Hartwall Original Long Drink
Social media 2.0
FMCG
About the client
Hartwall Original Long Drink is Finland’s legendary gin drink with a strong cultural identity and a loyal consumer base around the world. The brand has been on the market in Estonia for years, but a new approach was needed to engage consumers and refresh its digital presence. Our goal was to grow the brand’s Instagram community from scratch and increase awareness among a younger target audience.
The challenge
Hartwall Original Long Drink is a drink that has been known to the local Estonian consumer for a while, but their social media accounts have since been deleted, so we started fresh. As it will be difficult to get people to follow the company’s account on Instagram in 2025, it needed a strategy that would create an organic brand community. The brand had the potential to do this.
Our strategy
Realist’s goal was to transform Hartwall’s social media channels into a community-based platform where the brand is not just about products, but about lifestyle and values. We saw that copying the brand’s home market in Finland wouldn’t save us – for example, Estonians have beer in the sauna and Finns have longero. So we needed to create content and tone of voice tailored to the local consumer that would differentiate us from our competitors.
Printed from
- We adapted the Finnish content to the local context, for example, if the headquarters creative used the famous Helsinki skyline, we replaced it with Tallinn.
- We started producing local content. Turns out there’s an electrician in Estonia, Valmar, whose car is branded Hartwall Original Long Drink style!
- We used data-driven analytics to identify which themes and visuals resonated most with the target audience and optimised our productions accordingly.
- We coordinated collaborations with local influencers who organically matched the brand values.
- We were present at summer events and branded a series of longero pong events, which became very popular at the Patarei Seacort.
- We created an Instagram community where over 200 true fans proactively share their own longero moments and list entertainment venues where longeros are not yet on sale, but where they would like to be.
Results from
- Organic growth +320% in three months.
- Growth in the number of followers +47% in six months.
- On average, user stories and posts increased 5x compared to the previous period.
- Average campaign CTR on paid channels 2.4%, exceeding the alcohol market average by 1.5x.
- Over 1.2 million views across all channels combined.
- Best post with 1000+ shares without a draw. Just good content.
- 200+ active superfans in the Instagram community, where longero topics are discussed on a daily basis.
Lessons and conclusions
The key to success was to humanise the brand – not to sell, but to listen. Creating a community was a long-term investment, not a campaign, and it also allows us to really listen to what our consumers want. Target audience engagement and two-way communication with consumers resulted in organic growth that no banner ad could have achieved.
