HiteJinro's JINRO brand has launched its first coordinated global marketing campaign, "My Favorite JINRO," tapping BTS member V as global ambassador in a bid to accelerate the world's top-selling soju label into mainstream beverage-alcohol channels outside South Korea.

The campaign premiered with a narrative short film featuring V arriving at the wrong party and inadvertently uniting two groups of guests over JINRO — a conceit designed to underscore the brand's positioning around social connection and everyday occasion drinking. The film rolls out across JINRO's official YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook channels, to be followed by digital content, consumer-engagement events, and offline promotional activity in international markets.

Product Strategy Embedded in Creative

The campaign film encodes JINRO's near-term product roadmap in its set design: "Room 306" represents the brand's current global lineup of three core soju expressions — JINRO CHAMISUL FRESH, JINRO CHAMISUL ORIGINAL, and JINRO IS BACK — alongside six flavored variants including green grape, peach, strawberry, grapefruit, plum, and lemon. "Room 307" signals an intended expansion of the flavored soju range to seven or more SKUs, reflecting a strategy to capture incremental shelf space in markets where flavored spirits have driven category growth. The move mirrors broader flavored spirits trends reshaping the global off-premise retail landscape.

First bottled in 1924, JINRO holds the title of the world's best-selling spirits brand by volume — a distinction it has retained for decades through dominant domestic share in South Korea and growing export penetration in Asia, the Americas, and Europe. The appointment of V, whose group BTS released their fifth studio album ARIRANG at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in March 2026, gives JINRO access to one of the most commercially potent fan ecosystems in global pop culture, a resource that beverage-alcohol brands have increasingly sought to harness as traditional advertising loses reach among younger legal-drinking-age consumers.

Targeting Mainstream Global Distribution

Jung-ho Hwang, Head of Overseas Business at HiteJinro, framed the campaign as a gateway to broader trade channels. "Moving forward, we will continue expanding our presence in the mainstream global beverage alcohol market while broadening consumer touchpoints worldwide to further strengthen JINRO's competitiveness as Korea's representative soju brand," Hwang said.

Alongside the film, JINRO introduced "Fill The Moment" as its new global tagline — language calibrated to position soju not as a niche ethnic-aisle product but as a versatile social spirit competing for the same occasions as vodka, gin, and flavored malt beverages. For importers, distributors, and on-premise operators, the campaign represents a meaningful increase in above-the-line support for a spirits category that has gained measurable traction in Asian-cuisine foodservice segments and Korean barbecue chains. Retailers tracking K-food and beverage trends will note that sustained celebrity marketing at this scale typically correlates with accelerated velocity in grocery and specialty beverage channels. The brand's digital-first rollout also reflects the beverage-alcohol industry's ongoing migration of marketing spend from broadcast to social and streaming platforms, where younger consumers index highest.

Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.