Keystone Light caps busy year with refreshed cans and packaging

From Molson Coors & Nick Kindelsperger:

✓ Keystone Light’s refreshed cans and packaging are being shipped to retail starting in December 
✓ The modern design is aimed at appealing to the brand’s core rural and new legal drinking-age consumers 
✓ Thanks to its eye-catching gold accent colors and inviting design, the updated packaging helps the brand stand out at retail 

After a busy year of celebrating fishing and hunting, along with honoring active military service members, Keystone Light is ending the year with a refresh of its everyday cans and packages. 

For the first refresh in seven years, even the Keystone Light logo has been tweaked, looking bolder and more modern. Returning to every can is the brand’s classic catchphrase, “Always Smooth.”

The two biggest changes to the cans and packages are the prominent use of gold and a bigger focus on the mountain scene. While gold had been a part of the brand’s color scheme for years, it was only used sparingly. Now that same shade of gold appears in the “Light” part of the brand’s name and in the mountain scene.

Keystone Light’s marketing manager, Matt Lafferty, says that every part of the design was carefully considered to help appeal to its core consumers.

“We wanted to bring more of the outdoor lifestyle our consumers love to our cans and packaging,” he says. “That’s why we went all-in on a mountain refresh and emphasized the gold accent color to make the packaging pop.”  

Each package also centers the new can on the front, which Lafferty says was a key part of the refresh.  

“We wanted to anchor all of our secondary packaging with a bold can image to help drive brand recognition,” he says. 

These changes should help the brand stand out in retail, Lafferty says. 

“The cases also have a lot of presence when stacked together. The design creates this continuous mountainscape that makes for a great billboard for the brand.”  

The new cans and packages are already in some markets and should be completely rolled out by the end of January. 

Connecting with rural consumers

The refresh is just one component of Keystone Light’s plans that started three years ago. 

“The process started with us focusing on both the consumers who’ve loved Keystone Light for years and the new generation of legal drinkers who were starting to discover the brand,” says Lafferty. “Many of these people are from rural communities, so we decided to celebrate them by being present in the places and occasions where they’d reach for a Keystone Light, including during outdoor activities where they’d spend time with friends and family.”   

This helps to explain why over the past few years Keystone Light has focused more energy on popular programs like “The Hunt,” where the brand has added partners like Realtree®, the outdoor lifestyle apparel company. The brand has partnered with an auto racing team and launched new promotions, including one focused on fishing and a partnership with the USO. The latter program helped send over 100,000 messages of appreciation to active military service members. 

Lafferty adds that these changes were also designed to help attract new legal drinking-age consumers. 

“This modern design helps us do a better job signaling quality to potential consumers,” says Lafferty. “We want legal drinking-age consumers to rethink our brand.”