SingleCut Beersmiths is a New York City craft brewery with fans in beer-loving cities around the world. The brand’s passion for music is reflected in new product launches, so when SingleCut’s new IPA was ready to be introduced to select markets in Canada, the U.S., and for the first-time ever, Japan, the question wasn’t whether music would be involved, but how.

As a small craft brewer, the success of each new introduction is critical. In addition to launching the new IPA in a way that brought together music and beer, SingleCut also wanted to celebrate its entry to a new market by embracing Japanese culture. The agency’s challenge was to develop an idea that would make the new IPA a sellout.

The music scene in Japan is known for a unique phenomenon: rock bands from North America and Europe become big in Asia before they’re popular in their own countries. Bands like Queen and The Runaways achieved stardom in Asia long before North Americans even knew their names. The term for this phenomenon shaped the team’s first recommendation: to name the beer “Big in Japan”.

The team investigated other cultural phenomena unique to Japan. Something that was familiar in North America had a whole other level of meaning within Japan: QR codes. In Japan, QR codes are entrenched in daily life as a way to obtain information, order products and interact with brands. Since Big in Japan would be starting with absolutely no consumer awareness, adopting behaviour familiar to the target would quickly establish relevance and gain attention.

Big in Japan completely transformed QR codes from the usual format of black squares on a grid to a colourful, storytelling graphic, rewriting how consumers saw and interacted with the technology and demonstrating the brand’s connection to music in an unexpected and gamified way. Four distinct QR codes were created as the primary packaging artwork. Each code was a clue, a pictographic representation of a classic rock song, that presented drinkers with a musical puzzle to solve. People could try to solve it on their own or find the answers by scanning the QR code. Once scanned, they were taken to a specially crafted Spotify playlist that solved the puzzle by playing the song, revealing the new IPA they were drinking. Point-of-sale posters featured a fifth QR code that presented the story of Big in Japan IPA and of SingleCut. To continue to build brand recognition in Canada, Big in Japan was available in bars in the GTA.

Big in Japan is an example of how local insights, both cultural and technological, can produce authentic cross-cultural marketing. The brand was able to forge an organic connection with a new audience through thoughtful adaptation to a new market and an emphasis on SingleCut’s core values; a shared love of rock and roll and great beer.

Big in Japan delivered on SingleCut’s big ambitions. The promoted social media assets garnered the brand’s highest level of consumer engagement to date, resulting in four times the usual response level. The Spotify playlists received over 5,000 unique visits, more than three times the visits SingleCut’s website typically receives in the same time frame. Best of all, the beer sold out within two weeks of release, a first for the brand in that short a time period.