Hello Kitty maker Sanrio introduces a rather radical marketing stunt that’s unprecedented
Hello Kitty maker Sanrio introduces a rather radical marketing stunt that’s unprecedented in the brand’s history. The Hello Kitty beer now makes it debut in Asia.
There are six Hello Kitty beers, which come in easy-drinking fruit flavors like peach, lemon-lime, passion fruit, and banana. They have about half the alcohol content of mainstream American beers – a Budweiser runs 5 percent alcohol-by-volume, where the Hello Kitty brews range from 2.3 percent to 2.8 percent.
“The beers were introduced in Taiwan, and are now also available in China, where flavored beer is a new trend in the market,” a spokesperson in the marketing department of Sanrio, the company that created Hello Kitty, told TODAY.com in an email. Sanrio confirmed it licensed the beer, brewed by the Taiwan Tsing Beer Company.
Do you think this will be an issue for the brand, since Hello Kitty is primarily marketed to pre-adolescent females in America?
In 2010, a Hello Kitty wine hit the American market, albeit with the tagline, “Our favorite girl has grown up,” showing the icon in black and white.
“[It was] done intentionally to indicate that Hello Kitty … has crossed over from being a children’s brand to being a brand for children and adults alike,” Drew Hibbert, of CEO of Innovation Spirits, which markets the wine in the U.S., told LA Weekly in 2010.