Anyone who’s seen rapper Ludacris lately at an industry event can’t miss that long, odd looking bottle he carries with him. Ever since announcing a partnership with Conjure Spirits co-founder Kim Birkedal Hartmann, Ludacris has had a rough go of it selling the brand to the Hip Hop community.
“All the [Atlanta] clubs have it, but I don’t see anybody popping bottles or buying it,” said one industry exec.
The reluctance of the Hip Hop community to warm up to Conjure has forced Luda to ramp up his marketing efforts.
The rapper frequently displays the bottle on video sets and at photo shoots. In fact, insiders are so used to seeing Luda with his ever present cognac bottle, they joke that he spends more time with the bottle than he does with his lady.
Luda has even taken to using his account on social networking site Twitter.com to market the liquor.
“Send me twit pics of u holding your @ConjureCognac bottles & I will [repost] them,” wrote Luda in a “tweet” yesterday that was reposted by roughly 20% of his 285,000 followers, prompting one annoyed “follower” to tweet back, “stop trying to sell your stupid drink all the damn time!”
And just today, he released a track, “O Let’s Do It”, from his upcoming “Conjure mixtape.”
One Atlanta marketing exec we spoke with noted that Luda probably has a certain sales goal stipulated in his contract that he hasn’t met yet — which explains the more forceful sales approach. Others point out that music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs promotes Ciroc vodka, but you rarely see him photographed with the bottle in his hand.
In a post dated Dec. 31 on its stock market news blog, Scottrade.com noted that “preeminent Journalist Dan Dunn” named Conjure Cognac one of the Top Ten Spirits of 2009.
But hardly anyone in the Hip Hop community reads Scottrade.com — and it’s the Hip Hop community that Conjure and Luda wants so desperately to win over.
