Molson Breaks New Ground With Icebreaker Brewery Attempting To Top Last Year’s Summer Promotion

The importers of Molson Ice say their beer sales got a lift last summer from a $10 million-plus promotion that offered free passage to a private Labor Day rock concert in a village above the Arctic Circle.

How do you top that? The beer marketers have booked an icebreaker for a concert cruise near the North Pole in the Arctic Sea.

The promotion dramatizes how far some deep-pocketed marketers will go to try to get the most out of their peak season for sales.

“We got a great reaction last year and people wanted us to repeat it,” said Bruce Winterton, brand manager for Molson Ice. “We wanted to push it even further.”

Molson Breweries USA is backing its second annual Molson Ice Polar Beach Party even though shipments of the Molson Ice brand slumped by double-digit percentages for all of last year and it fell to third place among the imports.

According to the trade publication Market Watch, Molson Ice shipments dropped 17.7 percent last year and the brand saw Corona Extra displace it as the second best selling imported beer.

Winterton said the promotion a year ago helped give Molson Ice a more contemporary image, drawing increased attention from men aged 21 to 27, a group the beer marketer keenly wants to reach.

“You always said you’d go to the ends of the earth for a great party,” Molson Ice says in an advertisement for this year’s event in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine. “Prove it.”

Molson plans to send about 150 people for a four-day trip that will include cruising the Arctic Sea from Resolute Bay aboard an icebreaker.