Absolut Tea Party: Absolut Boston Gets an Exotic Makeover into Wild Tea

Absolut is going exotic with its new Wild Tea vodka featuring a campaign with Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But the flavor was originally associated with a good old Yankee city that no one would call exotic: Boston. It’s a study not only in product testing, but in marketing a very similar product in vastly different ways.

The new Wild Tea vodka features black tea and elderflower, the same flavors found in the limited-edition Absolut Boston, which was released in 2009.

But while Wild Tea, which will be distributed globally, plays up its “wild” and Asian theme with a photo shoot in a Japanese garden featuring a live panther (and the part-Korean songstress), Absolut Boston tied its tea flavor to the Boston Tea Party, with the bottle design paying homage to the iconic left-field wall at the city’s Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox.

Absolut's Boston edition was part of the brand’s high-profile City Series, which has also featured-limited edition flavors for Los Angeles, Brooklyn and Vancouver, below. The series was inspired by an Absolut New Orleans that the brand launched in 2007 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Each city in the series receives $50,000 towards charitable causes from Absolut.

The brand's city series is not only a boon to the civic brands and locals' pride; it's also a testing ground for new flavors. Boston-to-Wild-Tea is not the first city-to-global transformation to come from the series; Absolut Los Angeles was the inspiration for the brand’s Absolut Berri Acai.

Next up in the series is Absolut San Francisco, which reportedly will have a “wine country” grape flavor and will be released later this year.