028 | Bottle Shops before Bars: starting at the liquid and work back towards the brand | with Duncan McRae, Co-Founder of Woven (Adelaide, Australia)

Welcome to the Maffeo Drinks Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Maffeo. In episode 28, I had the pleasure of chatting to Duncan MacRae, co founder of Walden, and a drinks industry veteran having previously worked with William Brands and Sons and Diageo. He's a leading example of building brands bottom up. I hope you enjoy our chat.

Hi Duncan, how are doing?

I'm very well. Thank you. Very well indeed. Nice to finally meet you in person and put a face to the LinkedIn post.

That's true. That's true. And to the newsletter, I still remember when you wrote me about my newsletter as you are a reader and and I remember you saying that you agree with almost everything, not exactly everything. So I hope we will have a few challenges on the conversation today and we'll learn from each other.

Yeah. No. I I do enjoy it. I feel very lucky to have found it at the time that I did because I was doing lots of, like, third party consultancy. And essentially, I got loads of free, very insightful information from you in pithy one liners that I could recycle and claim as my own in front of clients.

Not quite, but I think it's a great thing what you're doing. And I think the value in what you offer for free is I think a lot of people have a good understanding of the sorts of things you're talking about, but they haven't articulated it in the way that you are able to. And I think that's why a lot of people click and they get on board very quickly with what you're saying because it feels like common sense, but no one's ever written it down. And I think it's a very useful thing for people. I share it with all my clients and all my industry contacts and people that I mentor or run into at distilleries because it's the only thing I have to compare it to is a book, which was the autobiography or the biography of the founder of 42, the New Zealand vodka brand that was going back, like, twenty five years.

And it was just the first wave of premium vodka just when brands like Grey Goose were in their infancy. They took this brand from a startup as a side hustle to global success and then eventual sell out for millions of dollars to Bacardi, I think, ended up with it. And this is pre Internet as well, pre social media. And the way they built that brand is codified in this book. And the title of the book says it all, really.

You'll love this as someone with good expertise in sales, but every bastard said no. And the book is basically a story of, like, how they built the brand, in your words, bottom up, bar by bar, dram by dram, bartender by bartender. And when I was founding my brand with my cofounders, I scoured the Internet on eBay and found, like, enough copies to give everyone one. And I was like, this is the bible. We need to not be any under any illusion.

It's gonna be as hard as this. And I think your newsletter is really good for that because it it gives people, like, some real talk about how it's

gonna be. Thank you. That's the aim of what I'm doing. And sometimes it feels like a little bit of a like, I'm the bad guy, like, telling the truth of the dreamers, but you should get it right as early as possible, then you can save a lot of money. And I've spent a lot of money on behalf of brands and I know what works and what doesn't.

That's the actual aim. Let me ask you the first question. I I know you are a marketer at heart and there is this big buzzword that everybody uses now, brand awareness. Let's build brand awareness. So the brand is lacking awareness and all this meeting in big and small companies are full of this sentence.

I like to call it more like demand, building demand rather than creating awareness because it's a little bit fluffy for me awareness. So what's your take on that? How in your experience, your current experience with Woven and in your previous experience, how do you think brands should build demand when they start?

I think building demand in the entree, there's a million different ways to do it. I think there's that old saying of you can lead a horse to water, but you can't force it to drink. And brand awareness is not like a turnkey solution. It's a complex ecosystem where it's supported by understanding the occasion, the need state, the product features and benefits, and linking it to consumers. Because I think there's brands that have high awareness, but they're still not cool or they're not in demand or they're not meeting the needs of their target consumer or whatever.

And I think how to go about building it, I think, is taking your time, really spending some time investigating all the assumptions that are baked into your vision as a brand and removing your ego or your confidence and playing devil's advocate with yourself and saying, why on earth would anyone need this? And it's not because you want to sell it to them or you think it's great or you're fixing a category problem that no one cares about because a lot of brands do that. They're like, oh, they've come up with the solution, and then they've created an argument to sell that solution, but no one's having that argument or that conversation. And I think deconstructing demand is I would hate to say that there's luck involved, but it's that thing of being in the right place at the right time with the right proposition, with the right story to meet the needs of either the bartender, the buyer, the consumer. And there's a lot of things that need to go right.

And some of it's intuitive, but a lot of it is not common sense. And I think it's so complex. It's so hard. I don't pretend that it's easy. But, yeah, as you said, it's very easy to waste a lot of money in the on trade with poorly conceived ideas that are forced because they have to work or it should work and it just doesn't and it doesn't make sense because a lot of things need to go right.

There's approaches you can use about playing devil's advocate, listening rather than talking. I think that's the best thing you can do first. And then there becomes like a doggedness as well, where you can't take the first no as this doesn't work. That's where you need good relationships between marketing who say, this is a great idea. We've got lots of insights.

We've developed this to meet this situation. And then sales who are like, yeah, you would say that. You're marketing. This is what the real world says, and therefore, it's going in the bottom of my priority list because it's a hard sell. Like, you need a strong relationship between those two entities to make something work because you need them to say, okay.

That didn't work. But you need that, like, openness, constant communication, like a true belief that you're on the same team and you're not being given something ineffective to sell. Like, your feedback is listened to and responded to and valid. That relationship, I think, is probably the biggest thing that can make or break brands in their early days. And often it's the same person in founder led startups.

Sales and marketing is like the founder often. This is a very

interesting point with what you're raising because it's you mentioned it there, like with a few things. It's about the system in place, putting a system in place because everybody more or less we discussed this in the beginning. Everybody knows what to do more or less when I'm talking, when I'm writing on LinkedIn, I'm writing a newsletter or having a chat like this with you on a podcast, I'm not reinventing the wheel, you know, it's, it's not like it's stuff that people know about. It's just that I feel that a lot of brands, they lack the system and they know the bits and pieces and they cannot put them together. For example, the maintenance, the technical team would be super great at certain things, but then it's kind of disconnected from a brand team.

They may not have never heard of each other, met each other, had the feedback to each other. Then it's about the KPIs to have shared KPIs between sales, marketing and operations, because a lot of time they are incentivized on different things that go against each other, like the distillery or the brewery. It's incentivized on productions and effectiveness and efficiency, driving efficiencies on products. They discard SKUs that may be super needed by the on trade sales team because that's the one that put the foot in the door in pubs and then they can squeeze in the other, the more boring kind of brands that may have a huge brand awareness, like close to 99% in that market, but nobody wants them anymore because they are just on promo on supermarket shelves all the time. So it's, this is the very interesting discussion and like, we're not gonna solve it here, but the, my wish, let's say is trying to decode it in a way that, you know, what I see, what you guys are doing with Woven, for example, like you created a kind of movement if I got it right from experiencing from a, from an outsider perspective on creating the community and getting to a certain place before the product was actually even available.

And of course it has got to do with the fact that whiskey needs aging and maturation and so forth. There is a point that I'm struggling with when I talk to sales teams that is you cannot show up to the, to a bar with a product that they've never heard of because the bar community is very intertwined together, like across the world, across different cities, countries and so forth. And if they haven't heard about your brand, there's a reason. Like it's not that they, cannot be that they have missed it. Okay.

One of the 20 buyers you're going to talk to may have not heard about it, but the, they must have heard it somehow. There's something wrong. So how do you create that demand, for example, before you actually entered the bar or the pub or the restaurant?

For us, it was like, we were really lucky. We came with loads of insights. We doled on there were three of us originally. There's now five of us. Three of us are like drinks industry since, you know, legal drinking age, bartenders, inter brands, big companies, small companies, different parts of the world, different skill sets, interestingly.

So we are a nice blend of sales, marketing, and advocacy. And that works really well for us because we knew not what we were doing. We still don't know what we're doing. Let's get that very clear. But we knew what we wanted to do and why certain things were going to be important.

Initially, we were self funded, so we knew we couldn't make enough whiskey to satisfy the demand we wanted to create. So our primary objective of what we called phase one was just about mental availability. That's what big drinks companies call it. But getting the brand out there noticed, talked about, like, we call it our blue tick moment, like Instagram, where people would be like, oh, Woven. Yeah.

I've not tried it, but I hear it's decent or it's credible. It's not just a fad or a fake thing. Like, it's got substance and the right people are saying the right things about it. So we we had a lot of existing relationships we were able to lean into, and a lot of people had either mentored us or helped us. And the brand we built was not really about us.

It's about the relationship between us and everyone else. And so it's quite a friendly, warm brand to approach people with because we're talking about the cool distilleries we're getting casks from to make our blends, or we're talking about the cool distilleries we're working with to bottle our product because we only use third party production. And as ex bartenders, we're able to walk in and really connect with licensees and bar owners because we are probably, like, painfully out of touch from that world now, but that's where our journey started. And for us, it's the most important most important channel for us as a new brand because we understand that's where the reputations emerge from. That's these people in independent off trade.

We talk about the fact that these independent passion project whiskey shops, they hand sell every bottle. So you don't just get the product. You get a story or a way to drink it or a recommendation that you use when you get that bottle and you say, oh, the guy in the shop said you should drink it in this cocktail or this way. We love that because that's, they are like the unsung heroes of the whiskey industry. Those sales guys in shops that hand sell every bottle.

But bartenders do that in the entree as well. They upsell. They make recommendations. They say, oh, you've ordered that. Have you heard of this?

And we've done it in the way that I just described it, independent op trade first

Right.

Because that's where our proposition and price point is. We did get a lot of support from our domestic Edinburgh bar scene because of friends and relationships. But, realistically, we're in a 50 CL. We're about £50, and it's not quite cheap enough to work in cocktails for people. So we were going into these bars and we were like, hey, we just wanted to let you know.

And it was almost like the anti sell. It's like, we've launched. You might have seen it online. You're very important to us as a bar. This is our home turf.

Like, we want to be in here, but the reason we're not coming to sell this product to you now is because everything we're doing is a limited edition. We don't wanna piss you off by asking you to put it on a cocktail list and then you go to reorder it and you can't, but we wanted to make sure that you tasted it. You knew it. You had a chance to ask any questions and we'll see you in nine months when hopefully we get to the level where we can do a continuous liquid at a price point that is going to work for you. And everyone, of course, lift listed the because they were like, that's so cool.

Love what you guys are doing. You guys, that's such a great story. Really appreciate you coming to see us and let us taste it first. What can we do to help you? And so we we were doing it out of courtesy to, like, our own community, telling them that this will be for you in time, but at the moment it's not.

And it's backfired because most of our volume in Scotland went through the entree. And there were all these cocktail lists in town with like our cocktails scored out because they couldn't get hold of the product anymore.

This is, this this is super insightful because first of all the launching in the off trade first, which is of course, whiskey is quite peculiar in certain extents. If it was a gin brand, we would be having it probably like a different conversation. But it's very interesting, like what you're saying firstly about the off trade and then also about how you, how it played. And I heard a few words that resonates with me, which is the home turf, the importance of winning in the home turf. You cannot have a scotch whiskey not known in Scotland.

First of all, and of course, then when you play with the blends and when you play with Duffer, the other world's whiskey geographies, then you can play with that thing, but there is that element. And then also the fact that it really, the liquid I hear plays such a strong role that then you can really start from there and build the relationship with who's going to sell it afterwards. Right?

I think we put pressure on ourselves just to get out there and make it real because we were like, as soon as we saw the insight that it was just after Compass Box had celebrated their twenty year anniversary. And I was listening to John Glaser on a podcast, and I was like, I just had this moment that I won't go into our origin story, but we were we fell in love with whiskey as bartenders in Scotland. And we would spend our Sunday walking around Leith, the old blending district of Edinburgh, looking at all the old warehouses, trying to work out which brands might have been there and whatever. We were total geeks. And we had joked about starting a leaf whiskey.

And then we all went off and got proper jobs and worked in the industry, and we're trying to do what we wanted to do in whiskey from the inside and banging our head against the wall. And then I heard John Glaser talking about Compass Box twenty years after it had started. And I was I was like, no one's come since. They are still the new kids on the block in blending, but the world of whiskey has changed so much in in that twenty year period. So that's where we were like, okay.

Let's go for this. But I think for us, as soon as we had that realization that we could maybe do this, we got super paranoid that if we didn't do it like now, someone else would, and they would do it first and quicker. And we're definitely not the first mover. We're twenty years after Compass Box. But within the two years that we've launched, there's now two or three other similar outfits in Scotland that are trying to reappraise blending.

One's come from Beam Suntory, one's an independent. So we're really happy that we just went for it quick. And that meant doing things the complete wrong way around. And it's that idea that having something like, I'm a bit of a procrastinator in the way I work. Like, I'll always wait for the perfect window of opportunity to write this blog post or whatever.

And of

course it never happens. I've got two kids and like work in a company that's all over the place. So the trick is to just start it, even if you have the thought, it's like open a tab on the mobile phone and start it. So it's in your recent documents and it increases the likelihood. Even if it's a pile of rubbish the first time you've just got all your thoughts down, At least then, you know, that it's not starting something from scratch.

It's an editing job that you need to do on it, or it's a restructuring. And that's how things get done. But you wait for the perfect time to do something and it will never come. So you'll never do it. And I think that was the biggest thing is we've got one of our cofounders is Nick Ravenhall.

He is from New Zealand. He's got some Maori blood in him, but he's also like a world championship lacrosse player and then coach. And he brings that, like, mentality to business where it's like, just go. And he has no fear. Like, we've done personality tests at previous companies where you, you know, map how how like, I was like, why are we always fighting?

And he doesn't see fear. Like, just it doesn't register on him. So I see a lot of risk and fear in things. And he's like, I've already sent five emails and it's in motion, and then things happen. And I think that's a good insight about how we started because we talked about it for twenty years.

And then one day, we decided that we should probably make it real. And within a week, we had the business plan that Pete had written. Nick had already sorted out some supply, and I was like, oh, the pressure's now on me to get the packaging and bottle and brand work done because it's already in motion, whereas I would have just sat on it for another few weeks. So we very much carried that momentum into the way we seeded in the on trade, the off trade export, just trying to what's the worst that can happen. And it was during lockdown.

So it was a little bit easier to get ahold of people. And we were just reaching out to people saying, this is what we want to do. This is what we're about. This is our vision for what we think this could be. And it's that thing of like lead generation where you're you speak to 10 people.

One of them says, I can't help you, but I can put you in touch with this person who might be able to. And then you start again. And it's it's not just like a numbers game, but it's having the discipline and the self belief to realize that every door that closes in your face isn't the end. It's a potential new beginning. I think you you say this in some of your content is there might be a bar that you really want to list your product, but there's no point being in a bar if the only reason they've listed your product is your persistence.

And if they're not interested in stocking your product, it's a waste of everyone's time. And sometimes no is the best thing because if they say yes, but they don't really invest emotionally in the brand, it becomes part of your call list. You're dropping in there once a week. You're scratching your head as to like, why have we not got from one bottle to a case? What's going wrong?

You're questioning the brand. They're just not interested. And sometimes it's okay to call a spade a spade and say, okay, that that isn't working. That's okay. And concentrate on the bars where you can get that turnover and who are buying in emotionally and who are giving you time with their staff to train them and tell them about the brand and who are bringing you other opportunities to grow the business together.

If these relationships are like a marriage, you'd much rather be married to someone who's at least got an interest in the commitment with you rather than someone who might look for see, but has no interest in making this thing work for you.

I totally relate to what you're saying. It makes me think of my post that always creates a lot of pros and cons is the one one one case in one bar is better than six bottles and six bars. So it's at the beginning, you have to start doing those small experiments because you don't actually know when it's going to turn out nicely in terms of sell out. But then I'm always struggling with brands trying to spread across the city, especially because if you've got the muscles now I'm talking like more of a big brands kind of situation, not as more brand. If you've got the muscle, you can call up your wholesalers and make it available everywhere if you want, but then it would just collect dust on the shelf.

So you may have achieved your monthly budget of sell in, but sell out is never going to come and you're never going to sell in again. No. So when you are a small brand, you don't have that problem because you don't have that big power and muscles in the market, but you also have less resources and less time resources because then it's only Duncan in that city going around. So it's even more crucial to be effective and say, I'd rather spend time with these 10 bars that buy constantly every week repeatedly rather than having a 100 bars that I need to call on all across the city. And it's a big city and it's basically a waste of time.

And I'm bridging to my next question, which is woven to this example. You're going to talk more generically about your previous experience as well. It starts from the liquid. There is a liquid. There is always marketing terms, all the extrinsics and the intrinsics of the brand.

Some brands are more flashy and look at me kind of thing, less about the liquid. Some are more inner liquid focused and less about the packaging and so on. No. As, but when, when I think of woven is very much about certain flavors, certain taste profile. So you go for a certain type of people that depending on which bottle it is that like certain type of things, it could be, I don't know, like pitted or less pitted, or it can be different kinds of things.

So how does that translate into a bar list, for example, on where to go and hunt? Because they won't work everywhere. No? They will work only in certain type of places with certain type of people.

I think what we want to do, and there's not one piece of data that says going into scotch whiskey blending is a good idea. It's a category that's losing, but we looked at that and just maybe it's the way our brains are wired. I'd come through, like, challenger brands essentially in any stagnant category. I'm looking for the opportunity, whereas some people are looking for the exit. And that was very much we were whiskey lovers.

We talked about distillery, but we were like, all the problems that we see in whiskey are already being fixed by the new wave of craft distillers about flavor over mass production, etcetera. But no one apart from Compass Books had done it in blending. And I was like, that's where we should go, which is where we talked about it for twenty years. So we had half an idea, but we, therefore, the stories told in blend are usually consistency brand, Johnny Walker. You tell the story about Johnny Walker.

Some of it is a liquid story, but it's very much a story of scale, consistency, secret recipes, opaque, no transparency, and it's like a story of success. We wanted to tell a very different story, which was using some of the craft leavers, you know, about storytelling, about flavor, about liquid, about why we were doing it, celebrating. And this is because we were our first four whiskeys took us to 1,000 bottles in total. That was obviously a problem, but we tried to lean into it and make it an advantage by saying, this is what blending could be. If done at this scale, we can do things that other people just can't or won't the way we blended the way we reduced.

So almost by accident, we were borrowing techniques from cognac production or Japanese whiskey making, and we were like, as soon as we introduced them as blends, the moment we started telling people about the liquids and flavor and technique, suddenly they weren't approaching them like blends anymore. They were holding them up and looking at them like they were a fine single malt, and we were like, that's the shift that we're trying to do in this category. So we purposefully made a lot of our storytelling introduction tactics, like start at the liquid and work back towards the brand. Because if we just said, oh, it's a new blended whiskey called Woven, people would have gone blends. Meh.

I know blends are all the same. They're a consistent, huge mass production. And it's a ridiculous thing to think that we can overturn category perceptions. Like that's a twenty five year mission, but that's essentially what we're trying to do is say that for us anyway, there's a lot of stuff that hasn't been right with blending in the past, but it's not blending per se. It's more the way blending was led through certain dynamics or certain, I suppose, industry trends and techniques that became rife and the scale, essentially.

And so we're trying to start a conversation. And, of course, the first thing people talk about in craft products is liquid and flavor and the story and the why. And all of that's really important to us, so we thought that we should anchor the brand in those things rather than trying to make the brand about personal success or any other sort of non liquid related thing. And that works because the people we're speaking to, independent retailers or bars, that's something they can get on board with because we're not gonna go in and win a commercial conversation right now. Our sales pitch is not here's the category data showing that you should have more blended whiskey on your back part because it's the opposite is true.

So we have to win, like, hearts and minds and pull at their heartstrings and let them taste it and discover it. Yeah. And buy in to the vision or the mission at an emotional level and a liquid level because we need them to play like the avant gardeist for us and say, when someone comes in and orders like a standard single malt that is like everywhere, but not amazing, or there's not much excitement about it, We need them to start diverting people and say, oh, if you like that, this is actually a blend, but and it's that but, and we need them to then follow in with like three things about liquid or us or the ethos that convinced that customer to go against the grain, to use the pun, and maybe Yeah. Give blending a chance, which is and that must have been I worked on Hendrix for most of my career at William Grant's. They did the same thing.

Gin was in the doldrums. Bombay Sapphire had come out, and Hendrix was that challenger brand in a category that was, I think, double or triple the price of sort of standard gin when it launched. And no one was asking for super premium gin, and I think they did the similar thing where they had a liquid story. They had a recognizable bottle, they had the right people, and they had to get the right people on board early to then start seeding that message and that, oh, maybe gin could be interesting or or maybe you try this gin, or we've got this new thing it's gin, but it's not like the gins, you know, and I think it's maybe easier for challenger brands in the market because they can come. And I don't mean disrupt in like brew dog way, but like people are people go to bars to have experiences and offering something new or different that's maybe slightly off piste, like it is an experience.

And that's where natural wines coming in to, to replace incumbent wine or craft beer came in to replace beer saying, oh, it's like that thing that you're comfortable with, but it's over here. No one wants to be middle of the road mainstream obvious. Like people define themselves through these slight quirks in their choices. And I think spirits offers people that divergence that allows them to say, I'm a this drinker a that drinker.

Mezcal type of person or a a Negroni or an Old Fashioned or a Margherita or whatever. Like, it's easy to do that. To your point, like, for example, when I first tried Hendrix, I mentioned it in another episode, so I won't go long on that one, but I was not drinking gin. And I started drinking gin because of that, because it was the unusual gin and, and, and all my friends that were not drinking gin, I got them into drinking Hendrix. I should have got money back in the days.

You know how many people I got into gin and something with Hendrix, but it's very often like what you say is like taking an excuse or a no to your previous point about sometimes the no, it is your ally rather than your enemy, because that's what people can relate to. And then it's, oh, I'm having a gin and Sonic. Oh, I don't drink gin. Oh, if you don't drink gin, then you should try this one. And then to your point, it would be, I'm just making it up, but it would be like, no drink.

I only drink single malt whiskey. And as I don't do, I don't do blends. I don't like blends. Oh, if you don't like blends, then you should try woven kind of thing. And it's almost like that bridge that fishes from a category pool, a pool that it, that is the opposite of what you would think of.

So listening to you, I think that probably your target is actually single malt drinkers rather than blend. Blended whiskey drinkers, which is counterintuitive because it's a blended whiskey, but that's the way to approach the issue because you are, you get people off guard because then it's okay. Let me check this out. Let me give it a try. And then it becomes it ignites the conversation, and it it drives something.

Yeah. I actually think it's something that the best brands do really well because we sit in our ivory tower in brand world obsessing over the individual words on a PowerPoint slide about what this brand is about. But then you get to the entree and bartenders, they are like walking, talking Wikipedias. They have to learn so much stuff about so many brands, memorize a cocktail list, know how to do hospitality, have, like, spider senses on, like, the air con, the music, the service, the cocktails, and a gantry of 200 spirits behind them and a wine list and beers. It's crazy if we think that they're gonna remember more than two things, three things about your brand, if you're lucky.

And so I think some brands are very good at this. Some brands don't even know exists, but you need to give shorthand to a bartender so that they look at your product and they think either what the serve is or or goes like where it plays in the category. Even like a bar will be exposed to, let's say, 10 different gym brands trainings, and none of those gin brands will often talk about the other gin brands in the bar. Whereas when I did gin trainings, I would go in and make sure that I noted down which other gins sat around our bottle in the bar so I could make the training really useful to them and say, listen, you've got these five gins. This one is your super Juniper classic dry.

And then where we are is somewhere in the middle. And then you've got the more new Western floral styles here. So your opportunity, if you wanna push someone to our brand, or if you want to offer them a slightly different experience to that mainstream brand that sits next to it, then this is where you push them. And, of course, like, some of it was tactical and, like, the evil marketeer in me now realizes that it's maybe a slightly unfair tactic because you're in a position of trust and training. But to give them a vision of the category with your brand either at the heart of it or in relation to these or in relation to these cocktails.

And it was like, there's a 100 things I could wish that they remembered from the training, but the top two would be, like, makes a great martini, gets served with this garnish, and is a credible upsell from these three gins around it. And and if I could get those three things over the line, none of which were about the history of the brand or the family or whatever, that has equipped them to have success with the brand. And I think we have this impression in spirits that people have loads of time and loads of attention, but they don't. They look for shorthand, and the main thing that people at point of purchase are thinking is I don't know what to order. I think it's 75% of people in the entree approach the bar with no idea what they're gonna order.

And then all of a sudden, it's like, you've got the attention of the bartender panic sets in. It's I don't want to be laughed at. I don't want to buy something. I don't want to like cripple myself by spending too much money by accident. So you look for beacon brands and that's why brands like Hendrix do so well, because it's like known it's everywhere.

It's trusted. It's got an iconic bottle. Everyone knows it's not the most expensive, but it's also not the cheapest. You're gonna walk back, put it on the table, and no one's gonna laugh at you. You might not be the avant garde gin curator amongst your friends, but it's a safe choice.

And that's what people I believe are looking for, but you can make your brand safer by having bartenders understand where it sits. And I think monkey shoulder, which I can see over your shoulder in the video, they do a great job of it. Right. Because it's a blended malt scotch, But they tell bartenders, they do a tasting and sometimes they're tasting it next to Maker's Mark. And they had this internal mantra that was like, see makers, think monkey.

And it meant that if a sales guy walked into a bar and saw that they were having success with Maker's Mark, it was validation that monkey shoulder would be a good go. You know, there was a conversation to be had because flavor profile. And of course, that's smart thinking from a big international drinks company that are thinking cross category because they're like, who are we gonna steal from? Bourbon. People looking to graduate from bourbon into scotch makers has a good loyal following.

And if we can train bartenders of swap out a bourbon for monkey shoulder, it's shorthand for them. It's so easy to remember. Someone orders old fashioned or a mint julep, They go, oh, I'm feeling a bit crazy. Do you wanna try it with this?

Went It's funny what you say because I see I have exactly an example of a bar in Prague that used to do old fashioned on Maker Mark, and now they do it on on on monkey shoulders. So that's a spot on. What I like about what you're saying is that there's a few things that one way that I see them a big geography fan and now we are talking like I'm sitting in prior sitting Adelaide. So we are a few hours apart from each other and a few kilometers apart. And it's all about how you see when you look at the map now, there's, if you look at from a European perspective, Europe is in the middle.

If you look at it from an Australia perspective, that's a little bit of a challenge because Australia is never in the center of any map. But if you look at it from a U S perspective or from an Asia perspective, like perspective totally changes now. And that's where you set the focus and the epicenter of that map now. But to your point, whatever brand you're working with, trying to navigate who's left, right, up and down, north, south, east, west kind of thing on that back bar map and try to help navigate that bartender that you're having a training on to, to really say, okay, this is how I play with these brands. And it's not, I mean, you were saying like it was a bit of an unfair way, but I don't think it's unfair.

It's just a matter of how to, where you center the map kind of thing now, because then somebody else will come and then Hendrix would be on a, to the west of somebody or to the north of somebody and it wouldn't be in the center. But so it's very interesting. And what I hear from your conversation is that there is something to be thought about liquid first rather than brand first and category first, because there's always this thing like rum fights, rum scotch fights, scotch blends, fights blends. It's more like, okay, if you drink that kind of, I re I remember at some point I was having a conversation to somebody with somebody that they had a tequila. I think it's what it's called story with tequila from a guy, Michael Ballantine.

I think it's it's his name. And he was saying like, it's aged in scotch barrels. It's a tequila that it's aging scotch barrels. So I'm approaching scotch drinkers and bars that sell Scotch whiskey rather than tequila bars and Mexican restaurants because that's where I'm taking the inspiration from. So very often is to your example about Scotch versus bourbon, or it could be gin versus vodka or mezcal or gin versus tequila or tequila and mezcal because big companies think in silos.

And it's like, we're fighting rums. Who's the rum was, who's the competitive sets, but consumer don't think it that way. The consumer thing taste profile. I like this kind of sweet ish stuff. I like bitter.

I like sour. I like certain different ways. And also to, to your previous point, the importance of social currency to allow no, no matter how trained people are, whether you can be a award winning bartender or like a guy or a girl with a job that is outside of the industry. But when you are at that dinner or at that after work, if you can have those two words that make you look cool and make you look, you know about what you're doing, that's the easy way. And I see all brands that win are the ones that are at, to your point, like safe choices.

Think of an Aperol Spritz as an example, nobody's going to be, unless you go to a fancy cocktail bus, nobody's going to get pointed at for ordering a Spritz. Right. Or for ordering a gin and tonic. It's challenging, but if you can do it in a nice way that you actually give ammunition to somebody to say, oh, I'm going to look cool because I'm going to bring this bottle to this dinner. And I'm going to explain it in a very short way with one sentence, what this is about and why the person I'm gifting it to knows about it, then it's a win win for everyone.

When you make it too complicated, that's where brands struggle and then it's what was it about that brand kind of thing?

Yeah. I think it comes down to relevance at the end of the day. Like, everyone thinks their brand's gonna be super relevant in a bar. That's not necessarily objective truth. So you need to find ways of making your brand relevant within the category, within the bar, and that is the stories you tell.

They have to be either so interesting that they're interesting in themselves or interesting in the context of what else is available or happening in that bar so that you have a role in the drama that unfolds between bartender and consumer. Because it's like being at a party, there's loads of people, but how do you make sure you're the guest that the bartender introduces to their guest? You need a hoot in the brand and it might be a serve. Right. And the easiest one for brands, which I don't understand why more brands don't do is like, oh, it makes an unusually good old fashioned, or it makes an unusually good mojito.

And it's like the next time someone orders mojito, light bulb goes off in the bartender's mind. Oh, I'm gonna try it with that one because they said it makes an unusually good martini. And it's as simple as that, but what you've done is provided a hook on your brand that isn't the heritage, the history, the story, the distillation process. It's a practical thing that they can literally grab hold of and say, I have it on good authority from the brand owner that this makes a really good and if you pick a slightly avant garde cocktail, like a paper plane or something that's, like, trending.

I was writing a post a couple of days ago about this exactly when there's a tendency of brand owners choosing their target cocktails from an ad agency kind of perspective. This is cool, so you should go for this one kind of thing. And to your point, like the classics are classics for a reason. So if you take, whether it's an old classic or a modern classic, like the penicillin or porn star Martini or like stuff that is perceived as a classic, but it is actually not that old, then you make it much easier. And also sometimes it's like, you try, what I try to convey as a message is that you don't know what's gonna be.

Take a vermouth as an example. You don't know if it's gonna be great with Boulevardier or with Negroni or with Manhattan, but your liquid proposition must skew towards some of these. And maybe it goes well with a whiskey or it goes better with gin or so on. And try to put it there on the table and then shut up and listen to the bartender and let them, because if you dictate, bartenders are often prima donnas. No.

And it's who are you to tell me how to do an old fashioned? Are you crazy? Like you're coming here with your, with a white shirt trying to teach me how to do an old fashioned. But if you say people usually do great old fashioned or whatever, and then you lay down like a couple of cocktails and then test it in 10 bars, going back to insights. Like you don't need a huge insights, but budget for that.

And there's actually out of 10 bars where I dropped these three cocktails, they all picked the Boulevardier. So I'm gonna go to the next 10 saying that the Boulevardier is the preferred cocktail with this because it's not coming from me or my inner circle and my echo chamber, but it comes from a handful of cool bartenders from this city that actually told me that.

And it's about telling them what your product does Exactly. For them. It's not what your product is. And being able to say something like, the thing that people love about this whiskey is mouthfeel. It's oily and waxy.

And so when you make cocktails with it, it makes a Manhattan. But instead of being like the spicy rye lead Manhattan, you get this soft, moist coating, oily Manhattan. That's the stuff bartenders remember because they're like, oh, I wanna make an oily soft Manhattan as opposed to a classic rhyme Manhattan. This is a tool that serves my purpose with that goal. And they might not have even known that they wanted to do that, but you tell them something that they aren't aware of.

Suddenly their ears prick up. You're not just talking about your brand. You're empowering them to do something that you're assuming they might want to do. And suddenly, you've delivered value in that conversation rather than just product messaging. But yeah, I think the serve thing is crazy because everyone wants a perfect serve.

Everyone wants a ritual serve. Everyone wants to make their version of the Hendrix and clinic. But a lot of the work I do in, like, agency world is explaining to people that a perfect serve is not just a drink. It's actually an ecosystem of things that relates to education, training, customers, need states, what's practical, and then how you activate it and how you talk about it. And it's, as you said, bars don't like being dictated to, especially when it comes to things they have to spend money on.

So like, oh, no, if you wanna serve our brand, you have to go out and buy these 12 different types of fruit because this is how we serve our gin and tonic. And brands get really upset when they walk into a bar and they're like, no, you're serving our drink wrong. So I think Hendrix was a bit of a unicorn with cucumber. It works at a liquid level, but it still, I think we're going back like ten years. Hendrix was 15 years old or something.

And they did some research in The UK and everyone thought that it was a runaway success. It still only had 60% compliance with the cucumber serve. And so they're in started like a huge operation to make sure as the brand was deepening its footprint into more mainstream places that the serve went with it. And of course, that's you you don't get that just by asking. You have to come up with consumer campaigns, with POS, with merchandise, like strategies to go and

spot It goes back to what's in it for them. Because if you explain that the cucumber to this example enhances some flavors because there's actual cucumber in the gin, then it's one thing. But then if you come up with a random flower or veggie or fruits that has nothing to do with the recipe just because it looks cool on a glass because your agency told you to do that because it's nice on Instagram because it's Instagrammable, then it doesn't make any sense now. And also it's about, okay, if you serve it with the cucumber, people are ordering Hendrix and they expect the cucumber. So by not giving the cucumber in that serve, you are doing a disservice to your customers that next time are going to go on a random mainstream gin because it's not worth paying more for anymore because they want to be looked.

They want their gin gin and tonic, you know, showcase the cucumber because they like that flavor. Maybe they don't like the Juniper part of the gin and tonic. There is a reason why certain things work. But then if you go there with a policeman hat on, oh, you should do the cucumber. Where's the cucumber?

Oh, you're not compliant. Okay. I'm gonna talk to the brand ambassador. I'm going to set up a training for you on this. Then it becomes a bit of a, who the hell are you?

Gonna go with this other brand that is not so picky. But I remember for example, when I was launching Peroni in Barcelona many years ago, I was meeting, it was about the time that Gin Mare was starting in Barcelona. And I loved what they were doing because for example, their serve was on, of course it was a Mediterranean gin, which was totally different than anything else. And they had all this because they had basil, rosemary, thyme, and other botanicals. And the serve was very flexible, for example.

So it was like, whatever you've got, basil put basil in, you've got rosemary put rosemary in as long as it's something that actually goes with it, because on the bottle, it actually says what's in it as a botanical, but then you make it flexible enough that you're not shooting people for not having basil if they've only got fine. And the funny situation now that after what Hendrix has done and now then what Jean Marie has done, now it got wild. I go out in Prague and now it's totally random. Whatever gin you order, you get a random it's like a lottery on the garnish. You get a thigh on a on on something.

You get a cucumber on or sometimes they do cucumber on everything. Or they ask you, do you want lemon, lime, or cucumber? Or do you want thyme or lemon? And some places just, okay, this has gone a bit too far, but it goes back. It has to be bar friendly because the bar manager is not going to go to the market by several different bolognicals.

Yeah. I I think it's crazy. I think once you get to the level Hendrix at or Guinness is another good example in beer, like, they've got data to back it up that if you don't serve it the way that we are saying is the perfect serve, people will be disappointed and that's bad for both our businesses. So you can have a logical data led conversation that I think I remember Diageo having a stat that a Guinness drinker will seek out a pub with good Guinness and take their friends there. But if you serve bad Guinness, they will leave the pub and take their friends with them.

So the power of the serve And I'm sure it's the same in spirits, but I think it's an interesting area because ultimately you need it to be a partnership, not a dictatorship.

That's all for today. If you want to reach out to Duncan, you will find all the details in the episode description. If you enjoyed the episode, please rate it and share it with friends and come back next week for more insights about building brands on the bottom up.