A Beach Ad With a Difference From Flensburger

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Flensburger beer is a fine example of a small brand that’s made the most of some important, intangible assets, turning things like its location and its style of bottle into brand assets, and creating ads which make the most of them.

The beer is brewed in Flensburg, Germany’s Northernmost town, on the Danish border and on the edge of the Baltic Sea. Flensburger has taken that remote location and chosen to emphasise its uniqueness, with the atmosphere of the lonely Baltic coast coming across strongly in this witty new ad, “Neulich mit Spritz”

A man is returning from a beach bar, to a woman and an older man, all sitting on a lonesome beach swing. He brings with him a bottle of Flensburger and a spritz cocktail, and offers the cocktail to the woman. She is not impressed, and simply takes the beer instead. The man trudges back to the bar, the woman and older man open their bottles, and we then see all three drinking Flensburger on the swing.

It’s a very dry, humorous vignette – one of the comments on our Test Your Ad report even highlights the “dry Northern German humor” – and a style of advertising that suits the odd location. Flensburger have taken their heritage and local culture and successfully made it part of their brand identity.

The other intangible asset at play in this ad is the “plop” sound of the Flensburger bottle opening. Flensburger use traditional, swing-top beer bottles, an unusual choice in an industry dominated by bottle caps. But as with the location, they’ve made that unusual property part of their brand image. The “plop” sound features strongly in the ad, as it has done in Flensburger commercials for years, so it’s become part of their brand identity.

It all ads up to an ad that’s funny and distinctive in approach and brand style. On Test Your Ad “Neulich mit Sprits” outperforms the German norm on every metric, with a very good 3.9-Star Rating (predicting long-term business impact) and strong short-term Spike Rating and rapid-recognition Brand Fluency. The ad does exceptionally well on Emotional Intensity, generating a much stronger reaction than most German ads. As the key attributes and types of happiness charts tell us, that’s down to its humor.

Flensburger are a small, family-owned business in a location far from the big cities. But like whisky brands from remote Scottish islands they’ve managed to turn that into an asset, building a brand with a strong link to local culture and a distinctive humorous style. And they’ve done the same with their old-fashioned packaging. It’s a classic case of a small brand making the most of the things that make them truly unique, instead of chasing category conventions and losing distinctiveness