Wray & Nephew is not just rum to Jamaicans, and Ashley McKenzie-Barnes built its Miami Carnival debut around that. The creative director and founder of D.PE Agency said anyone who has a relationship with the brand feels it. “It’s emotional. It’s nostalgic,” she said. Then she said the part that reaches well past rum: “You don’t just have it because you love the colors.”
The work started as a conversation a year ago. By the time the brand reached Miami Carnival, her team had spent months on carnival itself rather than on carnival as a backdrop. The debut ran through Gen X, the largest carnival band at Miami Carnival, and the hospitality around it took invited creators and media to Jamaican owned restaurants, Mangrove among them, which put the brand’s hosting money with Jamaican businesses on the same weekend it was asking for Jamaican attention.
What those months went into was carnival traditions, which is a different study from a market. A brand that skips it still gets the weekend and still gets the crowd. It just does not get to claim it understood either one.
That order is the argument. A brand can reach a carnival crowd without learning anything about it, and McKenzie-Barnes put the learning first. She is plain about what that costs and what it buys. “It might take a little bit more effort or a little bit more research, but it truly makes a difference,” she said.
Her advice to anybody arriving at carnival for the first time was not about marketing. “Move with the crowd, dance,” she said. “Don’t get intimidated by it.”
The part worth sitting with is who was making the decisions. The brand is Jamaican, the diaspora it means something to is the audience, and the person deciding how it showed up runs her own agency and comes from that culture rather than briefing somebody who does. Her own line is the test any brand arriving at carnival should have to pass: you do not get to hold the bottle just because you like how it looks.
