RI Pernod Ricard

By Imani Moise 

Bacardi Ltd.'s Havana Club rum is turning to immersive theater to win over hearts and taste buds.

In its battle for recognition as an authentic Cuban rum, the brand is staging a play, "Amparo," in a Midtown Manhattan bar, following a debut in Miami last month.

The brand recruited a Cuban-American playwright and actors to convince audiences at Bill's Townhouse that its version of the spirit, made in Puerto Rico, should be considered the real Havana Club. Another, more widely distributed, Havana Club is made in Cuba and marketed by Pernod Ricard S.A. The two companies have long feuded over the brand name and bragging rights.

During the course of the show, the audience is ushered in and out of rooms as actors tell the story of the Arechabala family, who founded Havana Club in 1934 but fled to Spain and then the U.S. during the Cuban Revolution, and lost the company.

The audience follows characters as they run from gunshots and confront Cuban militia members. Throughout the drama, actors pull guests into the stories, grabbing their hands and rhetorically asking: "What should I do? What would you do?"

"Amparo," which is the name of Ramon Arechabala's widow and translates to "protection," opened as a limited engagement for the press and social-media influencers. After the hourlong show, some audiences members still confused Bacardi's Havana Club with Pernod's.

The company plans to sell tickets for public performances in New York City and Miami later this year.

Bacardi and Pernod Ricard have been sparring over naming rights in the U.S. since 1994 when Bacardi bought the original recipe from the Arechabala family.

Pernod declined to comment on the play.

If the desperate cries of actors aren't enough to win over the audience, the free cocktails before, during and after the performance might help.

Broadway producer Ken Davenport, who isn't involved with "Amparo," said playwrights have used theater to spread political and religious messages for centuries. For a corporation, "it's a very smart and very subtle way to market their message," he said.

Although uncommon, companies have a long history of using theater to promote brands. Tabasco toured the U.S. in the late 1800s with an opera about its hot sauce. More recently, Stella Artois has tapped Punchdrunk, the British theater company who popularized immersive theater, to stage a play in London that features its beer.

Immersive theater can be a particularly effective branding tool. Emotional reactions are easier to elicit in interactive settings. Several studies have found physical touch can be persuasive.

Immersion also can make products seem more appealing. A 2013 study published by BioMed Central Ltd. found multisensory atmospheres have a significant impact on a person's enjoyment of an alcoholic beverage.

One drawback of immersive theater for branding is that intimate experiences can be hard to scale, said Chloë Rae Edmonson, a Ph.D. candidate in CUNY's theater-studies program. "If you were in that experience with 5,000 others it wouldn't be as effective."

Bacardi says it already has seen returns on the play through increased engagement on social media and feedback from customers.

"Of all the branded experiences I've been to, this one wasn't too heavy handed," said Rachel Martino, a lifestyle blogger with more than a quarter million followers on Instagram who attended the preview. "Granted there was a lot of rum."

--Cara Lombardo contributed to this article.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 07, 2018 09:14 ET (13:14 GMT)

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