Brothers Cider announces biggest-ever relaunch with four permanent flavours

Brothers Cider has announced its biggest-ever relaunch.

Encompassing new liquids, packaging and flavours, coupled with a new creative identity and a significant programme of marketing support, the brand will look, taste and communicate differently.

After extensive consumer research giving comprehensive insight into key drivers for today’s flavoured cider drinkers, family-owned Brothers Drinks Co has relaunched its flagship cider brand.

With demand growing following the brand’s debut appearance at the now legendary B-Bar at Glastonbury Festival in 1995, Brothers introduced the UK’s first-ever flavoured cider. Since then, Brothers Cider has built its success on developing unique and eye-catching flavour combinations, and frequently refreshing its range with innovative additions.

However, the fruit-flavoured cider category has evolved significantly and consumers are now more motivated by sessionable, easy-drinking flavours and quality, authenticity and sustainability than by quirky flavours.

Reflecting changing consumer preferences, Brothers Cider will now focus on four key, permanent flavours in its ambition to reignite the fruit cider category:

• App-Solutely Pear-fect – a refreshing apple and pear cider

• Un-Berrylievable – featuring crisp apples and juicy blackberries and raspberries

• Best of the Zest – an orange and lemon combination

• Berry Sub-Lime – a union of tangy lime and refreshing raspberry

Brothers Cider’s new flavours will benefit from a pack redesign aimed at better communicating the brand’s free-spirited personality. According to the company, the bold and disruptive new look breaks category norms, using playful illustrations and vibrant real fruit depictions on clean, white cans. Prominent text reinforces the brand’s Somerset home and makes clear that the products use all-natural flavours.

Mirroring both consumer preferences and environmental benefits, all new take-home variants are available in cans only. All flavours will be sold as single 500ml regular format cans, single 330ml sleek-style cans and 6 x 330ml sleek-can multipacks.

To match the brand’s new positioning targeting consumers seeking refreshing, sessionable fruit-flavoured ciders, three of the four relaunched Brothers Cider products will be available at the new level of 3.4% abv. In a nod to the brand’s original Glastonbury Festival cider, the App-Solutely Pear-fect variant will be offered at 7% abv, aligning it to comparable apple and pear flavour competitors.

Made in Shepton Mallet from apples grown in orchards only a few miles from the Showerings Cider Mill, the new liquids have a much-reduced sugar content, with the natural fruit flavours providing all the appropriate sweetness. In addition, the recipes contain no added colours or artificial flavours, and are vegan-friendly and gluten-free.

Brothers is a cider brand with real heritage: Gabriel Showering first sold his drinks in Shepton Mallet over 350 years ago, and his descendants have been producing ciders in the heart of Somerset ever since. As fourteenth-generation cider-makers, the four Showering siblings behind family-owned Brothers Cider have all the tradition and know-how to create exceptional quality products but, more importantly, they are up for the challenge of reigniting the fruit cider category.

To support the relaunch, a major campaign of consumer activity will commence in May and run throughout the summer. The marketing package will comprise TV sponsorship, video on demand, festival activation, consumer PR, significant in-store activity and a major social media campaign.

Nicola Randall, head of marketing at Brothers Drinks Co, says: “With new liquids, new packaging, new flavours and a new positioning, we’re being bold and disruptive to create a relevant and credible offering for today’s cider drinkers. We’re really playing up our British provenance; we’re really going to be showcasing our honest company and brand values; and we’re focusing in on light, refreshing, natural products, and shoppers in independents are really going to sit up and notice what Brothers Cider stands for.

“As a company, we’re family-owned and agile and, as a brand, Brothers Cider is independent and natural; it’s the free-spirited fruit cider and it does things differently. We’ve put the consumer at the very heart of the relaunch and we’re confident that our approach as a seriously unserious cider is going to truly resonate and have huge appeal and prove a big success for both depots and retailers.”