Big Spirits Brands Make Smaller Ones Invisible to Customers. And Creativity Alone Won’t Help

By JP Summers, Partner, Strategy, Five Cherries

It’s not often that you see marketing for a craft or small-batch spirits brands these days. Now, imagine how it must feel to be a small spirits brand, spending plenty of marketing dollars but never earning the type of visibility or customer awareness that major brands do.

It’s not just a creative problem. Smart, compelling marketing isn’t enough to break through anymore.

The real issue is that a “brand presence gap” makes meaningful visibility for new brands extremely difficult. Larger competitors have a huge advantage, both in spending and in the amount of cultural saturation they’ve achieved over years (or often decades) of marketing. It’s a deficit that many new brands just can’t overcome, especially in that split second before a customer chooses a drink at their favorite bar. There are bartender programs, in-bar initiatives, incentives and other tactics to give new spirits a fighting chance, but at the end of the day, the only way a brand can win at the point of purchase is having an undeniable amount of top-of-mind awareness.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to break through. It just takes a better understanding of the challenge so that marketing efforts can be planned and executed to accomplish a more meaningful KPI than lower-funnel optimization.

Minding the gap

Overcoming this “brand presence gap” wasn’t always the level of challenge it is now – where instead of a David versus Goliath competitive environment, it’s now David versus 10 Goliaths. It took Annheuser-Busch, Molson-Coors, Constellation, Diageo, Pernod-Ricard, Beam-Suntory, and others buying up the smaller brands, spending to make their big brands unavoidable and erasing the ability for anyone to come in with a modest media spend and make it work.

Digital marketing also exacerbated the issue by allowing everything to become pay-to-play. Theoretically, it should have made it easier for smaller brands to get their messaging out there more widely. But the reality is more stark, with big brands out-spending all others to such a degree that even small brands with decent marketing budgets get drowned out. This heavy spending also continues to drive up ad rates, making the whole environment more expensive to compete in.

The wealth of performance data enabled by digital marketing also came with downsides. More data should mean better optimization, particularly for newcomers who need optimization most. But the reality is that, in the rush for sales, brands have stopped seeing the forest for the trees.

It’s not that channel-specific KPIs are wrong, but hyper-focusing on the narrow end of performance ignores the bigger picture of what actually works. Instead, new and smaller spirit brands need to invest in a full-funnel marketing system that doesn’t just optimize at the bottom end. Attention-winning creative will only get you so far. You need the right kind of investments across the funnel, with a mix of traditional and non-traditional applications. Here’s where to start:

• Don’t get caught in the performance trap
  If you’re going to spend indulgently, don’t overlook the critical role of awareness. Broader upper funnel awareness campaigns are where people really learn to connect with your brand, so don’t make the mistake of prematurely overspending on lower funnel efforts designed to close a sale. Research has proven how much money gets left on the table when we overlook that it’s awareness marketing that allows lower funnel marketing to work.

• Forget being everyone’s favorite. Hyper-target
  It’s a mistake to try to message and appeal to everyone. You have to focus on finding your core, most passionate consumers. That means consolidating your spending to potential loyalists that have yet to be converted. A great example is Montucky’s explosive growth story, built on the back of a hyper-specific mountain-lifestyle audience and driven largely by merchandise. They’ve made everything from jumpsuits, to shot-skis, to custom ski and snowboard equipment, all distributed in small mountain towns where activity-centric social circles thrive, all without spending significant money on traditional advertising.
  
• Dream nationally but spend locally
  It’s fine to think of yourself as the best spirit brand in the nation. But don’t waste time actually buying ads nationally. Instead, leverage the data tools that can identify the highest density of your potential customers, then conquest those areas with hyper-localized creative. That’s exactly how we drove a +27% YoY sales lift for Fernet-Branca during our March Madness campaign.
  
• Provocation is a mandatory
  A strong media approach does not work if the creative itself is uninteresting. It’s spirits – part of a social activity that’s exciting and that people want to be a part of. Showing off the product without imbuing it with spirits’ inherently fun mindset isn’t just unimaginative, it makes it hard for customers to see themselves trying something new.

As the “brand presence gap” continues to grow, new spirits brands have no choice but to use their advertising dollars more strategically. Those that rely on creative marketing stunts to earn fickle attention will find themselves without the strong foundation of loyal customers that can make the difference between a momentary blip and a brand that lasts. So, spend wisely.

Author Bio:

JP Summers is Partner, Strategy of Five Cherries, a marketing agency that makes things for brands that people devour.