073 | Chris Maffeo | Create Demand Before Trying To Capture It | MAFFEO DRINKS

Welcome to the Maffei Drinks Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Maffeiho. In episode 73, I continued the conversation with Filippo Bertamati on his Growth Brands and More podcast. I explain the concept of drinks builder and we delve into the blurred lines between marketing and sales, discussing how to create demand before capturing it. I emphasize the importance of understanding customer needs, solving problems with your brand and building communities particularly among bartenders.

We discuss successful case studies, the impact of strategic thinking on the supply chain and tools for effective marketing and advocacy. This conversation is packed with insights on creating a strong demand for your beverage brand through a bottom up approach. I hope you will enjoy our chat. A small ask that means a lot to me. If you enjoy this podcast, take the time to leave a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

You will also find a detailed transcript of the episode on mafjordrinks.substack.com, where it gets pre released twenty four hours before other platforms.

Which brings me to our final big topic, which is your bottom up approach. So you recently coined the notion of beverage builder. Did I get that correctly?

I call it drinks builder, but it's And the

what I like about those is because in the beverage and food industry, which is what I say blurred, what you are basically your insight, what you are claiming is that functions are now blurred and you can't have marketing divided by sales because at the end of the day when you want to really build a brand bottom up the two are one and the same. So what's your definition of beverage builder and what makes it different? Let's start from there.

A beverage builder is somebody who understands that you need to create demand before being able to capture the demand. So it is someone who doesn't go just it doesn't go full on into commercial with blindly getting opportunity, working in and out of stores randomly. You know, they have something, they have done their homework and they know that you can only build the demand first and then capture it. The whole thing is about like my take about brand awareness. For me, brand awareness means nothing.

I've always hated that term in meetings. Like let's look at the funnel, blah, blah, For me, it's about demand. Is that brand in demand? Do they know about the brand in a way that they're interested in purchasing the brand and they understand that brand makes sense for them? And it's also given by the fact that the path to purchase has changed, like versus 20 ago, the actual logistics of the infrastructure with wholesalers and so on hasn't moved, hasn't changed, but the way things happen has changed.

So now before the salesperson, for example, was going into a bar and was creating that demand. And then it was trying to capture that demand at the same time because the operator was only an operator. It was not a, but now the operator is also a drinks builder. The bartender, the owner, they are curator of back bars, like when you talk to bartenders, they want to, they know what's hot, what's not hot, they go to other friends' bar, when they're off, they see, oh, what's that bottle, try it, or they go on WhatsApp groups, they go on forums, they go to trade fairs and so on. So now they already know what to buy.

So I always say, if you are walking into the bar and when you mention the name of your product, they have never heard about it, you're probably in the wrong bar. Or probably you haven't created demand or both. Because that's the thing, like people, they already know what they want to get in the best bars. So either you really spend an effort and put effort into creating that demand that could actually last even like months before you actually put the first foot in the door in a bar and really understand why they should buy you. And then you can focus on actually, okay, how do I capture that?

But many times people want to capture it, but they've not done anything to create it. So they go, they really do this kind of like door to door, taking the bottle out of the backpack and start talking about the brand. I'm like, I'm not interested about this kind of conversation.

So let me see if I capture that correctly. On one hand you have the route to market with the supply chain pieces which hasn't changed. There are a few things coming up there, but it hasn't changed basically in the past twenty five, thirty years in most developed countries. And then what you're saying is that you need to do rather than doing a pure push or a pure pull in marketing terms, marketing commercial terms, you would try to build some intelligence on what are the outlets that might already be interested in your offering?

Yes.

Okay. So how do you sell the first button?

That's the key. So first of all, you need to understand and transform. So you need the foundation of your strategy. You need to translate that brand positioning that you started with your brand into what I call a commercial proposition. So what does that mean in terms of bars and restaurants that are not only like a pub or a pizzeria or a kebab shop, but they are actually people, places with certain type of aspects, like the bar owner is a certain type of person, like the it's about the philosophy behind this.

And there are also drinks builders, by the way. So this is not only like from the brand side, it's also from the customer

They already belong to a community.

They belong to a community of people that want to have certain type of products. And if you manage to establish yourself as a product that is not only a vodka, a whiskey, a gin, but it's something that solves a specific problem to someone, which is not only the consumer, but it's also the bartender, it's also the owner, it's also the wholesaler, then you can actually really map the city in that sense and say, okay, actually, I want to go into places that do certain type of things. So example, otherwise it stays very ethereal. It could be like, okay, it's a cafe during the day that after work becomes, so you go there for latte, cappuccino and tramezzini and sandwiches, But then from 04:00, it starts to become a place where people want to have a beer, but maybe it's a bottled beer. They don't have food for to have a draft.

They start to have a spritz. People start having a spritz, they start to have a gin and tonics and so on. And then, maybe is there a space for them to actually start having a whiskey highball maybe, or capturing that volume pool that is like light beer, spritz, Prosecco, gin and tonic kind of thing. Now, the thing is that if you go there without having built any demand or without having explained what you do before, then you walk in with a bottle of whiskey and that owner is gonna sell you like, do you see any whiskey here? Are you crazy or what?

I just sell beer, wine, prosecco, gin. Ciao. Goodbye. See you next time. But then if you explain it to them as, okay, our whiskey is good for mixing it and especially many people recommend it because it has a certain taste profile that goes well with, I don't know, a ginger ale or a ginger beer or a Mediterranean tonic or whatever that could be.

It goes well with that kind of brands that you're already selling. And by the way, maybe I give you a little bit more margins because you can upsell it because you're selling the gin and tonic for, I don't know, €6 and this one you get sell it for €7.5 and actually you make more margin and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now without going too much into the details, all of a sudden you creating that demand on someone that on paper would not be interested into your brand. Because no other whiskey brand is actually approaching those venues. Because they do it top down and they say, tell me the outlets that sell whiskey.

And then you go and basically fight into the 70 whiskey on the back bar venues, and then you need to fight much stronger than what you would do with this other way. Which by the way, is the same thing that happened maybe ten years ago with Gin and Tonic, because that same venue would have answered, I only do cappuccinos and espresso. I don't do gin and tonic here. But then when the commercial people from Aperol started commercializing the Spritz, that's exactly what they probably have done, because there was only beer, there was only cappuccino. And then all of a sudden there was Spritz, then all of sudden there was Prosecco, and then all of a sudden there was gin and tonic.

And then now you could start to do, okay, what about whiskey highballs? And then what about this, and what about that? And the same thing with premiumizing tonic waters. No, here they just drink Coke and Fanta. They don't like tonics.

Okay, let's talk about it. So this whole thing about generating demand and creating demand is basically not fishing in the same pond where everybody's fishing, but creates your own category, which doesn't mean whiskey as a category, but your micro category, which is, you know, you are a whiskey for that kind of occasion, or you are a tequila for that kind of thing, or you are a mezcal that is a little bit less smoky than the other mezcal and you go well in up trading from tequila or side trading from scotch, a pitted scotch because you work on smokiness. You can play on, especially like on starting from taste profile, I'm a big fan of starting from the taste profile to actually do these little experiments and then expanding that footprint into where there was no demand. Because otherwise you focus on the people that know they have that problem today, but you have to focus on the people that don't know yet that they have that problem, but you have identified it for them.

So bottom line, you need to have incredible insight on what the customer needs are and bring the customer a solution to a problem, not a beverage brand, a brand that solves an existing problem that might or gives them an opportunity to upgrade, they might be or not be aware of. And that's how you generate and capture demand. And I think it's beautiful. And by the way, that's how Aperol was developed because at the beginning the logistics of having a cocktail with three ingredients in most countries, where usually you've been in Spain and in Spain, for the love of God, I love the country, but the Cubata, they don't even mix the cola or the Fanta or the tonic inside to give you the bottle next to it. They pour the alcohol base in the glass with the ice cubes, and then they give you the bottle of cola next to it.

It's as simple as that. So doing a spritz in that condition, it's more complicated. Absolutely. You cannot do that with the spritz. But then they managed to find a way to solve solve the problem.

Interesting And enough for me, like just to close the loop on that one, Filberto, like, they all think that's the reason why I don't call them brand builders and I call them drinks builders. Because for me, it's not about the brand, it's about the drinks category that you are building. It's about building the category before building the brand. Because in the way you are selling, I'm a big fan, despite what people may think, I'm a shy person and I don't like to sell. I don't like to sell as such.

I don't like the pushy sell. So for me, it's more like I talk to you, I listen to you, I shut up, first of all, which is tough for me often, but then I get insights from you to your previous point. And then I start to understand, okay, like you are selling certain type of categories and I think that there is a hole in this one, But now I don't want to go there, oh, Filibeto, that's exactly what you drink, what you need. The Maffei or Whiskey. No, you need something that will solve this problem because maybe you are making less money on beer, maybe you're doing this, you're doing that, like your customers don't want to spend money on this one, they want to spend money on this one, they don't order this one, they order this one.

So you need something, and I haven't told you what it is yet, that solves that problem. And then by the way, have you thought about this? And that's when I put, so mine is a solution to a problem that probably you have never crystallized into your head And then I solve it, but then it's totally different if I came in with a bottle in my hand, Hey, Filipeberto, hi, nice to meet you. I'm Chris from Mafay Whiskey. I would like to talk to you and sorry, I'm busy.

And I'm not the owner, by the way, I'm the barbec and the owner will be back next week. You know? And then people say, oh, I like this. It's it's not working. Like, this mom this model is not working.

It's not working. What I wanted to add is that to that, there is also, which is where the strategic thinking helps, even though if it's empirical and bottom up, there is the question of the supply chain, the value chain, because, and you know what I'm talking about, I attended a webinar recently on the development of NOLO in The US, beyond the three tier system and so on and so forth, And they had few guests that have their own bars, they run their own restaurants. And what is important there, what makes, what stands out to me is the fact that, as you say, no love brands solve a problem because more and more people want to combine alcoholic and non alcoholic spirits into the same occasions. Okay, so for them it's an opportunity because it's not about having a virgin mojito. It's about a lot of consumers which will start non alcoholic and move to alcoholic or then they are going to do either one.

So it's an offer, it's a demand which exists. But the development happens, which is what I want to focus on, because they can easily now order those products through their standard suppliers and distributors because nobody wants to have 27 wholesalers coming to the pile. Because it's 27 accounts, 27 different bills with different terms, which you need to remember to pay and manage. It's complexity and it's complexity which has a cost. Okay.

But the other thing that I learned, is interesting is that in The US, they're now especially on the soft drink side, there are an emerging number of platforms who do drop shipping. And even Amazon does that. So a lot of these outlets can buy these products more easily. Okay, and I think that's also important. So when you sit into a bar, when you go and develop your solution, be sure you understand that solution to fit into a bar needs to go in parallel with their current way of working.

They are not going to add a wholesaler or a new way of ordering just for the mafay whiskey, following your method.

Absolutely, absolutely. 100%. And this is the thing, and this is the tricky thing, because until you reach, until you haven't reached a certain demand, also from which demand is not consumer demand, it's demand of the ecosystem. So wholesalers, bartenders, owners, anybody, distributors, until you don't have that one, you will not get the attention of a wholesaler. So you will say, okay, I've got these 20 bars that want to buy from me, but now I need to bring it to them.

And then if they buy one bottle from you, they don't want to pay one bottle just like out of that. So that's why it's important to reach that demand before you actually go into the capturing phase, because you want people to say, oh, okay, I'm interested in this because like now people are talking about it. Me as an importer, I start to get questioned a lot. Oh, I know this brand from London and it doesn't come here. I'm buying it by myself because that is the tricky one that sometimes, and I've seen it here in Prague, for example, there are some brands that don't have a distributor yet, but I see them in bars and I see them more and then they buy it online.

So they buy it online with a higher excise, they couldn't actually even sell it legally because it has like a strip stamp from another country.

They need to prepay them?

Sorry?

They prepay for them.

They prepay for them, absolutely. On a credit card or whatever, something that is totally like unthinkable of. So imagine how much demand that brand has if the bartender, the bar owner, the bar manager goes through all those hassles, like to get it to their bar. So that is a brand that is doing something right on demand because it's like shit, like there places that sell my product and I don't even have a distributor, which is the opposite of those who say, oh, I'm a distributor in 20 markets, of which one market makes 99% of their the other 19 board like a case.

Which is getting dust in a

way like a year ago. Going back to your priorities and focus and when it's nice, when it's right time to go to the next place.

Absolutely. The bottom line is it's about building communities as well. Yes. But is it about communities of bartenders, of consumers, both? What's the key?

I have to say, let's say, a name, then it would be bartenders. I'm a big fan of having the trade before the consumer. I think that they have the same power. If you take consumer as a super consumer, so somebody who's knowledgeable, somebody who's, it's like private clients on high end whiskies, for example, So first of all, on specific categories, the super consumer can be even more powerful than bartenders. If you take whiskey, if you take aged categories, there are some groups and Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups that are, move more cases than bars.

But then like for me, ultimately it's about creating these amplifiers that can tell that story. We go back to the beginning of the conversation about you want to be able to translate that message and transfer that message, no? So if I can make people that will do the talking for me that and, you know, you don't create that as selfishly. I give the example of my podcast, know, like sometimes I, like I, when I go around and then some people say, I introduce myself and I say, oh, I have a podcast and so on. And sometimes I give the name and then maybe like the guy goes on Spotify and says, oh, but I'm following it already.

Yeah, because a friend of mine had sent it to me. So someone that I have no idea who it was gave that recommendation of that podcast. So maybe they were following me on Instagram, they didn't know my face or whatever, no? So it's not that I do it in a selfish way. Okay, I'm creating this little bunch of people that go around and talk about my podcast.

It's just like I focus on the content. I focus on giving value to the listener, whoever the listener is. It could be a bartender, brand manager, a CEO, whoever that is. And those people, they get so much value that they start talking about it. So that's the good old word-of-mouth.

So community means that for me. It's not like the PowerPoint slide, we are in that community because if you're not relevant in that community, you're going have hard rockers and techno people and whatever you want to create. If you're not relevant, they will not care about you. So you need to give something to them that you are solving a problem and then they start really writing about it, they write it into their WhatsApp groups, they talk about a dinner party, they talk about it to their friends and then all of a sudden they create this demand. And then you never know who they are because like the famous six degrees of separation on social media is based on, by the way, who doesn't know?

It's all about also the weak links. It's about the super consumers, but it's about the weak links because you never know if I'm at the dinner with some lawyers that has nothing to do with drinks, And then all of a sudden, one of the lawyers maybe have a huge cabinet of rums and he's part of a whiskey club. And then he has invested in a small bottle shop that you have no idea, and if you had segmented it on people, you can have lawyers as your, community.

I agree. And what's interesting is that the way you sell it now or the way you decline it, if I need to reverse engineer it from a marketing point of view, building demand is first of all building mental availability, building the brand knowledge, so to speak. Forget about awareness. Knowledge. And then through that knowledge, close the deal on the distribution side, on the physical availability and making sure that they have a drinking strategy and then a commercial solution.

So the two things are they must be at least in parallel. They cannot be distribution and then communicate later.

And to answer your question, like what many brands I see do wrong is that then they mistake one thing. So they think that they have their product available, they have their brand story, they have their website, they everything, but then they rush into commercialization without having done anything before. Like the brands that I see succeed very well are the ones that are actually slowing going to market, but they are doing something already before. Like sometimes you have a brand that you already see the Instagram page, you already see them appearing in podcasts, in talking at conferences and so on. And then it's like, I want to try this brand.

It's only if you catch the guy or the girl, because you can only drink that bottle when they are here, because they are nowhere yet. Like you can only, you can maybe buy it online, maybe there is like a very limited availability, but the demand is so high that it's before it goes wide into the distribution. And I have some great examples in my, as my guests, woven whiskey with Duncan MacRae or the hard cut with Georgie Bell, one of the latest episodes. They've built the demand before going to the market so that at some point, like people that they can't wait to click and buy whenever that SKU becomes available, because it becomes like, you have created so much anticipation about it, that now you really want it, which is the opposite of brands that have got everything in place. They are too fast to go to market.

And then all of a sudden, oh, but I've been selling for one year and nobody wants my products. Yeah, because you haven't created demand.

On that, by the way, I think it's a bit what the craft brewers did at the very beginning. It's exactly that model. So they build community, they used to go to an event and they did it on a small scale and probably not online, but they had this community feeling, etcetera, etcetera. And you could only consume it either at the events that they were sponsoring or on tap at the distillery, at the

brewery. Yeah, the tap room. Interesting.

That model is actually changing now for craft drinks in general, being brewers, distillers, or soft drink producers, it's becoming the relevant model. We talked about a bit the events, we talked about the podcast, but what are the core elements of the marketing toolbox in this scenario?

That's also an interesting one. Like for sure, you need it. It's mainly about having a clarity internally. So having the strategy clear, which also means like having a clear drink strategy, what is the target occasion that you want to go for and so on. Having clear your, in a nutshell, it's your selling story, what I call the commercial essence.

So it's about, okay, this is my taste profile, this is my liquid, this is my ABV, this is my story, but not the story of my family that nobody cares about. The story of this brand and how does it work and why I created it because there was a need that I identified and so on, not because I was picking rosemary in the garden with my grandma kind of thing. I can tell it to you after we're already drinking it and then I can tell you the story when you ask me why rosemary? When you have all these kind of the brand elements and the liquid elements together, creates, that is the atomic part of your brand. And that is the atomic part of that marketing toolkit, because then basically you just need to have like more branches branching out from those little dots on the nuclear part of the atom.

And then you say, okay, when I talk about the liquid, boom, okay, then that means that on packaging, we are talking this way. Then it means that on tonality, we are talking this way. And then it means that in communication, we talk this way. And then on selling story to the trade, we talk this way and when I'm at the trade fair, I talk this way and when we talk about the category, our role in the category is this one, so we don't care about, I don't know, the geeky whiskey clubs because we are an approachable whiskey. Or maybe you are because you are a single cask super about, only about connoisseurs and then you talk about that and you don't go to the cafe that I mentioned earlier that because you don't do highballs with that whiskey.

So once that you have clear who you are and who you are not, then you can start to make the so you basically, you have all the drawings ready and then you have to make all the toys and all the tools after that.

And are there unmissable tools and toys these days?

Definitely like a short training, a short advocacy training that, you know, and again, I don't even like to call it advocacy. I call it because everybody calls it this way, so to explain what I mean, but it's not advocacy because I don't want to have it's like if mine was an advocacy podcast, it is not an advocacy. I give you value and then you like it. And then when you meet me at BarreConvent, you want to hug me and you want to buy me a drink. I don't do it to get a free drink from you.

I do it because I genuinely like to give my knowledge. Because I like to talk about these things. Of course, I'm not a nonprofit. Make money out of that. But at the same time, again, like it's about you have to give knowledge to people and they will be thankful in the future.

But it's not like I genuinely want to give you tips to go to Rome and have a good time with you and your family. I don't do it because one day you will pay me something back. I'm doing it as a favor initially, which is a very different thing. And this is probably what the craft world has started compared to the big companies. It's really like giving before asking because I give you, I give it to you out of passion.

I'm generally passionate about telling the story about that whiskey, that gin, about those flavors and about those things. And then you almost want, it's what they call this no sell sell. It's almost like, aren't you selling anything to me? I want to buy something from you because now I got so much out of you that I want to buy something from you now. Okay.

If you want, you can buy it. It's almost like the last cherry on the cake is not the objective, like the monetary objective.

No. But I think it makes sense with what you said earlier because it's all geared towards this generating demand by creating value in that sense. So the advocacy training is really about how my solution is going to make more money, more efficiency or more interesting the work that your partners on the other side of the bar

do. Absolutely, absolutely.

Cool. Chris, thank you very much. I think it's been, incredibly thought provoking and interesting, this conversation, and you're welcome to come back anytime.

Fantastic. Thank you very much, Filipe. It's always, interesting to to speak to you and to get some bouncing back ideas and also help me to develop my own clarity on, I think I will start writing something now just after hanging up with you. Thank you so much.

That's good. Thank you, Chris. Bye.

That's all for today. Remember that this is a two part episode, seventy two and seventy three. So feel free to listen to both. One last thing. If you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review, share it with friends, and remember that brands are built bottom up.