Jagermeister
Translating a bold spirits brand into a youth-culture lifestyle experience through music, subculture, offline activations, and immersive media events.
Agency - Edelman China
Year - 2021
Focus - Retainer PR, lifestyle positioning, media experience, offline activation, subculture storytelling
Client Context
Jägermeister had a distinctive global brand personality: dark, bold, playful, and deeply connected to nightlife and music culture. In China, however, alcohol communication faced category restrictions, and the brand needed more than product messaging to stay culturally relevant. The opportunity was to build a lifestyle world around the brand: one that could connect Jägermeister with music festivals, subculture, street fashion, nightlife, and young adult social experiences.
Retainer Challenge
The challenge was to keep the brand active and culturally visible without relying only on direct alcohol promotion. We needed to create experiences that felt ownable to Jägermeister while remaining flexible enough for media, KOLs, offline events, and future brand moments. Instead of communicating Jägermeister as just a drink, the retainer work needed to make the brand feel like a cultural signal.
Strategic Insight
For this audience, Jägermeister was not only about consumption. It was about attitude, atmosphere, and belonging. We saw that the brand could live naturally in China’s growing lifestyle scenes: music, street culture, creative nightlife, visual self-expression, and offline social discovery. By building the campaign around exploration, mystery, subculture, and participation, we gave media and KOLs a more compelling way to experience and talk about the brand.
Retainer Strategy
We developed an immersive brand experience system under the idea of “The Wild Hunt” turning Jägermeister’s dark, subcultural personality into a physical journey. The experience connected brand education with lifestyle participation: guests did not just hear about the brand, they entered a space, unlocked interactions, collected badges, created content, experienced the -18°C shot ritual, and discovered Jägermeister’s connections to music, street culture, and future lifestyle moments.
My Role
At Edelman China, I worked across client coordination, media-event flow, activation planning, material coordination, and brand storytelling. My role was to help translate Jägermeister’s global brand attitude into a China-specific lifestyle experience that could work across PR, offline events, and media/KOL engagement.
Execution Highlights
- Helped shape Jägermeister’s lifestyle positioning in China by connecting the brand with music, subculture, nightlife, and street-culture cues - Worked across immersive media event planning, guest journey design, and offline activation execution - Coordinated client needs, media activity flow, and display material collection/checking for the July media event - Built interactive experience zones including graffiti, photo moments, Plinko, badge collection, cocktail redemption, and brand-sharing moments - Translated product rituals such as the -18°C ice-cold shot into a broader lifestyle experience - Connected the brand world with KOL/media touchpoints, social content moments, and future campaign narratives
Impact
The retainer helped Jägermeister move beyond conventional alcohol communication and build a more ownable lifestyle presence in China. By combining immersive offline experience, music and subculture cues, media/KOL engagement, and brand storytelling, the work made Jägermeister feel less like a product being promoted and more like a cultural world people could enter, experience, photograph, and share.