Customer Reviews

Absolut: Biography of a Bottle

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Mr. Hamilton has written a thorough, fascinating account of how one of the most popular brands in the United States was established in the last 22 years. This book is a must read for anyone who has enjoyed the famous Absolut advertising campaign featuring the bottle shape, and those who want to understand more about the process of successful brand building.

I was an executive at Heublein, makers of market-leading Smirnoff Vodka, from 1974-1977, and found this story fascinating for how overwhelming odds against success were overcome. In this review, I will add some perspective that the author omitted.

Liquor is one of the most difficult areas in which to create a new consumer brand. The hurdles are many. You cannot advertise on television or radio. Most people are not very experimental in the liquor they will try. You cannot go door-to-door dropping off samples like soap powder. Distribution is very expensive and hard to acquire. Establishing profitability with a new brand can take many years, and there are many failures. As a result, the market leader in most categories in 1950 is still the market leading brand today. For imported spirits, the country viewed as the most "legitimate" historical source always dominated the imported category. For vodka, what country do you think of? Certainly, Sweden was probably not first in your mind in 1978.

Absolut was brilliantly developed, but Absolut was also lucky. As the Cold War continued and the Afghanistan War began, Americans had reason to question their ties to Stolychnaya, which had been the leading vodka import. President Reagan's characterization of the U.S.S.R. as an "evil empire" certainly aided that perceptual shift. Absolut had been established by that time on a brand platform of being different, a classy version of the Marlboro cowboy. The style of the product, the package, and the advertising all "whispered" to you about being subtly different while all the other vodkas shouted in vibrant colors with gaudy labels in similar bottles.

Interestingly, Heublein used a very similar approach to that employed by Absolut with packaging and positioning to build its mustard, Grey Poupon, into the market leader at the same time that the company was ignoring Absolut. The story of Grey Poupon is developed in part in The 2,000 Percent Solution.

What is even more remarkable is that Absolut was developed to be an export brand without a base in Sweden by the national Liquor Monopoly there, which had a strong heritage of keeping drinking under control. At many key points in the brand's development, the Swedes took large financial risks with little prospect of success. Who says that government agencies cannot be entrepreneurial? You will enjoy reading about Lars Lindmark who spear-headed this initiative as head of the Monopoly.

But the heart and beauty of this story is how the brand platform, positioning, and the rest were established. The results were astonishingly good, but the process was inevitably messy. Most consumers have not thought very much about how brands come to be like our friends. This book lays out many of the best practices involved. Get many of the top creative people involved, let them compete for inspiration, test out the results, and keep refining around the core ideas that resonate the most strongly with some people. I was extremely impressed by the role that Gunnar Broman played in the early development of the brand as head of the Swedish agency, Carlsson and Broman. Most brands are mostly developed by internal staff. Quite simply, an advertising agency usually doesn't have the skill to pull off all parts of the task. N.W. Ayer also helped a lot. But what will impress you is how many people contributed in important ways. Much of the advertising we now admire was developed at TBWA, which was the successor agency after a conflict occurred for N.W. Ayer. The task of finding an importer was long and involved. Dichter deserves a lot of credit for establishing the right research methods to find people who were deeply interested in the brand, despite many people being turned off by it. With a brand, you shouldn't try to please everyone.

The bottle stories are priceless. I won't spoil them by telling you about them in detail. But you will find that the developers of Absolut vodka had to overcome a lot of stalled thinking on the part of those they were working with. You will love the many photographs of the bottles and advertising while they were under development, including the famous Andy Warhol ad.

There is another personal reason why I enjoyed this book. Our older daughter (now in her third year in medical school) is very anti-drinking. Despite this, the walls of her room during high school were papered with Absolut ads. For one birthday, I gave her an empty Absolut bottle, which is still in her room at home. This deep impression of an advertising campaign on an anti-alcohol teenager had always impressed me. Reading this book helped me to better understand her attraction to the campaign, and to understand her better.

After you finish this exciting story about developing this fun brand, ask yourself how you can apply the lessons here to making your own personal image more appealing and vibrant. Who do you want to appeal to? Who can help you with that?

Have Absolut pleasure from this book! Skoal!

The advertising campaign for ABSOLUT Swedish vodka has captured the attention of millions. The promotional program for the product has been highly creative, captivating, and unquestionably successful. Now ranked as the #1 imported vodka in the United States, ABSOLUT is celebrating its 20 year anniversary.

The story behind the bottle, the product, and the marketing campaign is interesting, as might be expected. Most behind-the-scenes looks produce surprises, intrigue, and stories that cause readers to shake their heads in wonderment. ABSOLUT is no exception.

Carl Hamilton is described as one of Sweden's most provocative and original literary voices. He's also host of the critically acclaimed television show, Dilemma, a political commentator, and a columnist for Scandinavia's largest popular newspaper. With this build-up of the author, the reader would expect an intriguing book that would be a joy to read. Even the cover of the book is designed to reflect the advertising image of black and white simplicity.

The book does tell a good story-about the bottle, the name, the development of the product, and the marketing campaign. Unfortunately, I was not as impressed by the book itself as I wanted to be. I was disappointed. While I recognize that the book will sell because of the popularity of the product it chronicles, the writing left me wanting.

Describing this book as a biography suggests a certain amount of genealogical research to illuminate the subject of the work. As family trees are researched, people uncover branches that really don't fit into the mainstream of the family's development. These side stories are typically left out of books that document family histories, or they're archived outside the main text. Not so with this biography: all that information is served to the reader in a number of seemingly unrelated stories that don't seem to fit in the flow. An endorsement on the back cover of ABSOLUT suggests that "the author superbly swings from one scene to another." My description of this experience would be less glowing; I found the side trips distracting, confusing, and sometimes irrelevant. It felt like Hamilton was weaving in every bit of research he had, force-fitting as necessary to fill the book.

I was troubled by the use of profanity in ABSOLUT. One would not expect to find four letter words seasoning a business biography. Perhaps this is the style of Texere, a new publishing company, but the language didn't set well with me. There are ten incidents in the first 50 pages of the book where the author uses words that might get our kids a dose of soap in the mouth or at least a good talking-to. If you don't mind reading the "f" word in a business book, it won't bother you. It annoyed me, particularly as I observed that the point could have been made just fine without the profanity.

ABSOLUT does tell an interesting tale, particularly if you're interested in the reality behind the legend of a popular product. The book is hybrid of a business history, a biography, and expose, if you don't let the bumpy writing get in your way.

The story of the Absolut advertising campaign has been well-documented but the story behind the creation of the product that led to the campaign hasn't been told...until now.

Within advertising and marketing circles, the Absolut ad campaign is to the 80's and 90's what the VW Beetle campaign was to the 60's...everyone working in advertising at the time claims credit. With the discipline and integrity of a good journalist, Carl Hamilton digs up the facts and presents them in a highly compelling way.

Buy it for anyone in advertising, anyone in marketing, anyone who's ever taken credit for a stolen idea, or anyone who's planning a trip to Sweden!

I didn't have a clear idea of what I expected "Absolut: the biography of a bottle" to be, perhaps an insight into one of the most interesting and sustained advertising campaigns around, but this meandering tale wasn't it.

Mr Hamilton wanders all over the place - we have a detailed, if sometimes incoherent, account of the history of Swedish State Wine and Liquor Monopoly and the Swedish Liquor Pass (Sweden's attempt to manage alcohol abuse), interspersed with a lot of detail about bit players in the Absolut story. They come in, have an incident of their lives minutely described, then exit stage left without having significantly contributed to the narrative.

Every now and then an interesting comparison is drawn between Swedish and American social policy, or marketing approaches, but these do not seem to have been inserted for any particular reason. Certainly there is no shortage of information about the bottle and label design. The most interesting thing I learned was that the company favours using photos "with a minimum of post-session computer manipulation" - I had though a lot of manipulation would have been employed.

If the intent of this book is to demonstrate that advertisers may need to create several platforms or approaches to marketing a product, and that designers need to develop different versions of packaging, it was successful - though this end could have been achieved in a more succinct format. If, however, the idea was to attract a mass audience to appreciate the campaign, or the difficulty breaking into an established (and apparently niche) market, Mr Hamilton had better hope for readers with stamina.

In Absolut: Biography of a Bottle, Mr. Hamilton has written a thorough, fascinating account of how one of the most popular brands in the United States was established in the last 22 years. This book is a must read for anyone who has enjoyed the famous Absolut advertising campaign featuring the bottle shape, and those who want to understand more about the process of successful brand building.

I was an executive at Heublein, makers of market-leading Smirnoff Vodka, from 1974-1977, and found this story fascinating for how overwhelming odds against success were overcome. In this review, I will add some perspective that the author omitted.

Liquor is one of the most difficult areas in which to create a new consumer brand. The hurdles are many. You cannot advertise on television or radio. Most people are not very experimental in the liquor they will try. You cannot go door-to-door dropping off samples like soap powder. Distribution is very expensive and hard to acquire. Establishing profitability with a new brand can take many years, and there are many failures. As a result, the market leader in most categories in 1950 is still the market leading brand today. For imported spirits, the country viewed as the most "legitimate" historical source always dominated the imported category. For vodka, what country do you think of? Certainly, Sweden was probably not first in your mind in 1978.

Absolut was brilliantly developed, but Absolut was also lucky. As the Cold War continued and the Afghanistan War began, Americans had reason to question their ties to Stolychnaya, which had been the leading vodka import. President Reagan's characterization of the U.S.S.R. as an "evil empire" certainly aided that perceptual shift. Absolut had been established by that time on a brand platform of being different, a classy version of the Marlboro cowboy. The style of the product, the package, and the advertising all "whispered" to you about being subtly different while all the other vodkas shouted in vibrant colors with gaudy labels in similar bottles.

Interestingly, Heublein used a very similar approach to that employed by Absolut with packaging and positioning to build its mustard, Grey Poupon, into the market leader at the same time that the company was ignoring Absolut. The story of Grey Poupon is developed in part in The 2,000 Percent Solution.

What is even more remarkable is that Absolut was developed to be an export brand without a base in Sweden by the national Liquor Monopoly there, which had a strong heritage of keeping drinking under control. At many key points in the brand's development, the Swedes took large financial risks with little prospect of success. Who says that government agencies cannot be entrepreneurial? You will enjoy reading about Lars Lindmark who spear-headed this initiative as head of the Monopoly.

But the heart and beauty of this story is how the brand platform, positioning, and the rest were established. The results were astonishingly good, but the process was inevitably messy. Most consumers have not thought very much about how brands come to be like our friends. This book lays out many of the best practices involved. Get many of the top creative people involved, let them compete for inspiration, test out the results, and keep refining around the core ideas that resonate the most strongly with some people. I was extremely impressed by the role that Gunnar Broman played in the early development of the brand as head of the Swedish agency, Carlsson and Broman. Most brands are mostly developed by internal staff. Quite simply, an advertising agency usually doesn't have the skill to pull off all parts of the task. N.W. Ayer also helped a lot. But what will impress you is how many people contributed in important ways. Much of the advertising we now admire was developed at TBWA, which was the successor agency after a conflict occurred for N.W. Ayer. The task of finding an importer was long and involved. Dichter deserves a lot of credit for establishing the right research methods to find people who were deeply interested in the brand, despite many people being turned off by it. With a brand, you shouldn't try to please everyone.

The bottle stories are priceless. I won't spoil them by telling you about them in detail. But you will find that the developers of Absolut vodka had to overcome a lot of stalled thinking on the part of those they were working with. You will love the many photographs of the bottles and advertising while they were under development, including the famous Andy Warhol ad.

There is another personal reason why I enjoyed this book. Our older daughter (now in her third year in medical school) is very anti-drinking. Despite this, the walls of her room during high school were papered with Absolut ads. For one birthday, I gave her an empty Absolut bottle, which is still in her room at home. This deep impression of an advertising campaign on an anti-alcohol teenager had always impressed me. Reading this book helped me to better understand her attraction to the campaign, and to understand her better.

After you finish this exciting story about developing this fun brand, ask yourself how you can apply the lessons here to making an important task something that everyone wants to do. Who can help you with that? What is the purest form of the concept?

Have Absolut pleasure from this book!

Having spent a lifetime in advertising and marketing and having once been charged with creating a "campaign of the decade" by my client, I had to read this book. After all, the Absolut campaign is not just a campaign of the decade, it is THE campaign of several decades.

It was facinating to learn, not only how the campaign came to be, but that the advertising campaign was invented before a single drop of the product was conceived or produced.

I found the book hard to put down. It reveal the mysteries of one of the most facinating "start-ups" of the past few decades, and it exposed some of the best and the worst of advertising and the creative process.

If you've ever worked at an advertising agency or with one, or if you just like Vodka -- read this book!

My Brother in law , Rajeev, gave me this book . I was curious when I saw the cover page and name of book and started out.


Cary Hamilton has written a hilarious , fascinating and thorough description of how Absolut was established. It starts our right from the conception stage of the bottle , when Gunnar Broman , the wacky Sweden ad agency head, heads with his team to Madison Square and tries to sell the concept of a Swedish Vodka.

The book captures the various difficulties he encounters while trying to sell this concept to the agencies in the US. The shape of the bottle is something that was hotly discussed , laughed at and equaled to that of a medicine bottle.....This whole bit is beautiful. Its interesting to also learn of how Lars Lindmark, the man behind the initiative manages around the National Liquor Monopoly of Sweden . ( Btw : Do you know that Sweden had a history of keeping liquor sales under control).

The beauty and the main emphasis is on the various platforms Broman creates, how they position it and how it was established. Even funnier are the initial bit of selling the bottles ( initially they were just trying to get the concept sold, now the real stuff). The book goes on to talk about TBWA and N W Ayer and how Gunnar Broman gets sidelined in the fight for advterising for absolute.


I could go on and on about this book, but the beauty of this book would really be appreciated if you can look at how many twist and turns there was in this story, how they were able to come out of it successfully , innovative advertising and top of it deal with the bureaucracy of the Liquor monopoly.

And yeah remember, this is post Smirn off !!!!!!


Once you read this book, you would be dying to grab a bottle of absolute and admire the beauty of it .........Read on ....there's a lot I haven't told you about J


Btw, I read this book in 2 days and trust me am not the type who reads for long hours

http://www.bloglines.com/blog/PrashantP

I loved getting this book, as it completed my 3 book series on this marketing campaign. For some reason, though I don't drink, these books were insightful and had the artistic element that I have a passion for.

The book is in mint condition and the time of delivery was shorter( 20 days less) than expected. I am very pleased.
Victor Melian

If you collect absolut vodka items, you must have this book. If you don't ... you'll never understand why it was even published.