033 | The Bottom-up Trade: aka where to build brands regardless if on or off-trade | Part 2/2 with Julian Marsili, Global Drinks Brand Director (Copenhagen, DK)

Episode 33, I continued the conversation I had in episode 32 with Giulia Marsili. He is a global drinks brand director who has many years of experience in the drinks business. He is behind the successful rejuvenation of the Carlsberg brand globally, the launch of Alcorfib brews and other portfolio innovations. He has previously managed Peronina Srazzura in Italy. I hope you will enjoy our chat.

Remember that this is a two part episode. So don't forget to listen to episode 32 as well. I hope you will enjoy our chat. There is always this disconnection between marketing and sales that we should strive to, like as a distance, like we should strive to, to shorten. And this is also the kind of like me a culpa, no, from salespeople and from marketeers in actually managing to get into a same conversation and having a constructive debate without having any extremisms in the talk.

Yes. When I hear your podcast, I was hearing the guys from Antiqualia. That is a conversation you want to have with a customer together with your sales guy. And you're talking to that customer and that he gave us, marketers a lesson on how you build brands through customers in a place. And that is the kind of conversation you want to enable.

Unfortunately, in my career, working for bigger companies, the marketing guy is always called together with the sales guys and the customer when it's about, let's squeeze some money. So I cannot give you any more sales contribution, but I guess this guy's got some money. So let's bring him in and let's tell him out the customer and the sales guys, you know, I've got this fantastic idea. It's a negotiation and you're being played. Whereas other times when you are actually going, just bring me out one day a week, I will come out with a different sales guy and the agenda is just tell me what your problems are.

Tell me what the customer problems are. Do you have any ideas or how can we come up with ideas to solve that customer pain point and so forth? That's when the fun starts, when the real business starts flowing. And I've had the luck of being a trade marketeer, holding the hand of marketing guys and the hand of sales guys. And that's been the most fun part of my career, where I talk about assortment, pricing, distribution, placement, and customer reach.

And this is the dark side of the off premise,

Now you are attacking me on my home ground. Now jokes apart, mean, is actually a very interesting conversation, and we were talking about that, like, briefly before because I've been thinking about this a lot, and we had several conversation about on trade off trade, also with the off trade people in the companies I work with and my old career and so on. And it's always, it's not that on trade is cool and off trade is not, or the on trade is the brand building space and the off trade is the trading milking space. There is a thin line and it's often very specific on countries and cities now, because if you take New York and Miami, they are two totally different animals. It's still East Coast, let's call it.

It's still us, but in New York, it's a much more European kind of setup where the bottle shops play a big role and in which the off trade, it's a brand building off trade. There is a guy or a girl there like helping you get the right bottle for the right price. What are looking for? If you take Miami, it's big chains. So it's more like modern off trade and you go there and you just shop with your cart and you're stuck it with bottles.

So if you go back to, for example, homeland in Rome, I mean, all these enoteca and the wine shops, that's where you go and buy a nice rum and nice whiskey, specific beers as well. But if you go to Prague where I live, there's no such thing as a bottle shop. Like the, I can name you five of them and they're probably all the ones in the city. And this is what we were discussing earlier. There is a, I would call it like a bottom up trade and a top down trade.

A bottom up trade is the brand building space, regardless if it's on or off. And then the off trade, the, what we know as off trade is more like the top down trade.

There's places where you build your brand and there's places where you trade your brand and it doesn't, and it depends, as you say, on the city, on the area and so forth. They have those two logics and they can be on one hand, a non trade or an off trade. There can be an off trade, which is a proximity off trade, which is a smaller shop in the city center. Maybe it doesn't have the sales rep inside that helps you make the choice. It has convenience.

It is properly located and it has a fantastic assortment of the things you are looking for, for a quick, but premium dinner, whatever. Well, I know. So, so that is a place where you build your brand because I have a need. I need, so I've got guests coming over. Where do I go?

I go there and I find good stuff. And that, and as long as you're good, you're selling good stuff and you are there, you are building your brand in that place. And you can use off trades if used correctly as a brand building place. Even a supermarket owner wants his products to sell. He wants to occupy the space that it sells has to sell more for him.

It's not just, it doesn't get you just to put you on a shelf and collect dust. He wants your product to sell. So like the way you work with a small bottler with a small bar owner, you can work with a big distributor to make sure that, that your brand is visible, gets the right rate of sales and so forth before you expand it. The trouble is us marketeers want to be think big and maybe the sales guys that work in the off premise want to go wide. So you go wide too, too fast, too soon before you built your brand.

And there are ways in place. I mean, there's data in place, which is the axis of rate of sales and weight of distribution. You look at your rate of sales. If it goes up above the average, then you start expanding it into greater distribution. You always have to think that distribution is a cost.

It's a mega cost, but that cost is never is often relegated into, is it a listing fee that you will put in the contract and you don't measure it. You forget about it. And somehow you want to go as far as possible, but it's expensive to distribute. And if your brand is not working, you might as well just spend that money, making sure that the brand works in the places in which you are before thinking of the next place you go.

You nailed it there on, on this tracking mechanism, because I had many fights in my corporate days. I always looked holistically, you know, and I said, this is super expensive. This activation is like, no, why? It's like, you know, it's this money and this. And I was like, yeah, but you're forgetting the listing fee.

No, but that's another call center. You know, that's listing fees. Now we're not paying because that's paid already by global or that's already paid by marketing. That's not our sales. And, you know, you forget about the whole thing and then you just look at your small patch of land and you forget about the holistic approach.

I appreciate your challenge on building enough trade. And there is an element that it's working only with certain retailers that allow some customization at outlet level. Because I I feel the big chains, depending on the market we're in, the big chains that are centralized, it's much more difficult to play that game that you're talking about. But if you look at chains that allow a little bit more, like there is an owner that is affiliated with the chain, and then you can have a proper conversation, then it becomes more of a bar owner type of conversation. Hence, the the bottom up trade.

No, we agree that we don't want to grow too fast, too quickly because otherwise we burn it. But then you have been in situation where the brand had been grown too much too quickly. So how can you fix that when things go out of hands? So how do you go back to the roots? We discussed about from a brand perspective on looking back at what worked and so on, but from a more trade perspective, how do you do that?

Like I work with some brands that are more like mainstream, know? And when I try to list them to rejuvenate them, because that's a nice word that we are going to talk about now. This this whole rejuvenation. Let's start get gen z. Let's start get millennials when until fifteen years ago, it was millennials.

Now it's gen z. And but then I go to a bar and I want to list that product. And then my dear Alex from Lambda Guario that you quoted, I was like, I'm not gonna list this shit stuff here. I mean, this is like on promo at the corner shop behind my flats and it's on super promo all the time in off trade in supermarkets. I'm never gonna list this brand.

So how can you connect these two worlds in these rejuvenation efforts? To say,

I think in my experience where it has worked is going back to the essence. So on the Carlsberg branch, we started from redesigning how the brand looked. Okay. So it had been chasing Heineken forever, wanting to be the next Heineken and had forgotten the beauty of the design that had been created by Thorval Bindersboll, who'd been paid €10 to draw this iconic Carlsberg logo that had so many stories behind it and so forth. And we went back to relook at the overall brand experience, which was not just what you say, but it's no, what you brew, what's in the room, what's around how you look and the way, and what you do as a brand.

So you go back and rebuild little by little, and you start talking to your consumers and your customers to figure out, is this interesting? Do you like it? And getting proof points of this is actually some, oh, I didn't know about that. Actually, this looks really good. This looks cool.

And that story starts over again. You get back to having a distinctive visual identity, having a brew that has something interesting in it. And the story that people are interested in and you go back and you dig and, and I'm not saying that Lantiquario is gonna buy you, but people around them are gonna be talking about it. And at some point somebody would say it's natural that yeah, I could see a, whatever brand in this place. It wouldn't be out of place at the moment.

You're completely out of place because all the people know you is that you're on promotion outside and that's all they know because that's the only reference point you're given to them. And then there's also a fine balance of we've been there. Right? What do you do? You cover your tracks.

You remove the way you have come. And that doesn't work either. We've done that. I've been put part of it on, I must say on the receiving end of the Nasrat Zoro exiting pizzerias because pizzerias were not a cool place. And I was saying, come on, but this is the best pizzerias in town.

Yes. They haven't got a white tablecloth, but it's the best pizzas where people go for the best. And you have the best beer that goes with the best pizza.

Going back to this extremism, you know, that between marketing and sales, and there's no right or wrong here. It's, it's just sometimes it's the sales that are the extremists. Sometimes they are the marketeers and I've been on both sides. I've done mistakes and we discussed that over lunch in the Carlsberg office and elsewhere. And this is the thing that there is also an element of when a brand goes too big, then it starts with the global local kind of discussions now.

And then, okay, the global identity says this, and the local market thinks and acts differently. Then we lose track of is that what happens in the trade is what actually sticks to people. And I remembered, I mean, I've been living abroad for eighteen years now. And I remembered those years when I went back to my favorite pizzerias in Rome and all of a sudden I couldn't drink, drink Nastrozzurro anymore. And I could only drink pepperoni because they had swapped the kegs and the phones because all of a sudden Nasrat Zuro shouldn't be in pizzerias.

Yeah.

And, and then the week after, and the week after Menabea came

and the week after Menabrea comes,

yeah, we get in stills the game.

And, and that's the thing. And, and this is where it's so crucially important because you, you mentioned that earlier, not the, the marketing guy walking with the sales guy to the bar and like they they drag him in as the, we call it the chicken or at the poker table. Let's get some money from Julian. He never plays poker. I I bring you a friend and he want he wants to start to play poker.

So let's bring him in. And there is this element of like, why do we lose touch with the trade as marketeers? You know, why do we need an invitation? And my answer is that often is laziness from the marketeers because it's more fancy to be sitting in a Ogilvie office in Central London than to go to a pub in, Clapham. But then often is also like this silo mentality.

Imagine I'm a sales guy and you are the marketing guy. If I find out that you went to my client and you spoke to the barman, you know, with your marketing hat on, then first thing I do, I call you as like, Julian, what the hell are you doing? Why are you talking to my clients? You know? Because it's my client.

It's not our brand's client. It's my client because I'm the sales guy. You know? So there is this silo thinking merge with laziness, with what's convenient. And that's the recipe for disaster in my opinion.

No? Because then all of a sudden, like you, you cannot enter bars because you get slashed from the sales guys. So then where do you go? You go to advertising agencies. And then let's run a research.

What do brand what do bartenders want? Let's call a marketing agency, a research agency. Let's gather 40 bartenders and let's have, like, qualitative interviews and so on. So there is this element, but I feel it also goes back to what you were saying earlier about going back to the basics, going back to the rules, because if you keep the basics and and you make a rule that you cannot get bored with basics, You know, I always bring the Hendrix example with the cucumber, the Aperol example, the Campari, you know, like all these successful, the Guinness example, Guinness is a benchmark, but it's not always been a benchmark. There has been some drives in which they had to reestablish the serve because things that got out of hand, but then all of a sudden it's okay.

We stick to that. You know, the poor takes what it takes to do. We only serve it in certain pubs. We don't go that wide in distribution. And, you know, if you don't stop doing that basic while you grow, the brand wouldn't have that issue.

But correct me if I'm wrong, if what's your take on?

My take on why does that happen? Why does that happen? And how can we avoid to make it happen for me is two things. One is culture. If we go back to speaking about those founders, if I was going to talk to Mr.

Peroni, or if I was going to talk to Mr. Jakobshund and I told him that I was going to Ogilvy instead of going to a customer, how many kalchin kuras we say kicks in the ass we would be getting from that founder. That's a cultural, this is how you do business and that's culture has to permeate. And the second one is you need to hire marketeers to know what marketing is all about. And marketing is not just advertising.

Marketing is the whole business seen from the customer's point of view. When you get that, you think of, you go back to your Cottner four piece, you know, think about the product, the price, the place, and then the promotion. And a lot of people just talk about promotion as it is either a sales discount or an advertising campaign. And that seems that's all we're talking about. It's the constant fight between top of mind and pallets.

There's much more before that. And making sure that you understand that your customer service is marketing, your deli, your truck delivery is marketing. The, your sales guy is a marketeer and so forth. That's how you ensure that your brilliant basics are in place. And yeah, I've been that guy who didn't want to go, but I've learned that was a mistake.

When I've done those immersions and really go back to it, it's been super instrumental. And often it just come from an illuminated CEO. So the example you did before about listing fees, I had a CEO who came along and said, listing fees are a cost. We're going to put them above the line and we're going to measure them. Bastard.

Suddenly there were everybody's costs. He just said it. Another CEO in, in Peroni came, you know what, we're going to Ichircoli. So we're going to go in the South where people drink lots of our beers, where they're sitting on a nice bucket of pepperoni reds and they're drinking a ton of it all day. We want to go talk to those guys because there's a, there are a big portion of our distributors, the business we've, have you ever spoken?

I said, no. Have you ever been in a Chipotle? No, we went to Chipotle. You'll cover stories and culture of the use of your product, which you would never uncover with, through a marketing researcher or using another famous way. We use marketing research as a drunkard uses a lamppost more for support rather than illumination.

You just use it to test what you think, because you think you are the consumer. So you just use your research to prove you are right and go along rather than, you know, looking for new ways in or, or other ways to do business. That's so it goes back to culture. It goes back to culture of the business and knowing how to market stuff. And you've had a lot of guest speakers build that have built brands bottom up that have shown that pattern.

This is how you do things and consistently doing them in a freshly consistent way has gotten them to where they are today.

There is that quote now the tough times create tough men and then good times creates weak men. Sometimes you enter a company on the glory days and then, you know, you think it's because of you that the success is happening, but actually it's for your work, but also for external factors. And you think that those hard things and what I call the unsexy stuff or the boring stuff is not important because I know that in theory, should go to visit bars at least once a week, but I haven't been to bars for a year. Nothing happened to the brand. We're still growing.

So it's not that needed in the end. But then when you, when, then when shit happens, then all of a sudden is, oh, but what should we do? And then if you had done it, and it's a little bit like we see with everything in life. If you skip the gym for a month, nothing happens. Like you're gonna still have a beer and a pizza and a carbonara to your,

at your home.

Nothing will happen. And then all of a sudden summer comes and then you think you haven't gained anything, but then the swimming suit is a little. It was washed at 90 degrees probably. It doesn't fit anymore. So it's, is this keeping the eye on the trajectory on the long term things, but then taking care of the short steps and the 1% efforts.

It's bottom up and top down. It's not just, it's not either or it's both. Okay.

Now you want done. Now you really want to fight. Okay.

That's great. When you're big, when you're big, do, you need to do both. And I think you just forget, then you forget them and potentially since you've forgotten, you have to do 70% go

back

to bottom up and leave that top down stuff to, to feed the beast or make sure that, the, the things that the, the, the, the machines are oiled, the big machines that you have are oiled so that once you get back into the gear, it goes fast because you can abandon that. So that's why I'm being, as we say, demo Christiano and putting a little history, you can do both when you're big. The importance lies into the end, not either this or that, but it's one and the other.

And you're right. And we always have funny fights on bottom up and top down because ultimately the drive that I push on the bottom up is that it's easier to do top down. I shouldn't remind anybody to do it top down because top down happens by default. So it's the path of least resistance is top down. Yes.

So everybody does top down, but very few people do the bottom up. So hence I'm pushing the both bottom up narrative, no, but ultimately you need to grow. And there is a moment in which you have to do stuff that is happening top down. But the way to look at it is to really like never stop thinking bottom up, never stop this challenger mindset because even though you're driving a posh car and you're doing good money and revenues and you bought a house, remember what made you buy that house and that car. And it was not the last year.

It was like the the ten years before that, that got you there now, but ultimately is what you say. It's both depending on the life stage and often because I mainly speak to smaller brands, like on, on average, I speak to both the big and small, but then if you take quantities, then of course there's more small brands than big brands out there. And there is a tendency to think too fast. I want to grow and I'm already in, in 20 markets and I'm like, are you in 20 markets? What are you doing in 20 markets?

It's you and your cousin. And what are you doing in 20 markets? I'm like, it doesn't really move anything and okay. Like you can put it in a presentation, a pitch deck you can put available in 20 markets. I talk about this because I think about it because I always challenge myself and say, yeah, but I'm also saying that my podcast is listed in 73 markets in 73 countries, but that was bottom up because I didn't force anyone.

I didn't do advertising in 73 countries. It's just that people from 73 countries are listening to it. Because it created the demand bottom up. So they decided freely to listen to the podcast. So there is an element, you know, if there is demand, go to Scotland, go to Latvia, go to Sweden.

If you've got 10 bars that keep on asking your product and then you contact an importer and then, Hey, there has this 10 bars. And I went there and they also, they already want my product. Then fine, go there, but don't stretch yourself too thin by going to countries just because some random importer contacted you from whatever China or Japan or Thailand saying we want to buy a pallet. Yep. Because nothing is going to happen there.

And let's let me ask you this other question. So building on your both ism,

another stolen quote, but yes, but but I love it.

You introduced me to Mark Ritzon and his mini MBA and also to the, like these things that happens every now and then, like there are these hypes on LinkedIn with Byron Sharp and Mark Ritz and who agrees with whom and so on. Let give us some short overview about this on the dualism between differentiation and distinctiveness. What is it about and what's your take on that?

My take is the power of the word and be it differentiation and distinctiveness, be it long term or short term thinking, long term sales and short term activations and so forth. It's about going back to what has made you who you are, know what your brand is, know what drives some distinctiveness into the way you look. So I'm super advocate of making sure even in the way you design your brand, you design how it looks, how it feels. You introduce some elements that are distinctive, that over the time will become some distinctive brand assets. And those are the shortcuts that you are putting in your packaging, in your communication, in your sales pitch, in, in whatever you do shortcuts that allow your customer to think of you when they are in a buying situation.

That's the power of a distinctive asset, which Byron Sharpe talks about profusely. And then he says differentiation does not matter because there's no difference between an iPhone a Samsung and so forth. And in some cases he's right. In other cases, he is not right. So I am in the camp of, there is boats that you can work on boats and there is brands that have a bilge success working on both of those elements.

So that's where I stand, but for somebody who's building a new brand, really knowing where you come from, knowing what you stand for, your product inside out. Yes. But already start building some element of distinctiveness There's something that I would encourage everybody to think about. The cucumber is distinctive, right? And you've mentioned it before, the orange of Aperol Spritz, everything orange that is distinctive.

Right? So there's something that comes to mind.

I love that. And there is also another point, which is on some of the books that I read that they talk about be different rather than be better as well. No, because I think it's connected to this distinctiveness and differentiation. I don't know where you would put in this in, but it's on the fact that many brands that say, oh, drink this gin. This is better.

It's not about being better. It's about being different. What do you bring to the table? Because we should go out of the taste profile of people. I mean, like a gin.

I like another gin. That's that's the thing. But then if it's Mediterranean gin versus a London dry versus something with some specific botanicals, or what does it bring to the table? Then it's not about this is better than this one. Same thing with whiskies, but it's like, what are you looking for and what are you pitching on that specific demand space?

And

yeah, I, I, I don't have a recipe. I am a fan of better, but great fan of constant pursuit of better. That was in the Carlsberg brand DNA, but I think it's about being interesting. B tell me something that's interesting about you and make me, you know, make me wanna know more so different or interesting that I would go for interesting. That is interesting.

Henriksen, if that's not interesting, that world that has been created around that, that is super interesting. So that's where I would work my way through doing the delivery, a great product, but making it interesting.

It's also about also giving this kind of like ammunition, the social currency to people, because what I've seen in my experience and myself as well, the best products are the one that are easy to explain and simple to explain. So that I come to Julian's because he invites me for his carbonara nights in Copenhagen. And I bring you a bottle and with simple words, I can explain to you and your guests or either to you because I'm usually the first one to arrive. And then you can sell it back to your friends. You know, try this product that Chris brought me because, and then all of a sudden people can go and buy it again.

Oh, I love this product. And they go and buy it and they can tell their friends when they organize another dinner. But if you go on all these crazy stories that nobody remembers just because the agency told you to work on storytelling, then interesting goes off the Yes. Actually,

the story has to be delivered in a simple and understandable way. And the reaction has to be, that's interesting. So you're touching another massive button that I have on my book. One of the fortunes of working for big corporations is I got to travel the world and I met the founder of Patagonia. So you're on Chenard.

And when he gave me, I went, he's got this wonderful book that I encourage everybody to read is let my people go surfing. It's a way of how you manage your business and how you get great products and happy people. So what he wrote on it was Dear Julian, keep it simple. That was his advice to the man who has made a very successful bottom up sustainable clothing business company. Just keep it simple.

And now that is definitely, there is money around that description that you just gave me. I've heard you speak about explaining flavor profile in a very simple way. It's that without that, who is like this, but with this, do you get it? Yeah. We wanted it.

Yes.

That's an incredible story to tell and to have. And it reminds me, for example, of the master master brewer at the Pilsner Rockell brewery. When they hand over to each other, just say, don't change anything, you know? And that's that has been the story for the last hundred

and

eighty years. And that is the thing. Like it's, it, it goes crazy. It's I don't know who's pushing us to, to change stuff for the sake of changing. And you say if it's not broken, don't fix it.

But ultimately it's about keeping the consistency, the saliency that if it starts not to work, ask yourself why it's not working. Is it something that we change? Can we go back to it? Or is it, exogenous and can we do something about it?

Yes.

So I think that's a great way of closing the conversation. And let me ask you to tell the audience where can they find you, where they can have interesting conversation with you, where they can reach

Absolutely. Out to Another mantra, which is again, stolen quote, but I, which I, which I love is do interesting things and interesting things will happen to you. So I'm always up for interesting conversations and you can find me on LinkedIn on Julia Marcini. You can find, I'm the only one there. And that's where you can reach out to me and start a conversation.

So LinkedIn would be my favorite place to engage in business conversations, carbonara's and somewhere else.

Thanks Julian. That was, it was great talking to you.

Likewise, Chris, have a fantastic day.

Thank you. Remember that this is a two parts episode. So don't forget to listen to episode thirty two and thirty three. That's all for today. If you liked it, please rate it, leave a comment and share it with friends and come back next week for more insights about building brands from the bottom up.