How Fact & Fiction Tapped the Potential of Beer Brand Voodoo Ranger on Instagram

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. And when life gives your creative agency a client with a brand on the rise and a fun, marketable mascot—along with unexpected help from Star Wars Day and Elon Musk—you run with it. In January 2019, Fort Collins, Colo.-based craft brewery New Belgium Brewing turned to a fellow Colorado firm, Boulder-based creative agency Fact & Fiction, to help differentiate its Voodoo Ranger line of beers within an increasingly crowded sector. The goals: growing its audience and, ultimately, beer sales. The challenge facing Fact & Fiction was dealing with what it called a “sea of sameness” among both craft beers and the ways they were being promoted. But the agency and the brewery had an ace up their sleeve in the skeleton that adorned bottles and cans of Voodoo Ranger. “The beer community sometimes takes itself too seriously,” Fact & Fiction founder Kyle Taylor told Adweek. To help lighten the mood, Fact & Fiction set out to turn that skeleton from a logo on products into the personality of the Voodoo Ranger brand, giving him a unique voice and point of view, developing storylines around him and injecting humor and wit into the process. “We’ve spent the past two years building this character and giving him a voice and a point of view through social,” Taylor said. “[New Belgium has been an] amazing partner, with a lot of courage, allowing us to have a lot of fun with this mysterious, renegade, lighthearted ‘spokescreature.’” Instagram, great for breaking convention While Voodoo Ranger has a presence on several social platforms, Fact & Fiction zeroed in on Instagram. As a result, the agency has helped grow followers from 1,500 to over 60,000 since 2019. “We as an agency have a philosophy,” Taylor said. “Instagram is the most visual medium, and it allows us the most latitude to break convention and have some fun. [The skeleton] doesn’t have a physical voice. We use concepts and art direction.” The now-sarcastic and self-aware skeleton began offering his perspective on topical events and trends, including memes (Homer Simpson fading back into the bush, Kermit the Frog pondering), entertainment (Game of Thrones, Stranger Things) and trending topics (Tiger King). The agency also turned to the worlds of animation, art and comic books for inspiration as a way of countering the stereotypical “rustic-looking type and photography” that tended to accompany most creative for craft beers across all platforms. Nest stop, Voodoo Ranger merch Those efforts resonated with its audience: According to research from social media management platform Hootsuite and digital agency We Are Social, the average Instagram engagement rate for business accounts with between 10,000 to 100,000 followers is 1%. The Voodoo Ranger account saw organic engagement of 8.53% in 2020. It now handles the accounts for Australia, which just debuted in February, and the U.K., which topped 1,300 followers after being introduced last November. The hard work put in by Fact & Fiction was augmented by two fortunate events that helped spike its Instagram following. An Instagram post on Star Wars Day (May 4) in 2019 boosted the skeleton’s profile even further, depicting him as a Star Wars action figure and sparking enough interest for the brewery to produce and sell that figure, eventually leading to the recent creation of online store, Vootique. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Voodoo Ranger (@voodooranger) The Vootique sells limited-edition Voodoo Ranger gear like action figures, stickers, glasses and T-shirts, separate from the main New Belgium online store. https://twitter.com/voodooranger/status/1287814705684393987 And last July, Elon Musk tweeted (organically and unprompted), “Hold my beer,” with a photo of him holding a can of Voodoo Ranger Starship IPA. Moving the needle on sales Success on Instagram was also a precursor to success on the shelves. While overall craft beer sales were estimated to have fallen by 8% to 12% in 2020 compared with 2019, market research firm IRI tapped Voodoo Ranger Imperial IPA as the third-bestselling IPA brand, up 80.2% last year, to $90.4 million. Three other Voodoo Ranger labels cracked IRI’s top 30 craft brands for 2020: the flagship IPA brand (up 10.2% to $44.1 million), Juicy Haze IPA (up 54.3% to $50.1 million) and its rotating IPA series (up 81.1% to $21 million). Next up for Voodoo Ranger and its Instagram account, tentatively scheduled for late April, is the Pint-Sized Film Festival, in which fans will create and share short films featuring the skeleton action figure, complete with prize money and giveaways. “Some well-known filmmakers are going to attack this,” Taylor added. The Voodoo Ranger fan base is a vibrant one. Fact & Fiction creative director Brock Johnson pointed out that over 600 people entered its Juicifer IPA Tattoo Contest on Instagram in 2019, with four winners walking away with custom tattoos. “We built a really in-tune team that makes content that people really want to see from a brand,” Taylor said. “The best way to build brand personality is to be a reflection of people who are advocates. It’s not a push mechanism: It’s a two-way conversation.”