Andrew Tindall started his marketing career with seven years in the commercial and marketing teams at Bacardi, Innocent, Brown-Forman, and Diageo. Now working in global marketing effectiveness, he reckons the drinks trade has lost its way.
A still from I'd like to buy the world a Coke, where they are holding Guinness instead
My marketing career began in the drinks business where I developed three bad habits: I’m a sugary juice fiend, I spend far too much time in the pub, and worst of all, I became a certified drink-marketing-wanker (DMW). We are all one or two friends removed from a DMW. You just have to learn how to spot them:
All their friends work in booze marketing or behind bars.
They constantly outdo each other’s cool new “hidden” bar, like a liquid cultural capital dick-measuring contest.
They have WhatsApp groups to debate ad launches, innovation flops, and gossip about people moves like they actually matter to anyone outside Soho.
It is the category-navel-gazing that completely screws a DMW’s objectivity so much so that they start thinking a new hard seltzer or gin launch is genuinely culturally significant. However, good DMWs recognize this and rely on customer data to make decisions instead of just pleasing their mates.
I’m now three years DMW clean, having left drinks marketing to work in marketing effectiveness. Sure, I still occasionally swirl a mezcal negroni while chortling at the latest celebrity acquisition, but mostly, I’m out.
After working across different categories and markets, I can confidently confirm that the drinks category isn’t what it was. I don’t take any joy in writing this. Ignore what that CSO wrote about me on the back of the toilet cubicle door at the Groucho Club; I always try to keep things positive. Yes, there are some brilliant exceptions, but we must wake up and smell the sambuca. The industry that once produced the best marketers has fallen off the wagon. Marketing has failed big-booze.
Advertisement
Big-booze stock prices are drunkenly falling. The top houses are all more than 30% down; one is literally down 79%. Listening to industry folk trying to explain this decline quickly sorts them into four camps:
The Lifer: This person holds a golden DMW card, is an expert at boardroom politics and has survived 10+ restructures. They’ll always cite “macroeconomic factors.”
The Marketing Non-Believer: Considers marketing a cost and (quite rightly) points out how hard procurement teams have dropped the ball. A good example is the tequila mess, where no one could get enough agave, and now there’s a massive oversupply. Whisky planners forecasting 20 years of barrel aging into the future must be howling.
The Clueless: Always the loudest. They claim culture has changed (alcohol has become less relevant), people are trading down to cheaper brands, and revenues are slumping as people leave the category for alternatives.
The Minority: Understands marketing’s role, so cringes at The Clueless. Knows proper marketing keeps brands in culture, grows categories through penetration, and allows you to charge a premium.
You can usually work out which group someone falls into by asking them why the Coca-Cola share price remains impervious to decline and gets Warren Buffett out of bed in the morning. Not every drink brand and business is guilty, obviously, but it’s worth pondering a few key issues.
Many spirits ads are incredibly “left-brained.” In Orlando Wood’s seminal work, the IPA books ‘Lemon’ and ‘Look out’, he showed that brands must put on a show with “right-brained” creative features to capture attention and elicit emotion from non-buyers. He was forced to name some “left brain” creative features to prove the point with data. You’ll see a lot of spirits clearly use a lot of these: vacant stares, fast cut scenes, overt voiceovers, abstracted body parts and rational product features.
This style of work only speaks to the already aware and interested, and struggles to recruit lighter buyers. Elite-DMW Nick Williamson researched over 200 global booze ads and proved this in his drinks ad how-to guide: Raising The Bar. (Reach out if you want to see that.)
Beyond the dependency on rational thinking, many ads from big-booze brands look, smell, and taste the same, be it grading, studios, music, sets, lens flare, and the ever-present Gen Z-esque cast. Honestly, go pick a big-booze business. Watch the latest ads from its various brands. The similarities are uncanny and hilarious.
Is this procurement having too much sway? Brand managers rotating between brands? Refusal to hire non-drink marketers? I am not sure the agencies are blame-free here either. I once launched a paid Meta campaign for a whisky brand, a competitor launched something similar on Meta the week after and I shit you not: they’d picked the same music and used the same studio.
Also, innovation has been replaced with chasing incremental flavors and slimming down glass bottles at the expense of distinctiveness. Or launching global travel retail “exclusives” that eventually fail and end up in the staff shop. You hear horror stories as stock prices get spicy and trousers get soiled.
“We must focus on the core.” I agree; get back to brand building, not incremental flavor BS, while we wind back investment in anything that will pay back in 5+ years. Incubation and brand accelerator budgets have been slashed.
And the biggest crime of all: no one has managed to arrest the endless discounting. Some of your favorite spirit brands are sold on offer in grocery 95%+ of the time. I understand grocers need their pound of flesh. I understand shelf space, joint business plans, and how you get activation space. But if you pulled that at a P&G or Unilever brand, the CMO would personally come and drag you from your desk to the front door, no matter how many times you say “revenue growth management”.
Saving the largest discounts for Christmas as well is like a florist doing a deal on roses for Valentine’s Day. When did you last buy a case of beer or a bottle of spirit at full price? As one of my DMW mentors always laughs, “Why charge for it when you can give it away?”
It’s hard not to rant like this when you care about the industry and brands. And you see friends losing jobs, unable to find new ones. Marketing’s role in society is to turn the wheels of commerce. It’s noble. Without exposing myself as a card-carrying capitalist too much.
What really prompted me to bother writing this was re-listening to Tito’s CMO (Taylor Berry) on The CMO podcast. A rare podcast episode that I’ve found myself diving back into multiple times over the past few years. This guy really gets it. It only has six product lines (SKUs). I’ve worked on tiny, tiny brands with hundreds.
Tito’s refused to jump on trends but focused on driving its brand power. It found an emotional brand platform and stuck with it over the years while still keeping it creative and interesting. This got me thinking about the green shoots we see in the industry from people who clearly get it, green shoots of marketing hope.
There’s the obvious advertising and culture work coming from Guinness, maybe the less obvious, incredibly consistent ‘Do What Moves You’ Bacardi Rum campaign that gets far too little recognition for what it’s managed to do for its market share. White Claw’s creation of a global category should also be studied.
The Woodsman whisky’s creation of Barry the Beaver and the results that followed, in a category determined to discuss flavor benefits, is heartwarming. 5-star work in System1’s testing and subsequent market share gobbling. Poretti’s first powerful stake in the ground with their new foxy work is also magnificent.
De Kuyper’s purchase of the dormant giant Archer’s Peach Schnapps and investment in a brand refresh and new campaign to turn latent awareness into salience is poised to yield brilliant results. Honestly, Gemma Collins is exactly what this brand needs, even if the bottle refresh went a little too far.
Speaking of excellent celeb use, Malibu’s new work with Brian Cox is right-brained AF. Malibu is consistently doing some interesting things to drive brand fame. It has to as rival premium coconut rums pop up left, right and centre. Cox really makes all other drinks ads (a category inherently rooted in friends, fun, and relaxation) look serious, boring, and stuffy.
And AU vodka is, by some measures, the fastest growing global brand (not drink brand, brand).
I can’t reference any big TV ads because it hasn’t done any. Growth has come from a genuine market orientation that birthed a garish gold bottle, a high-color high-flavor strategy (that changed the category), authentic celeb collabs, and owning where few DMWs have bothered to step foot in - a corner shop. Top-shelf vodka brands are getting shown up by a couple of mates from Swansea.
But the brand that should really give us hope is the one that should be the most impressive marketing story of the past decade.
Heineken’s Birra Morreti.
What a champion of a brand. It's just about to overtake Peroni’s off-trade sales, off the back of the ‘Enjoy Life’s Simple Pleasures’ brand platform, which just hit the System1 database. The second highest scoring beer ad we’ve tested. Cracking work from Lucky Generals as always. It lost volume last year but managed to grow by increasing its price by 11%. You see this in about 3% of IPA case studies and 5% of WARC’s. Bloody brilliant. And its Birra Moretti Sale Di Mare (sea salt) is a great example of fluent innovation (80% familiar, 20% new).
It’s not all doom and gloom.
Marketers who are smashing it will raise the bar. Let’s just hope everyone gets serious and catches up before the decent ones all go and start marketing toilet roll. The minority must become the majority.
Right, all this writing made me thirsty, so I went off to the pub. And not for juice. Email all your complaints about the above here.
Andrew Tindall is a leading expert in creative marketing and advertising effectiveness. He currently serves as SVP of global partnerships for the creative effectiveness platform System1. With a background that bridges science and marketing, Andrew began his career in the FMCG sector, where he held roles in brand management and innovation at major companies such as Diageo and Bacardi. You can get in touch with him on LinkedIn.