Buckfast Tonic Wine

With a history that spans over 126 years, Buckfast was created by monks at Buckfast Abbey and is still overseen by them today. Until now, It has remained a staple in many Scottish and UK homes without ever relying on any consistent marketing practice.

Back to basics

We were approached by Buckfast to initially conduct a brainstorming exercise with a select group from their team. This workshop helped to discover what the potential benefits and risks were, understand where the brand sits currently and gain a stronger awareness of how Buckfast is perceived – based on what they felt needed to change.

During this process, we also interviewed a selection of professionals from the industry to gain an external perspective on how the brand and product are perceived by industry leaders.

Don’t just take our word for it

“Rooster recognised the tradition, mystery and heritage behind our brand, distilling it back to its core elements to emphasise our special history. We chose Rooster because they believe in the journey we need to take to bring Buckfast to a position we’ve never been in before.”

Graham Chart, Financial Director at Buckfast

Sharing the love for Buckfast

An essential factor we considered was ensuring that any campaign material and messaging would need to grow the product’s reach without alienating the existing fanbase – those who love Buckfast partly for its lack of marketing and cult status.

Having explored a variety of different campaign options, playing on the history of the product, its elusive nature to date, smell, taste and overall versatility of the drink, we concluded that the strongest selling point was its traditional aesthetic, the core brand colour (Buckfast yellow).

We produced a CGI rendering of their 70cl bottle to avoid any of the imperfections that come with photographing glass, and combined it with the core brand logo and new key message: ‘’Discover the Legend at buckfast.com’’ This message plays on its existing identity and leads customers to their new website, which Rooster designed and built alongside the campaign.

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