Strongbow Dark Fruit Cider, 4x440ml

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Over time Strongbow Dark Fruit has become a firm favourite and the brand has learnt to lean into the love – including engaging with its most extreme fans. In 2013 the cider category was booming. Fuelled by sunny weather and the urge for a sweeter, more drinkable summer beverage, consumers couldn’t get enough of bottled fruit cider.

Despite the joy the team gets from engaging with super-fans on social and at events, Sherwood-Smith is adamant TV remains crucial.Martin Lewis: What the Autumn Statement means for you – including wages, benefits, pensions, ISAs, housing, national insurance and more Since its launch in 2013, Strongbow Dark Fruit has become the second best-selling draught cider in the UK, behind Strongbow Original but Sherwood-Smith believes there will be a day that the fruit variant will overtake its parent brand. She says: “The question is, if Dark Fruit continues on this trajectory there could be a time when it will be bigger than Strongbow original and that will present a whole new set of challenge which we’ll then have to deal with.” READ MORE: Strongbow ‘connects with nature’ in latest campaign as it aims to inspire the younger generation She explains: “The plan had never been for it to be in the on-trade, the plan had been for it to sit in grocery [in cans] but we were really pushing the agenda internally and really challenging the management upstairs and saying ‘we really believe people would buy purple pints’ and we’ve got a Dutch beer company going ‘Are you sure? Are you really sure?’.

Despite this reluctance for feminine marketing the brand has worked hard to get more female drinkers and Sherwood-Smith now estimates that 45% of its clientele are women. Always with brands, if you want to achieve scale mass media remains an important part of the marketing mix”, she says.

Consumers competing for a brand’s attention is something Sherwood-Smith says is “unusual for a mainstream brand”. In more recent years Dark Fruit has been using social more heavily to capitalise on the love that has made it a ‘‘become a cultural phenomena” she says..

If you want to achieve scale mass media remains an important part of the marketing mix. Emma Sherwood-Smith, Heineken Sherwood-Smith says: “Right from the start we reached out into culture and asked what are people doing. What is the current behaviour and how can you bring the [Strongbow] in the world effect to that?”

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Finally Heineken allowed Strongbow to test it out in 2014. It launched Strongbow Dark Fruits in 10 pubs within its own estate and since then 270 million pints of Dark Fruit have been poured, according to CGA data commissioned by Heineken. Both employees and self-employed workers will pay less in National Insurance from next year, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has announced in today's Autumn Statement. NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Ulster Bank, which are all part of the NatWest Group, will now shut at least 172 of their bank branches in 2023 and 2024.

Autumn Statement: State pension confirmed to rise by 8.5% from April 2024 – while some benefits will go up by 6.7% NatWest, RBS and Ulster Bank to close at least 172 branches in 2023/24 – here's the full list, plus alternatives When the competition zigs you zag and it was really juxtaposed to all the traditional summer blue sky images of cider at the time… [we had to be] true to the infrastructure of Strongbow and not be tempted to make it feminine.”This brand had two jobs to do: we were looking to bring people into our flavoured cider but it also needed to rejuvenate the Strongbow master brand. Emma Sherwood-Smith, Heineken