Chester Brandes: The saviour of Sobieski Vodka

Sobieski Vodka was the 7th largest vodka brand in the world when Chester Brandes was approached by Groupe BelvÈdËre to market it as a global brand. Witha career spanning over 30 years in the spirits industry, he was well-placed to take the Polish vodka from eastern Europe to a worldwide market. As Vice President of International Markets at Cruzan Ltd until January 2007, Brandes conceived and executed the launch of Cruzan Rum. Prior to that, he spent 12 years working for the Altia Group, owner of Finlandia Vodka - for most of those years as President and CEO. His input in the redesign of the Finlandia bottle and the development of new image enhancing advertising helped reposition the vodka among the leading premium imported vodkas in the US. Now, Brandes is doing the same for Sobieski vodka, which was launched in the US in August 2007. How did you repackage Sobieski for the US market? It's not exactly an uncompetitive category. There were something like 255 vodka introductions in the last five years. So how do we differentiate ourselves from the rest of the pack? We were an honest, nice, clean, excellent product. We made the decision that we were going to over-deliver on quality at an affordable price point. Named after Poland's most revered monarch, King Jan III Sobieski, the brand has an interesting heritage. How did the advertising campaign play on that? We're a world brand; we exist in our country of origin, which you can't say about many other brands that are successful. We felt we had a good story, a good heritage. The next challenge was the fact that we needed a real personality for this brand. We chose the message: "You don't have to spend a King's ransom to get a great bottle of vodka." The global launch of Sobieski came at an interesting time with regard to the economy. How did you adapt to this? This is a strategy that we adopted before the meltdown in the economy in the US. Our development was not hindered as a result of the downfall in the economy in 2008. Consumers started down trading in a sense, not spending as much money on super premium brands - and that naturally had a positive impact on our development, but that certainly wasn't planned. What we didwas we adapted; we tweaked the advertising strategy somewhat. The campaign in 2009 is playing off a lot of the negative economic happenstance in 2008. Sobieski Vodka recently agreed to a partnership with Madison Square Garden - explain how that has helped the brand. From our perspective, the relationship with Madison Square Garden is not necessarily about how much Sobieski vodka we sell at Madison Square Garden each year. It's more the fact that it is a global icon in terms of a venue and the fact that they would want to associate themselves with a new brand like ours - it gives us an enormous amount of credibility. Are you working on diversifying the product range at all? There are orange flavoured vodkas but nobody's ever produced a vodka from oranges, so we decided that might be an interesting idea. We could certainly stir up some interest and excitement and create a destination product at first. It's called 4 Orange Premium Vodka and it's made from four different kinds of oranges from Peace River Valley in Central Florida. We have the facility, we have the capability, why not try and do something totally different? So we anticipate launching that in September. For more information on Sobieski Vodka visit: www.vodkasobieski.com

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