History: Cabin Fever Maple Whiskey is an 80 proof whiskey originally produced in New Hampshire. What started out as a back yard hobby has quickly turned into a successful family business. After traveling through different parts of the world and trying local Spirits, Rob Robillard decided that New England needed a local Spirit of it's own. "You can easily identify Scotch with Scotland, Tequila with Mexico, and Bourbon with The South. That trend extends all the way down to such roots and fruits as Icelandic Moss. Now being a man of reason, Rob sensed immediately that a Maple Whisky was going to taste a whole heck of a lot better than one derived from Icelandic Moss. From that point forward, the Cabin Fever project was underway, (cabinfever.com)"Rob brought on board his wife Melissa, brother John and sister-in-law Julie to help create the perfect recipe. After making and testing several recipes, and sounding a bit like Goldie Locks, they were all deemed either too sweet, not sweet enough or too weak. Finally, after 3 years and countless "Marketing Unfocused Groups" (aka: volunteer taste testers), they created the recipe that is today's Cabin Fever. Rob, Melissa, John and Julie Robillard are now the proud owners of Custom Spirits, LLC.
Grassroots Marketing: With full time jobs and little to no budget, The Robillards had to market their product the old fashioned way; Grassroots Marketing. In their free time, they literally went door-to-door offering samples and tastings of their product to anyone that would try it. With their target market being males and females between the ages of 21-35, they went to bars, liquor stores, clubs, sports events and any other place they could think of. And in order to get the word out to where they would be heading next, they turned to Facebook. Along with the Cabin Fever fan page, each Robillard had their own Facebook page that they would post tastings on and send out event invitations to friends and family. Soon, Julie Robillard became, Julie CabinFever Robillard on Facebook, and went from a few hundred friends, to 3,085 friends as of March 15, 2011. That's about 1,000 more friends than the official Cabin Fever Facebook page. Her personal Facebook page has become the unofficial Cabin Fever page where friends, family and Cabin Fever fans can post all things Cabin Fever. And when someone posts a question or a comment, Julie personally responds. Her cell phone number is posted on her page, and if you call her with a question, she will call you back with an answer.
People are encouraged to post pictures, add their favorite Cabin Fever Recipe, tell their favorite Cabin Fever related story and spread the word about Cabin Fever. And they do!
The Robillards also use Twitter to market Cabin Fever. Julie's Twitter account is strictly to promote Cabin Fever and announce events. She has 122 followers, so it doesn't have the same impact as Facebook for Cabin Fever.
Join Cabin Fever on St.Patricks Day at Cigar Masters Worcester with the Tom Dixon Band, Friday night at Amesbury... http://fb.me/MteG82yI
Social Media Monitoring: To monitor Cabin Fever in social media, I used several different resources. Along with Flickr, Youtube and Facebook, I also used IceRocket, google.com/insights/search, Social Mention, Yahoo!Pipes, Addictomatic, Twazzup, and blogsearch.google.com. I found there to be growing talk about Cabin Fever in the Groundswell.
Through google blog search, there were quite a few people talking about Cabin Fever, and almost all of it was positive. Here's what a few people are blogging about Cabin Fever, including one man talking about buying his father Cabin Fever for his birthday, and the other posted on a New Hampshire bloggers site on March 9, 2011
"visited over at my folks place with the family, my sister and her husband. my dad's birthday is this week - so Holly baked a kickass carrot cake! we got my dad a bottle of Cabin Fever for his birthday. we picked a bottle up for a cake over the christmas holiday and found it was just awesome stuff! my dad had some last week (he's not a whiskey drinker much) and mentioned he wanted to take a bottle down to the keys for the trip coming up. figured we'd just pick it up and he wouldn't forget it. if you haven't had the stuff - try it. it's maple infused whiskey and is something really fantastic!" (bobbyroastbeef's blog).
Most creative maple syrup uses:
I have a maple flavored something that is amazing... but I didn't make it. Cabin Fever Whiskey. Made right here in NH. Who ever thought of that was a genius. -Lisa (nh.com blogger).
I found a few Cabin Fever related videos on Youtube. The top one was a commercial made by the owners of Cabin Fever. It has 964 views, 3 'likes' and 0 'dislikes,' and two comments, which are both positive. The other video is from an episode of 'Cigar Think Tank.' It's over 12 minutes long, has only 33 views, 0 comments, and doesn't mention Cabin Fever until several minutes into the video, which is longer than most people will have the patience to watch.
I found an increased interest for Cabin Fever in Food & Drink related searches over the past few months through google. The graph shows a huge jump from January 2011 to February 2011. The amount of searches increased from 44 to 75 on the google chart. There was an even greater increase of Cabin Fever coming up in Alchohol related searches from January to February of this year.
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Facebook overall has the most mentions, pictures, comments and talk of Cabin Fever. And, a majority of this happens on Julie's page. There is a constant stream of her 'friends' posting on her wall, tagging her in Cabin Fever related pictures, asking and getting answers to Cabin Fever related questions, and where word of mouth marketing is working. On March 11th, Julie posted a picture of her new liscence plate for her car. There were 52 'likes' and over 15 positve comments just about her liscense plate. There were several comments about how much people liked the liscense plate and wanted one for themselves, but there was also a comment that simply had to do with another person passing on their enthusiasm for Cabin Fever.
Felicia Germain fred you got danny hooked on cabin fever through your dad,,,,thanksssss,,,love to all of you
Cabin Fever has gone from being brewed as a hobby, to being sold in over 20 states in just 4 years. The Robillards are using social media as a successful marketing tool to listen, embrace, energize and encourage word of mouth marketing through the groundswell to get the word out about their product. They have marketed their product to thousands of people they may not have otherwise reached, and openly give credit to their customers, "Doubling sales each year validates that Cabin Fever has been warmly embraced by consumers. Our only means to build the brand has been grass roots marketing, a meager advertising budget, and a lot of sweat equity. Cabin Fever's growth is a credit to the legion of folks that have tried the product, embraced it, and spread the word that America has something to be proud of. No corporate bail outs here, no foreign investment takeovers; Cabin Fever is brought to you by a small, American family," (cabinfever.com). The last few months of monitoring have shown an increase in sales and interest for Cabin Fever, it'll be interesting to see if that growth can continue through the next several months.
Saturday at 7:16am ·
Cabin Fever has gone from being brewed as a hobby, to being sold in over 20 states in just 4 years. The Robillards are using social media as a successful marketing tool to listen, embrace, energize and encourage word of mouth marketing through the groundswell to get the word out about their product. They have marketed their product to thousands of people they may not have otherwise reached, and openly give credit to their customers, "Doubling sales each year validates that Cabin Fever has been warmly embraced by consumers. Our only means to build the brand has been grass roots marketing, a meager advertising budget, and a lot of sweat equity. Cabin Fever's growth is a credit to the legion of folks that have tried the product, embraced it, and spread the word that America has something to be proud of. No corporate bail outs here, no foreign investment takeovers; Cabin Fever is brought to you by a small, American family," (cabinfever.com). The last few months of monitoring have shown an increase in sales and interest for Cabin Fever, it'll be interesting to see if that growth can continue through the next several months.
*I would like to appologize because the graphs appear as graphs in the preview, but will not show up when I hit publish.
It is great how even Cabin Fever is effectively using various platforms of social media to increase sales. It is even better how word of mouth marketing by their loyal customers have such an impact for their brand! This definitely works!
ReplyDeleteI think Cabin Fever is a great example of a company really marketing their owners "personalities" effectively, not only their product. As we always say, the more relationship established, the better. Having a face (or in this case several!) really makes a difference in the passion of user interaction!
ReplyDelete