The Brief

India imposes very strict restrictions on the advertising of alcoholic beverages on most main stream media channels. This has forced alcohol brands to look at alternate and innovative ways of engaging consumers. Indian brands still largely use conventional methods of engaging consumers through brand events & some digital media. The Indian audience is therefore largely exposed to brand innovation in the online & mobile space. This product was developed in an attempt to create impact & differentiate by leveraging hardware integrated with a common dispensing machine. In a country with some of the largest social media communities, the idea was to create a device that was fun, fresh & inherently social.

The Kingfisher Headbang Triggered Beer Dispenser was created for Kingfisher - one of the leading beer brands in India, to engaged with rock fans at India's largest beer & music festival - The Great Indian October Fest. The brand that has been associated with this event for the past 3 years aimed to differentiate & leave a lasting impression on the rock fans that attended the fest. Since consumers attend the event primarily for the music & the beer, the brand used these 2 pillars to engage consumers through a simple & fun innovation that gratified users with beer for head-banging to rock music. While customised vending machines has been done across the world by a number of brands, an innovation of this nature is still unique to the Indian consumer. The technology involved 2 mobile phones connected via bluetooth. One mobile phone was embedded in the vending machine to trigger the release of the beer can while the other was placed in a customised helmet that users could wear. When a user started headbanging, the accelerometer of the mobile phone calculated the number of headbangs and via bluetooth triggered release of cans from the machine. The frequency of release was preset basis testing done by the brand. To scale this product & expose it to a larger audience the goal is to fabricate a number of smaller dispenser units that can be taken across the country where the brand visibility is lower as a build up to the grand event in October. The upgrade will also include a real time video recording of the video that gets automatically shared on a users social page at the time of engagement.

The long term goal of the dispenser is to have it purchased by partner pubs across the country & become a permanent fixture in these locations. This would enable partners to create their own engagement properties & thus save costs on creating events. With the dispenser scalable to other user activities such as cycling, dancing, screaming etc... it allows different partners to create events catering to their local audience interests.