For everyday food and drink brands, standing out isn’t just about what’s on the shelf, it’s about the experiences you create around the product. This is where branded luxury gifts play a powerful role, helping transform a familiar brand into something memorable, tactile, and premium.
Kronenbourg 1664 is a great example of how this can be done effectively.
Elevating everyday brands through gifting
While Kronenbourg 1664 is widely recognised as a premium beer brand, its challenge like many in the food and drink space is maintaining that premium perception beyond the product itself.
Branded merchandise and event gifting offer a solution. By creating high-quality, design-led items, brands can extend their identity into everyday life moving from something consumed occasionally to something experienced daily.
The power of simple, useful giveaways
At the heart of many successful campaigns are simple, practical items like notebooks.
Notebooks work particularly well because they:
- Are used regularly
- Travel with the user
- Provide repeated brand exposure over time
When designed well, they don’t feel like marketing they feel like something worth keeping. This makes them ideal for events, activations, and PR moments where brands want to leave a lasting impression.
A premium approach: the Zeal x 1664 case study
The Zeal x Kronenbourg 1664 leather gifts project shows how to take branded gifting to the next level.
For this campaign, a collection of custom leather notebooks and matching laptop sleeves was created as event giveaways designed to give guests something “truly special” and long-lasting.
The focus was on combining:
- Everyday usability (notebooks and sleeves people actually need)
- Premium materials (real leather covers for a tactile, elevated feel)
- Refined branding (debossing for a subtle, sophisticated finish)
Details like silver gilt edging added an extra layer of polish, reinforcing the premium positioning and ensuring the products felt considered from every angle.
Creating tiers of gifting
One of the most effective strategies for branded merchandise is tiered gifting.
- Notebooks act as the perfect entry point accessible, useful, and scalable for larger audiences
- Leather folios or laptop sleeves offer a more elevated option for executives, VIPs, or key partners
In the Zeal x 1664 project, pairing notebooks with matching leather accessories created a cohesive, high-end set ideal for more exclusive recipients while still maintaining brand consistency.
This layered approach ensures every audience receives something appropriate while still reinforcing the same premium identity.
From giveaway to brand experience
The key takeaway is simple: branded gifts shouldn’t feel disposable.
For food and drink brands in particular, luxury merchandise offers a way to:
- Extend brand presence beyond consumption
- Reinforce premium positioning
- Create lasting emotional connections
When done right, a notebook becomes more than a notebook and a leather folio becomes more than an accessory. They become daily reminders of the brand, turning a single interaction into an ongoing experience.
And for brands like Kronenbourg 1664, that’s where real value lies.