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How Bavaria Made 1719 Fashion-Forward for British Beer Drinkers
Bavaria's 'Stylish since 1719' campaign is a digital advertising series created by London agency Strawman and published in the United Kingdom in August 2016, using an eighteenth-century-costumed figure in a contemporary setting to assert the Dutch brewer's three-century heritage as a mark of authenticity and independence rather than mere antiquity.
Bavaria is the flagship beer brand of Swinkels Family Brewers, a Dutch family-owned company whose brewing roots trace to 1719 in Lieshout, Netherlands, according to reporting by IMD. Swinkels was, at the time of the campaign's launch, managed by the seventh generation of the family, a fact that gives the brand's heritage claim unusual structural credibility. The campaign leaned directly into that lineage, framing the year 1719 not as a museum exhibit but as a living style credential — stylish, fashionable, and, crucially, independent since that founding date.
In the United Kingdom, Bavaria entered a crowded and consolidating premium beer market populated by brands with considerably larger media budgets. The digital campaign comprised three media assets, each built around the same central creative idea: a figure dressed in elaborate eighteenth-century attire moving through spaces that are unmistakably modern. The juxtaposition was designed to make Bavaria's age feel current rather than dusty, as noted by Flux Magazine in its coverage of the campaign on 22 August 2016. The campaign's full title — 'Stylish since 1719, Fashionable since 1719, Independent since 1719' — functioned as a layered brand manifesto, with each variant emphasising a different dimension of Bavaria's identity. Strawman, based in London, handled creative development, channelling the brand's Dutch family-brewery positioning into a visual language suited to the UK's digitally native beer audience.
Bavaria positioned itself in the United Kingdom by foregrounding what most large brewers cannot credibly claim: genuine, multigenerational independence. According to IMD, Swinkels Family Brewers deliberately built its competitive strategy around independence, entrepreneurship, and unconventional marketing rather than competing on mass-market television spend — a meaningful differentiation in a sector dominated by conglomerates. The strategic logic for the United Kingdom was clear: give discerning consumers a reason to choose Bavaria that no amount of corporate restructuring could replicate.
The global beer market in 2016 was mature and highly concentrated, with growth unevenly distributed by region, according to academic research published via Oxford University Press and data from Beverage Marketing Corporation. In that environment, Anheuser-Busch InBev held approximately 27.3% of global beer market share, and Heineken held approximately 9.7%, according to Beverage Marketing Corporation figures cited by J.P. Morgan. Carlsberg, a direct competitor in the UK premium segment, was also among the four largest brewers controlling an outsized share of global volume. Against that backdrop, Bavaria's claim to independence was not a soft brand value — it was a hard competitive differentiator, particularly for a UK audience that had shown growing appetite for craft and independent producers across the broader Food and Drink category.
The choice of a digital-only campaign in August 2016 also reflected strategic discipline. Rather than spreading a limited budget across broadcast media where Bavaria would compete head-to-head with Heineken and AB InBev's spending power, Strawman concentrated the campaign into three sharply crafted digital assets, maximising creative impact within a defined channel. According to Campaign Live, Bavaria undertook a broader UK branding overhaul during this period, suggesting 'Stylish since 1719' was part of a coordinated effort to establish a coherent brand identity in the British market rather than an isolated execution.
The central creative device of 'Stylish since 1719' is a deliberate collision of historical and contemporary visual registers. According to Flux Magazine, the campaign featured an eighteenth-century-styled figure entering a modern hair salon — an image engineered to be both arresting and immediately legible as a metaphor: Bavaria has always had style; only the context changes. The hair salon setting is particularly well chosen. It is a space associated with personal identity, self-expression, and the present moment, making the intrusion of an ornately dressed historical figure feel playful rather than pompous.
Strawman, the London agency responsible for the campaign, built the three digital assets around variations on this single core idea, with each execution emphasising a different heritage claim — stylish, fashionable, and independent — while maintaining visual and tonal consistency across the set. The approach demonstrates a craft discipline that is easy to undervalue: committing to one strong idea and executing it with precision across a small asset suite, rather than diluting it across multiple concepts. This is especially pertinent for a digital campaign where audience attention is fragmented and brand recognition must be established quickly.
The visual grammar of the campaign drew on the aesthetic language of heritage fashion and portraiture, recontextualised within contemporary commercial photography and digital art direction. Production credits for the 'Stylish since 1719' campaign are not publicly documented in full; however, Mat Sunderland is identified in connection with the creative work, and the campaign was created under the Strawman agency banner in London. The use of period costume, carefully lit to feel cinematic rather than theatrical, gave the campaign a premium finish appropriate to Bavaria's positioning in the UK market as a quality independent alternative to mass-produced lager brands.
No verified performance data for the 'Stylish since 1719' campaign is publicly available. No sales lift, market-share change, or brand-tracking results have been published, and no media spend figures are documented. The campaign did not receive recognition from Cannes Lions, the D&AD, the Clios, the One Show, the Effies, the Webby Awards, or WARC. Clapboard's editorial assessment places the campaign at a score of 63 out of 100.
That score reflects a campaign that executes its central idea with clarity and craft but operates within structural constraints that limit its ceiling. The three-asset digital suite is a lean creative commitment — sufficient to establish a brand point of view but insufficient to build the frequency or narrative depth that drives measurable brand equity shifts in a competitive market like the United Kingdom. The campaign's reliance on a single visual metaphor, while creatively coherent, means that its persuasive range is narrow: it speaks effectively to consumers already predisposed to value heritage and independence but is unlikely to recruit audiences outside that frame.
Where the campaign succeeds structurally is in its strategic alignment. Bavaria's core differentiator — genuine, documented independence since 1719, as confirmed by IMD — is not an invented brand story but a verifiable fact, and Strawman translated that fact into a visual language that is contemporary and shareable rather than archival. In the context of the United Kingdom's increasingly heritage-conscious beer audience, that alignment between brand truth and creative expression represents genuine strategic value, even in the absence of quantified outcomes.
Bavaria's 'Stylish since 1719' is a digital advertising campaign created by London agency Strawman and published in the United Kingdom in August 2016. It used an eighteenth-century-costumed figure in a modern setting to dramatize Bavaria's brewing heritage, framing the brand's founding year as a living credential of style and independence.
Strawman, a London-based advertising agency, created the campaign for Bavaria. Mat Sunderland is identified in connection with the creative work. The campaign was a digital execution comprising three media assets, published in the United Kingdom in August 2016 as part of Bavaria's broader UK brand positioning effort, according to Campaign Live.
Bavaria is owned by Swinkels Family Brewers, a Dutch family business tracing its roots to 1719 in Lieshout, Netherlands, according to IMD. In a UK market dominated by conglomerates including Anheuser-Busch InBev and Heineken, independence was a structurally credible differentiator that no major competitor could authentically replicate, giving Bavaria a distinctive brand platform.
The campaign placed an eighteenth-century-styled figure inside a contemporary hair salon, according to Flux Magazine. This collision of historical and modern registers made Bavaria's 300-year heritage feel current rather than antiquated. Each of the three digital assets emphasised a different brand claim — stylish, fashionable, and independent — while sharing the same visual logic.
The campaign did not receive recognition from Cannes Lions, D&AD, the Clios, the One Show, the Effies, the Webby Awards, or WARC, based on available records. No verified performance metrics or media spend figures have been published. Clapboard's editorial assessment places the campaign at a score of 63 out of 100.
Bavaria's brewing roots in Lieshout, Netherlands, are documented to 1719, according to IMD, giving the brand a heritage claim that is both specific and verifiable. In the United Kingdom's competitive premium beer category, where Heineken and Carlsberg also trade on brand history, Bavaria's independent, family-owned continuity across seven generations offers a more singular and credible narrative.
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