Absolut. The story of Grey Poupon is developed in part in The 2,000 Percent Solution.

What is even more remarkable is that Absolut was developed to be an export brand without a base in Sweden by the national Liquor Monopoly there, which had a strong heritage of keeping drinking under control. At many key points in the brand's development, the Swedes took large financial risks with little prospect of success. Who says that government agencies cannot be entrepreneurial? You will enjoy reading about Lars Lindmark who spear-headed this initiative as head of the Monopoly.

But the heart and beauty of this story is how the brand platform, positioning, and the rest were established. The results were astonishingly good, but the process was inevitably messy. Most consumers have not thought very much about how brands come to be like our friends. This book lays out many of the best practices involved. Get many of the top creative people involved, let them compete for inspiration, test out the results, and keep refining around the core ideas that resonate the most strongly with some people. I was extremely impressed by the role that Gunnar Broman played in the early development of the brand as head of the Swedish agency, Carlsson and Broman. Most brands are mostly developed by internal staff. Quite simply, an advertising agency usually doesn't have the skill to pull off all parts of the task. N.W. Ayer also helped a lot. But what will impress you is how many people contributed in important ways. Much of the advertising we now admire was developed at TBWA, which was the successor agency after a conflict occurred for N.W. Ayer. The task of finding an importer was long and involved. Dichter deserves a lot of credit for establishing the right research methods to find people who were deeply interested in the brand, despite many people being turned off by it. With a brand, you shouldn't try to please everyone.

The bottle stories are priceless. I won't spoil them by telling you about them in detail. But you will find that the developers of Absolut vodka had to overcome a lot of stalled thinking on the part of those they were working with. You will love the many photographs of the bottles and advertising while they were under development, including the famous Andy Warhol ad.

There is another personal reason why I enjoyed this book. Our older daughter (now in her third year in medical school) is very anti-drinking. Despite this, the walls of her room during high school were papered with Absolut ads. For one birthday, I gave her an empty Absolut bottle, which is still in her room at home. This deep impression of an advertising campaign on an anti-alcohol teenager had always impressed me. Reading this book helped me to better understand her attraction to the campaign, and to understand her better.

After you finish this exciting story about developing this fun brand, ask yourself how you can apply the lessons here to making your own personal image more appealing and vibrant. Who do you want to appeal to? Who can help you with that?

Have Absolut pleasure from this book! Skoal!

Rating:
Summary: everything i wanted it to be
Review: published in '96, it has, as far as i can tell, just about every absolut ad made until the books publication. divided into categories by special artist, or ad period, the images are well sized and are accompanied by a short caption talking about the inspiration behind the concept of the ad.
an excellent coffee table book for anyone who loves the vodka or anyone who loves creative design and advertising. or, if you're like me, both.

Rating:
Summary: interesting tale, uncomfortable read
Review: The advertising campaign for ABSOLUT Swedish vodka has captured the attention of millions. The promotional program for the product has been highly creative, captivating, and unquestionably successful. Now ranked as the #1 imported vodka in the United States, ABSOLUT is celebrating its 20 year anniversary.

The story behind the bottle, the product, and the marketing campaign is interesting, as might be expected. Most behind-the-scenes looks produce surprises, intrigue, and stories that cause readers to shake their heads in wonderment. ABSOLUT is no exception.

Carl Hamilton is described as one of Sweden's most provocative and original literary voices. He's also host of the critically acclaimed television show, Dilemma, a political commentator, and a columnist for Scandinavia's largest popular newspaper. With this build-up of the author, the reader would expect an intriguing book that would be a joy to read. Even the cover of the book is designed to reflect the advertising image of black and white simplicity.

The book does tell a good story-about the bottle, the name, the development of the product, and the marketing campaign. Unfortunately, I was not as impressed by the book itself as I wanted to be. I was disappointed. While I recognize that the book will sell because of the popularity of the product it chronicles, the writing left me wanting.

Describing this book as a biography suggests a certain amount of genealogical research to illuminate the subject of the work. As family trees are researched, people uncover branches that really don't fit into the mainstream of the family's development. These side stories are typically left out of books that document family histories, or they're archived outside the main text. Not so with this biography: all that information is served to the reader in a number of seemingly unrelated stories that don't seem to fit in the flow. An endorsement on the back cover of ABSOLUT suggests that "the author superbly swings from one scene to another." My description of this experience would be less glowing; I found the side trips distracting, confusing, and sometimes irrelevant. It felt like Hamilton was weaving in every bit of research he had, force-fitting as necessary to fill the book.

I was troubled by the use of profanity in ABSOLUT. One would not expect to find four letter words seasoning a business biography. Perhaps this is the style of Texere, a new publishing company, but the language didn't set well with me. There are ten incidents in the first 50 pages of the book where the author uses words that might get our kids a dose of soap in the mouth or at least a good talking-to. If you don't mind reading the "f" word in a business book, it won't bother you. It annoyed me, particularly as I observed that the point could have been made just fine without the profanity.

ABSOLUT does tell an interesting tale, particularly if you're interested in the reality behind the legend of a popular product. The book is hybrid of a business history, a biography, and expose, if you don't let the bumpy writing get in your way.