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Suriname Soda Now a Dutch Treat

This is the best soda in the world… I’ve smuggled my share of cases into the US.. 😉 -!YG

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South American Brand
Rides Expats’ Backs
To Gains in Fickle Market

By JOEL MILLMAN
September 26, 2007;Â PageÂ B3

While sales growth of most carbonated soft drinks has been tepid in Europe, a super-sweet soda linked to the colonial past of the Netherlands is gaining notice in the Dutch market.

For decades, homesick Surinamese living in the Netherlands have hauled Fernandes sodas — in crimson-red strawberry and Amazon green lemon-lime, among other flavors — back in their suitcases. The Surinamese staple is made by closely held Fernandes Concern Beheer NV, founded in 1910 by a Brazilian family. It is one of the oldest corporations in Suriname, a country of fewer than one million inhabitants on South America’s northern coast that won independence from the Netherlands in 1977.

Fernandes ties marketing events to comedian JÃ¶rgen Raymann.

In the 1980s, Coca-Cola Enterprises Nederland BV, the Dutch division of Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc. of Atlanta, began bottling Fernandes under license and selling small numbers of the sodas at curry shops in Surinamese neighborhoods of big cities such as Amsterdam and Rotterdam. About four years ago, the unit began to place the drink in supermarkets where mainstream Dutch consumers also shopped.

Sales of Coca-Cola, Sprite and Fanta were flatlining in the Netherlands, the Dutch bottler realized, because buyers were looking for healthier alternatives such as bottled waters. But the company figured that Fernandes was distinctive enough to be pitched as a drink appealing to young consumers.

Now, Fernandes ads in the Netherlands show blond teenagers on holiday in the Amazon-like jungles of the former colony. The slogan, “Discover the Taste of Suriname,” is in English, to give the brand a with-it image.

The Dutch bottler engaged Studio Prins, an ad agency based in Utrecht, to handle the campaign. Surinamese-born copywriters familiar with the Fernandes brand collaborated with the bottler to come up with a light image that plays off Suriname’s exotic allure. Some of the people in the ads wear sports uniforms — a subliminal reminder to Dutch consumers that many of the country’s top athletes, especially soccer players, are Surinamese.

“The idea is to say, ‘Be young. Dare to be different,'” adds Michel Brahim, the head of Fernandes’s bottling unit in Suriname’s capital, Paramaribo.

The marketing campaign also ties Fernandes to one of Amsterdam’s hottest television stars, comedian JÃ¶rgen Raymann, whose “Raymann Is Late” is a late-night Saturday favorite. A Surinamese of Asian ancestry, Mr. Raymann pokes fun at immigrants’ foibles and at Dutch fears of foreigners. “He knocks all cultures, so no one feels offended. Everyone can relate to his jokes,” says Shifai Ahmadali, a marketing executive at Coca-Cola Enterprises Nederland. “He’s like our Richard Pryor.”

Mr. Raymann appears as a host at Fernandes-sponsored events. Retail customers can win chances to meet the performer through raffles on a Fernandes Web site. Wholesale buyers and supermarket-chain directors get invitations to backstage receptions to meet the comic. Fernandes also sponsors stand-up comedy events where Mr. Raymann is the emcee.

This year, the bottler expects sales of Fernandes’s beverages will grow more than 20% in the Netherlands, to about one million cases, while sales of Coke-brand sodas remain flat, a spokesman for Coca-Cola Enterprises Nederland says.

Ads for Fernandes play up the exotic allure of Suriname.

Now, the bottler is test-marketing the beverage in Belgium and the United Kingdom and has introduced it in the West African countries of Senegal and Gambia. Next year, the company plans to bounce its South American brand back across the Atlantic, targeting Dutch-speaking consumers in CuraÃ§ao and Bonaire in the Dutch West Indies.

Fernandes’s bubbly sales show the increasing importance of immigrant consumers in Europe, as foreign-born enclaves swell and their incomes increase. The Fernandes brand sells best in big cities with large allochtoon (Dutch for “newcomer”) populations, says JosÃ© Mes, a spokeswoman for Ahold NV’s Albert Heijn supermarket chain.

But ethnic marketing can be a more delicate task in Europe than in the U.S. European countries don’t see themselves as nations of immigrants, so an immigrant-focused ad campaign can produce a backlash — especially if the immigrants are Muslim, as many Surinamese are. And many immigrants are sensitive to stereotyping, so images of Carnival-loving Caribbeans downing soft drinks could backfire. “I can’t go too heavy, say, like putting Arabic writing at my point of sale displays,” explains Mr. Ahmadali, the Fernandes marketing director. “I do that and I drive too many customers away.”

The Fernandes brand doesn’t run ads directly targeting immigrants. Instead, it uses store placement to make the link. Tapping into the diverse religious backgrounds of Surinamese, Coca-Cola Enterprises Nederland carefully ties the soda promotions to religious celebrations — which extends Fernandes’s reach to immigrants from other countries, as well. (Suriname itself is a multiethnic brew of Afro-Caribbean, Dutch and Southeast Asian ancestry, including Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Jews.)

This month, Mr. Ahmadali had sales teams fan out to supermarkets before Ramadan, moving Fernandes displays from soft-drink aisles and into aisles with the imported fruits and candies that Turkish, Moroccan and Surinamese Muslims purchase for evening meals. “You think of Ramadan as a month of fasting, but here Muslims think of it as a time of family get-togethers,” after the fasts end, he says.

In November, the company will do the same during a Hindu festival, Diwali.

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