How we helped Tomatin tell a story about what really matters. Brand Repositioning Campaign for Tomatin.
How we helped Tomatin tell a story about what really matters.
Brand Repositioning Campaign for Tomatin, by MadeBrave.
Since 1897, Tomatin has been one of the most loved whisky brands in the Scottish Highlands.
Here, patience, a gentle hand and a passion for purity rule the day, and protection of their craft, their environment and particularly their community has long been at the heart of everything they do.
Now approaching their 125th year, Tomatin wanted a fresh look not just at the past, but at the future. Since we’re their lead creative agency, they asked us to evolve and challenge their brand identity in three key ways:
Post-pandemic, never has the world been more focused on the truly important things in life.
Amidst the pandemic panic, we found some subtle shifts in the category. Rather than the challenger brands being disruptive to the leaders, the most wild and convention-breaking work was being pushed by the biggest brands in the category: the very leaders we were trying to unseat.
Yet our testing found global audiences seemed to increasingly want the opposite: a whisky that met all the conventional tonal cues of a Scotch, but instead offered something deeper beneath the surface. They wanted not neon colours, gimmicks or flashy celebrities, but a sense of perspective, purpose and depth of character.
Love, family, friendship, memories – these are the things that make true moments that matter, and the very foundations which Tomatin has held true to, for 125 years.
Tomatin needed to be positioned as the whisky that believes in something more than just product or prestige. It should stand for those fleeting but joyous moments of true warmth: in flavour, in experience, and in rare meaningful memories with others.
To bring clarity and focus to the brand, we crystallised this positioning into a new platform line.
A brand film that told the story of what really matters – using mementos as our hero.
We carefully and respectfully refreshed the brand’s visual and verbal identity, bringing a more premium and distinctive sense of warmth and ‘to what matters’ to every touchpoint.
To help bring this to life externally and internally too, we developed a brand film. Mementos are a perfect reminder of what really matters – gifted, acquired, collected – however they come into a life they are present throughout the journey.
This same creative treatment was then the foundation of a targeted ATL (above the line, meaning paid mass media such as TV and cinema) consumer campaign to begin the long road to increased awareness and sales in the market.
This brought Tomatin onto TV and cinema advertising for the first time.
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