Bacardi has announced a raft of marketing activity for cognac brand D’Ussé to mark the 30th anniversary of its co-founder Shawn ‘Jay-Z’ Carter’s debut album, Reasonable Doubt.
The campaign includes a limited-edition cognac box set containing Jay-Z 30 D’Ussé VSOP, which will be available “at select retailers nationwide [in the US] for a limited time”. No SRP was provided, but a previous limited-edition SKU for the brand marking Chinese New Year was listed online for US$209.99.
Alongside the NPD, Bacardi is organising activations at Philadelphia music festival The Roots Picnic this month and Jay-Z’s residency at New York’s Yankee Stadium in July. At both venues, there will be D’Ussé-branded bars serving a special-edition anniversary cocktail with lemon, amaretto, pineapple juice and soda water, called Code30.
Further branded “events” – details of which were not immediately available – will be held in Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC.
Last year, Bacardi teamed D’Ussé with rapper Latto for a marketing campaign with a focus on the then-recently launched D’Ussé VSOP Magnum Edition.
In 2022, Carter’s SC Liquor business, which joined forces with Bacardi for D’Ussé in 2011, filed court papers requesting financial and production information from Bacardi about the JV. The pair settled their legal spat over the joint venture in early 2023, with the spirits group taking majority control.
