How To Measure Trade Advocacy And What Actually Builds Brands In The On-Trade | Claire Warner | EP 130
This is Maffeo DRINKS. Hi, Claire. Welcome to Maffeo DRINKS.
Claire Warner:Thanks for having me. I'm so delighted to join you.
Chris Maffeo:It's a great honor. First of all, I mean, we never met in person. Probably we bumped into some events and we didn't know we were both there. But this is the good thing about social media. We were just discussing that if you use it right, you can meet great people.
Claire Warner:Absolutely. No. Here for that reason to use social media, but we can get into the other reasons later on.
Chris Maffeo:I was looking at your Instagram lately, and I saw this nice news that you recently launched a good measure guild.
Claire Warner:Mhmm.
Chris Maffeo:And when I read it, I thought, wow. This is really interesting because this is gonna be a great conversation about the middle and the good measure and the two mottos that I grew up with from my father. One was the one I was telling you is, so the virtues in the middle. But the other thing was, so it's about moderation in things. And he kept repeating these two things to me since I was a child.
Chris Maffeo:I never really understood what it was until now lately. I'm bumping into it more and more.
Claire Warner:Yeah.
Chris Maffeo:So let's talk about the moderation with measure, with the middle in a good sense kind of things that often gets forgotten. Tell me about the good measure guilt.
Claire Warner:Lots of M's I'm thinking. I love a little bit of illustration there. So it's like moderation, there's measurement. For me, the Good Measure Guild is really about measuring what matters. And I've spent twenty five years in this beautiful business.
Claire Warner:And a lot of that time spent in advocacy where every few years we get to a conversation about how are we measuring the effectiveness of our advocacy program? And I think that what advocacy does very well is it builds relationships and it builds meaning and it builds relevance for brands. And those things are very, very difficult to measure. But over the last ten to fifteen years, because I've been very deep in this kind of thought exercise around how do we measure what we do? How do we measure what matters from an advocacy perspective?
Claire Warner:Everything that we do in hospitality is about bringing people together. So how do we measure the impact of that connection piece that hospitality provides? The last few years has really been me circling this question around how do we measure connection? How do we measure the value of hospitality over and above what services we provide as in drinks and cocktails? How does that link back to what advocacy does in terms of building meaning and relevance for brands?
Claire Warner:I think all of that kind of thinking has culminated in the development of the Good Measure Guild, which is fundamentally about how can we put a value on the connection that hospitality venues provide. Because that value piece is not measured and therefore not protected or preserved. We need more places to be together in real life. We need more cathedrals of connection, these third places that anybody can wander into and have a great time and feel a sense of belonging or their identity reflected back to them in some way. Just having somewhere to go that's not home and not work.
Claire Warner:We all deserve places like that. And they are increasingly under threat. I decided that rather than just talk about how important the places are, pubs, restaurants, clubs, nightclubs, why don't we actually start to try and measure the impact of these places, the social impact of these places? We are losing one to two pubs a day in The UK. And for those pubs that are in rural remote locations, that is essentially like the whole community's living room closing and having nowhere else for those people to go.
Claire Warner:We talked about earlier how pivotal those places are to our social worlds, our livelihoods, how we connect as humans. They are places for us to go and be human and learn how to be human. So the Good Measure Guild is essentially us looking at all of the data that hospitality venues have, and then applying our criteria to that data to see what that social score is, and also providing education and insights around how to improve your social score. If we come in and we read through your data and we come out with a score of 50, obviously we want to get everybody up to as high as a number as we can. We'll implement training and education and just ensure that all of these hospitality venues who don't really have a lot of time or resources, we want to help them grow their social score through what we can offer.
Claire Warner:All of it is to drive more people into bars and to get them to stay there for longer. And that's not just the 1%, that's all bars, all restaurants, all hospitality spaces. We can hopefully do that by showing how beneficial a venue can be to your social health.
Chris Maffeo:Listening to you, it made me think of something. Measure has a double meaning in a way, no? It's measurement as measuring stuff, but it's also about the right amount, so to say. The interesting thing is that one of the issues is the fact that we tend to optimize for what's measurable, what can be measured rather than what should be measured. Yeah.
Chris Maffeo:And this is one of the big issue. The revolving topic about our conversation is the fact that if we take a step back to the on trade versus off trade dilemma, the meeting room discussions, is also because of this. Because on trade is very difficult to measure. Wholesalers don't give you data. You don't know exactly how much you're selling.
Chris Maffeo:So, okay, I'm gonna do a training for 100 bartenders in Manchester. How do I measure? I get the sell in, but I don't get this allowed. So all of a sudden, becomes like, you know what? You've got Tesco.
Chris Maffeo:Why don't we spend money there? Yeah. We're gonna get rid of 10 salespeople there with one key account manager. So there is always this revolving about measurements and KPIs and wrong target settings that is kinda like going into a vicious circle and then brings us to things. You know?
Chris Maffeo:Because the on trade gets deprioritized very often. And I see I mean, you worked at the Agio. Now the Agio is all over the news. But it's always coming in waves. Whenever somebody is saying, oh, everybody's firing people.
Chris Maffeo:It's like, just look for who's hiring them because it always goes in waves. Brand ambassador, salespeople, going direct, going indirect. What's your take on this?
Claire Warner:I see it as an ecosystem. And you're right. We do see a lot of cyclical trends. I've been very lucky to be in this industry for a long time. So I see the same sort of pattern emerge through advocacy.
Claire Warner:In particular, in terms of how are we measuring the effectiveness of that. There are a lot of pressures on these businesses right now because our socialising habits are changing socialising in different spaces, drinking less, perhaps drinking better. At the moment, yes, there's a lot of pressure on these huge multinationals to invest in programmes that are shown to have effectiveness. An effectiveness score measure needs data points, and those are very difficult to access in the on trade. But I do think that the best businesses and the best brands, those legacy brands or those legacy businesses understand that the off trade is where you can build scale by the very nature of how huge points of distribution might be through Tesco, for instance.
Claire Warner:But you don't necessarily build meaning or relevance in those spaces. And that really for me comes through the on trade. The on trade is all about bringing your brands to life, giving them their personalities, expressing the DNA of your brand, making it memorable, making it relevant, making it mean something. And those legacy businesses are always customer first. But the first customer in my mind is always the bartender.
Claire Warner:It's always that tastemaker, the gatekeeper, the person that you need to win their hearts and minds through their experience of your brand. And the best way to do that is to build a relationship with that person, ideally over time. Some of the best brand investors have been in their roles for many years for good reason, because they're exceptional at building really deep, meaningful relationships with brands that reflect their DNA through how they activate in the on trade. For me, this is about what happens. Advocacy is what happens when no one's watching.
Claire Warner:If you've built a great relationship and the bartender loves your brand, and you're not at that bar on a Saturday night and someone asks for a whiskey, if you've done your work well, then they'll pick up your whiskey brand without even thinking about it. That would be the one that they naturally, the experience they've had with a brand ambassador, perhaps at brand home visit. That's super difficult to measure. Then we come back to the age old question, but how do we measure the meaning in a brand? How do we measure the relevance of that brand to a bartender?
Claire Warner:I think it's about the repetition that the bartender expresses through their recommendation across the bar. We know that about 86% of high net worth individuals will ask a bartender for a recommendation. And it's that bit that you want to win with the bartender. How can you get them to recommend your brand? You're not going to get that in Tesco's.
Claire Warner:That is about driving awareness through other means, which also costs money. But I think the most honest, the most genuine, the most authentic recommendation comes from a bartender who has an affection for your brand. And that can travel over many, many years. I still remember my very first training from a Gordon's Gin ambassador back in the 90s. And I still remember it clearly, how we would talk to talk about Gordons, how we would talk to squeeze the lime.
Claire Warner:It was lime. Those experiences stay with you for years, twenty plus years for me. So I don't have the answer about how we stop this cyclical pattern happening of letting brand ambassadors go and then re recruiting them again when your brand loses meaning and relevance. But I do know that we need to start to recognize the power of what advocacy can bring in terms of building brands over the long term. Putting your brand into a supermarket.
Claire Warner:Great. Well done. These are all short term ways to build brands, but advocacy, building brands through relationships and genuinely bringing bartenders into your world, that can be the difference between your brand being a short term success and something that's still sat on someone's back bar twenty years from now. We need to find a better way to measure the effectiveness of what advocacy can deliver. Read the data points from the sellout from Tesco.
Claire Warner:Don't have the technology, or we're not prepared to invest in the technology. It exists in other industries. It exists in the beauty industry. L'Oreal have an amazing advocacy program and they can track and measure the effectiveness of what they do. The ability to do that exists.
Claire Warner:It's just that we haven't bought that into our business yet.
Chris Maffeo:And one of the things that I'm talking about a lot is that I'm a fan of my tagline brands are built bottom up. And I came up with this kind of differentiation instead of using on and off trade, I use bottom up trade and top down trade.
Claire Warner:Okay.
Chris Maffeo:Because the bottom up trade for me is wherever not all the on trade, because there are some mainstream on trade outlets where you don't get advised on which gin and tonic you want. You just see gin and tonic. But at the same time, there are some off trade venues like the bottle shops, the cavies, the notecas in Italy, where the role of the clerk, the seller, is very similar to the role of the bartender. They can make or break the thing, and you enter there to buy a bottle. You don't enter a bottle shop to look at bottles.
Chris Maffeo:You are there with a mission.
Claire Warner:Yeah.
Chris Maffeo:So how do we break the vicious circle? When I'm in this conversation with board members or leadership teams, the issue is always that, okay, we are sold on the idea that the on trade is important. We have to do the right things. Probably, we were doing very mainstream things. You're right.
Chris Maffeo:We need to reframe it. So then automatically, the attention goes to the top 1% of on trade because we are losing relevance. Let's repremiumize, reposition, rebrand, whatever. But then there is this 1% misunderstanding that is not about 1%, it's about doing things right, what you were saying. No?
Chris Maffeo:But that then leads into it's too slow and it costs too much per contact because, you know, okay. How many brand ambassador can we have?
Claire Warner:Yeah.
Chris Maffeo:How many bartenders can we train? So automatically, we go to the best bars because the others probably are not even interested into it. And then it's like yeah. Sorry. It's too slow.
Chris Maffeo:Yeah. So I want to reconnect to this in in Mediostat virtu, the virtues in the middle. I was discussing with Francois Monti back in an older episode. I was discussing with many people that aren't we forgetting about this beautiful, middle ground of bars that nothing to take away from the 50 best and top 1% prestige account, which have their own reason. But there is a lot of these middle bars in a regular random city.
Chris Maffeo:They don't want to get into any list. The bartender has been there twenty years now. The son is working there. The daughter's working there. Aren't we, as brand as leadership within brands, forgetting about these people and thinking black and white is like it's either fifty Best or Tesco.
Chris Maffeo:There's nothing in between.
Claire Warner:Yeah. I think the 1% gets a disproportionate amount of focus because of how visible those bars are and the personalities there. I'd like to think of the 1% as our Mozart or our Picassos or the Beyonces, right? They are absolutely inspiring us with their craft, with their artistry. The role for brands should be, how do we translate that and help their skills or what they do differently?
Claire Warner:How can we educate the middle tier who might be inspired by seeing what Ago or Julia or any of those bartenders in the top 50 are doing? How can we disseminate some of that skill? How can we disseminate some of the education in order to raise the quality across the board. That being said, that's not saying that the middle tier is not as good as the top 1%. They might be in smaller cities that are less traveled, less well known.
Claire Warner:One of the requirements of being a top 50 judge here is that you must visit these bars. You must've been there. And so by dint of how much you travel, perhaps you haven't been to so many of those secondary cities to see what's happening in those places. I remember when I was a brand ambassador, the different type of experience I would get if I was to go for instance, to do training in New York and the number of bartenders that would come versus doing a training in Boston. And you'd get twice as many people in the room because those cities are less exposed to brand ambassador visits because everybody wants to be in New York or everybody wants to be in London.
Claire Warner:I think your brand travels so much further in places that are less traveled. As a brand strategy, the focus shouldn't be secondary cities, it's actually you'll get more value. You'll get more bang for your buck if we spend more time in places that aren't so well traveled or well visited by ambassadors. Perhaps your message will land louder because there's less noise. You're not trying to compete with so many other brands.
Claire Warner:So I think the middle is very much overlooked, but it's a huge opportunity for your brand to really resonate because you're not competing with so many other brands within a very small subset of our industry, which is that 1%. I love your framing of it as the middle. And I think it's a very powerful part of our industry that's very much overlooked. That is where you've got this lovely crossover of scale because you've got more venues. You've got scale, you've got more venues and you've got a higher level of interest.
Claire Warner:People are more interested to hear what you've got to say. There's more engagement happening in that middle tier. It's incumbent on brands to create opportunities for the top 1% to come into the middle tier and create some excitement, some education, some opportunities to cross pollinate with ideas, bit like a mentee mentor relationship, bringing the 1% into secondary cities or that middle tier to learn from what's happening in less highly concentrated cities. Let's see what's happening in our local bars because they're very often using really local ingredients or techniques that we might not know about because they're not being used at that 1%. There's still a lot of creativity and ingenuity happening in that middle tier that we can learn a lot from each other.
Claire Warner:I think we spend so much time on the 1% because they're so visible, the sort of Beyonce's, as I say, of our industry. But there's all these amazing artists in that middle tier that we can learn a lot from and get a lot out of.
Chris Maffeo:I agree. What I was thinking while you were talking was that your example, I was thinking nowadays, this World Cup or Olympics or whatever. It's just sometimes when I speak to people and even young bartenders, it's like if you take the Olympics as an example, it's like they focus on the medal not much on the sport. You know? All these athletes are they're not just like creative geniuses.
Chris Maffeo:They are training every single day of the week. Yes. I think there is also something to be communicated better to younger generations on putting in the effort and the accolade being almost like a byproduct of the work they put in.
Claire Warner:Yeah.
Chris Maffeo:Because when you were saying about the 1% and the the middle and the smaller cities, there is this misconception that I need to example, you you worked you were in charge of advocacy for Diageo. For example, I need to win world class, but you started bartending a year ago. Why do you want to win world class? Like, it's just like master a bloody daikiri. So what is interesting for me, because many brands are using competitions as a way for Yeah.
Chris Maffeo:Advocacy. And I would argue that basically everybody's trying to copycat world class, which is obviously the epitome of advocacy. You know? We can say it loud. I don't have any time to judge you.
Chris Maffeo:Can I'm saying this because it's the best thing. But it's like if I come to your party and you have a fantastic birthday party, you spent a lot of money. And then I said, I wanna have a party like Claire had. But I've got one tenth of the budget. And then it looks like, what the hell is this place?
Chris Maffeo:Isn't there a moment of self reflection or self awareness on saying, I'm the owner of this bar or I'm a young bartender. I just moved to London. I just moved to New York. Let me put in the hours. Let me learn from the best because I work next to Yeah.
Chris Maffeo:An amazing bartender. And then I'll do the first competition in seven years' time.
Claire Warner:I'll tell you a couple of my own personal stories about cocktail competitions, because I do actually love a cocktail competition. When I started out as a bartender, I entered a competition after about a year. It was a Grand Marnier competition. And my drink was so terrible that the judges didn't actually taste it. They just left it on the bar.
Claire Warner:That's a moment of reflection, right? Because I then realized that I needed to step up my game if I was going to compete. The reason I love competitions is because they are a bit like a baptism of fire. You throw yourself in, you see what your peers are doing. You're learning from everybody around you under lots and lots of pressure, which I think creates the conditions for great learning experiences.
Claire Warner:Cocktail competitions, not expecting to win, but expecting to learn. That's the reason why I continued to compete after that first terrible experience, because I was fascinated by how do I progress? How do I do better? It's a bit like a personal best. You're not going to be in Usain Bolt, but you might have potential that you yourself see and that other people see in you and that you can use competitions as a way to get feedback, to see what other people are doing, to meet the judges, meet some of your heroes and be immersed in that experience of really learning under pressure.
Claire Warner:That's why I like cocktail competitions, because I think it's the only real opportunity that you get thrown in at the deep end sometimes. And you can pick up lots of ways of improving as you go. So you don't really have cocktail coaches. If you were training for the Olympics, you'd have a team around you who were training you and getting you ready and reading your stats. Whereas bartenders, we talk to our friends, we talk to our fellow bartenders and we compete and we learn in that environment.
Claire Warner:And that's one of the reasons I do love world class. I love bartenders who have been bartending for a year, who want to come into that world class experience, provided they're coming into that experience with the best attitude, which is, I've only been bartending a year. I'm here to learn. And I'm gonna learn from some of the best bartenders in the world. And if I do well, because I've got a lot of talent, then I'm going to be exposed to incredible learning that's going to help me hone my craft.
Claire Warner:And if I do incredibly well and get to the finals in Edinburgh or wherever it might be, then I'm going to be immersed in this incredible community of inspiring people who want to see me succeed. I think we'd looked at the stats. I think it takes like three or four times for you to do world class for you to almost be in the running to win because of going through that process and understanding how world class works. But every year we bring in a 100 bartenders into the top 100 in The UK. And we whittle that down to a top 50.
Claire Warner:And then we do the live competitions. All of that is a great opportunity for younger bartenders to hone their craft and get feedback in real time. So I love a cocktail competition. Yes, I think world class is best in class, But I think it's because of the energy, the investment, the focus, that's really helping all of those bartenders improve. Not just trying to recognise the winner.
Claire Warner:Yes, the winner will be globally recognised, but there's still a huge cohort of bartenders, probably like 200 bartenders a year. Who've gone through some of the most rigorous training in their lives to progress through that competition. And all of that stays with them. And they all stay together in this beautiful community where they continue to inspire and learn from each other. As a vocational sort of career bartending, we don't really go to school or university for bartending.
Claire Warner:It's important that you create that community around you so you can learn from each other. I encourage everybody to compete because I think it's the only way that you get really great feedback. World class is obviously the pinnacle, but any competition is a great opportunity to learn about a brand, make new friends, and to see how you perform amongst your peers. More competitions there are the better in my view. I think they're a brilliant vehicle to drive brand meaning and relevance and help bartenders improve.
Chris Maffeo:Okay. You adjusted my thinking about it. Thank you. Now, I think that I agree with you. The issue is with the translation of the good deeds into reality.
Chris Maffeo:Yeah. I think ego comes into place at some point. Every bartender, every young bartender can share your story. But then at some point, there is this ego moment where it's just like, okay. I'm gonna work with ten, fifteen different brands.
Chris Maffeo:I'm gonna be all over the place. I'm gonna try to take shortcuts. Yeah. And then because I think that that is the issue that creates this kind of lack of buy in from management teams. Because then they see imagine, like, I'm I tell you a hypothetical story, like a commercial director or a marketing director that is putting effort, not Diageo because with Diageo, there is a clear buy in.
Chris Maffeo:But imagine a smaller brand that creates something similar. They put a big chunk of their budget into advocacy, and then Claire shows up, and then all of a sudden on her Instagram, a week after the competition, she's working with another brand and then with Pernod Ricard and then with Brown Forman and then with Diageo. The management, they look at it as like, why are we doing these things with these bartenders that, you know, they're acting as mercenaries just going for who's paying more, you know, because the price is better and so on. I think this is the translation effort that we all must do into explaining things better to all the parties of the ecosystem on understanding how do we do it in a sustainable way Yeah. So that the toy doesn't break.
Claire Warner:Yeah.
Chris Maffeo:Because if the toy breaks, brands stop investing into competitions
Claire Warner:Yeah.
Chris Maffeo:And the circle starts again.
Claire Warner:Look, it doesn't always have to be a competition, you know, from a brand building perspective. It's just the competition seems to be very effective because of the nature of our business, because perhaps the personality type that attracts that type of bartender. And I think just because it tends to show how we're progressing and how we're learning. Last year, I only got to the top four in world class. This year I got to the top two.
Claire Warner:There's a sense of like, I'm getting better. So for that reason, the competition mechanic is pretty effective. But I think there's other ways to bring the community into your brand without it necessarily having to be focused around a competition. What's the best mechanic for your brand? How can you bring bartenders into your world and get them to really have a relationship with your brand?
Claire Warner:I think it's more challenging when you are in a category that's very saturated. So in order to stand out, gin, vodka, whiskey to a certain extent, do need to do a lot more work than if you were trying to be a memorable Calvados, for instance. You could bring someone to your distillery in the middle of beautiful France and talk to them about this unique product that you're producing. And all of that is super memorable and you don't necessarily need the competition mechanic. I think brands that sit in highly saturated categories need to work a lot harder to be memorable.
Claire Warner:And that requires more time spent with that brand. Competitions are great because you're trying it all the time, creating drinks with it, constantly picking it up, putting it down, thinking about the flavor profile of that brand. There's more exposure to that brand because of what you're trying to create with it. So all of it is about how can we bring this brand to life for a creative individual. I think about art in the context of what we do quite a lot.
Claire Warner:And I think about all of the brands as a sort of color wheel or a color palette for bartenders to paint with. And what we're trying to do is try to teach bartenders that this blue is so much more better for you to use than that blue. They're both blue, right? But what we're trying to get the bartender to understand is perhaps this blue has a different type of pigment, or this blue reflects light better. We're trying to bring their ideas to life and to help them channel their ideas through the brand's DNA.
Claire Warner:And all of that must be built through exposure to that brand with that bartender. It takes time. And I think time is the most precious resource. We want our brand to grow quickly. We want it to scale quickly.
Claire Warner:We want it to exit quickly. We want it to be now, speed, speed, speed. But the brands that bartenders love have been around for twenty years, twenty plus years. I'm thinking about Belvedere, right? So Belvedere was first created in 1993.
Claire Warner:It's the baby brand in the context of how long vodka's been around for. That now is considered to be a legacy brand. When I was working on it, it was still a new thing. That just shows how old I am. It's about constant repetition, really kind of to the point where everybody in the business is bored of what you're doing.
Claire Warner:And then the industry is only just starting to recognize what you're doing, right? You could be doing the same thing for ten years. And all of a sudden the industry is like, Oh wow, we heard about this thing called world class. World class is now seventeen, eighteen years old. And now we're like world class is the best of the best of the best.
Claire Warner:It's not that old, right? It's been around for a long time. It stood the test of time because they stuck to the formula and they build on that formula and they know what works and they aren't afraid to change the things that don't work and mix it up a bit and make sure it's evolving. So it's relevant and it's exciting. That's what brands need to do.
Claire Warner:Stick with what works, continue to evolve it and make it exciting and relevant. But if something works, lean into that. Don't keep chopping and changing. That comes back to your marketing director who maybe has come from a different industry, doesn't understand. We're in a business of long term brand building strategies.
Claire Warner:This stuff isn't just one year programming. It's gonna take at least three in order for it to start to sink in that we're doing this thing. That's the tension between brand ambassadors or heads of advocacy, marketing, the commercial piece. Everybody needs to understand what each function provides. And it is an ecosystem.
Claire Warner:Each function feeds the next function. And without one of those pillars in action, everything falls apart. So if you'd start to deprioritise advocacy or reduce investment over three to five years, you'll start to see that the brand becomes less relevant because that's how long it takes for the brand to build back its relevance in doing the things that are the same things year on year. We don't do the same things in marketing year on year, or the same commercial tactics year on year. But for advocacy, those things take longer.
Claire Warner:And therefore, you need teams, you need businesses to understand that they function in a different way, and to have patience with advocacy, because it's a longer term brand building approach versus being tactical.
Chris Maffeo:Isn't this connected also with the tenure of roles in big companies? Because ultimately, if I'm a commercial director and I'm in Czech Republic now, and then I'm gonna be in Poland next year, and then I'm gonna be in Dubai in five years time, honestly, I don't really care. I care about my bonus, and I care about my objective this year.
Claire Warner:Yeah.
Chris Maffeo:How do we help these people understand the importance of scaling in the right way? How does it change when you're building advocacy for the top bartenders that obviously get it to a normal corner pub where you want to drive easy producing gin and tonics Yeah. Whiskey highballs and so on. And they're just not really bothered with, I don't need to compete.
Claire Warner:There's no training on sous vide for the hare and hounds. They don't need the same thing. They do need a sort of touch point though. And I think Diageo does do this very well. It's It's got amazing teams who go into every on trade outlet and delivers a certain level of training that's relevant to that type of outlet.
Claire Warner:And then great POS, great marketing platforms and campaigns that are through the line. So there's always a consistency across what they're trying to communicate. I think for me, the difficult part is where you go from that middle tier to that top tier. And as you say, the one, the nine and the 90, the nine piece is tricky because some venues don't want a lot of handholding and training, some do. And it's about making sure you've got the right people, the right resources to give that venue what it needs.
Claire Warner:Diageo Barre Academy is invaluable because it's online, accessible to all. If you really have a team who are dedicated to learning, we would send our Diageo Bar Academy trainers into that account to add face to face training, which is incredibly important, I believe. And then through world class, we would have the world class roadshow where we'd have a centralized hub and then bring bartenders from all over the city into one location to offer them training and education. Someone at Diageo has got access to those incredible resources. But for smaller brands, I think it's about how do you protect your resources and how do you ensure that your commercial strategy is putting you in places that's gonna drive the most volume and the most value.
Claire Warner:And then training in those places where you want that bartender recommendation. And that might be the corner pub, depending on what your brand is and depending on what your goals are. And so, each advocacy outreach piece is individualized to your brand and to your channel strategy. Where do you want that brand to be? How do you want that brand to show up?
Claire Warner:It will vary depending on who your customer is, who your consumer is, and what your brand is. So it's always kind of bespoke in that way. But because of the scale of Diageo, it can do those things brilliantly at scale. So you'll always kind of get a sense of who Tanqueray is for and how you're meant to consume Tanqueray, just because of the nature of how they've communicated that across marketing, advocacy and the commercial piece, and even into kind of like point of sale materials. But all of it's necessary in order to grow the brand.
Chris Maffeo:And this is very true because I think probably the nine is actually a 19 or 29,
Claire Warner:which
Chris Maffeo:is already one of the misperceptions, which is not due to the adjective. Everybody thinks that way. Everybody thinks Yeah. Yeah. One.
Chris Maffeo:They may call it differently. They call it ABCD or whatever, but that's what they think. But how do we make that I keep insisting on this midsole because it's stuck with a with a with a good measure, guilt. It's the fact that how do we make it appealing to those people, but also to start having this translation mode because you cannot go from 1% to 90. You need the nine.
Chris Maffeo:Whatever
Claire Warner:Yeah.
Chris Maffeo:Whatever is a nine, it's 19, it's 29, whatever, but you need to get to the ninety, eighty, 70, whatever that is. And this is the big issue with on trade all over the world now. Yeah. Because that middle is shrinking. The nineties also shrinking because pubs are closing.
Chris Maffeo:And what is visible on social media is only the world class final Yeah. With the winner holding the trophy. Yeah. All of a sudden, all the new brands, oh, let's look at what Diageo is doing. Let's do that as well.
Chris Maffeo:Forgetting that Diageo has a plan for the nine and the 90. But they don't have the budget for the nine and the 90, and they are burning the budget on the one.
Claire Warner:The one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Maffeo:Yeah. And also, the other thing is that because of all these big companies are London, New York, very from my Italian perspective, very Anglo Saxon driven. There is also a misunderstanding on, for example, the level of cocktail culture, which is not exactly the same. In a small town, you may not even have a cocktail bar. You go to The US and there's cocktail bars in pizzerias and you can have a margherita with your burger.
Chris Maffeo:Yeah. The wider you go, the more you go to a regular bar or pub in a village or in a smaller town where there are three or four spirits bottles on the back bar. They can't do drinks. Nobody asks for drinks. But if you make a drink appealing enough, see the Aperol Spritz what they managed to do.
Chris Maffeo:Yeah. You have pubs here in Prague, and you have beer mugs and spritzes and gin and tonics and so on. So there is a training that must be done to those other tiers to explain you can have a gin and tonic that is probably going to be the same ABV as a beer, especially if you're drinking IPA.
Claire Warner:Again, not to kind of labor the Diage point, but they're currently running a programme at the moment where it's looking at the level of ABV across multiple different drinks, so that the consumer understands that drinking spirits in a gin and tonic are not necessarily worse for you than drinking a glass of wine or a glass of beer. It's all about moderation and how much you're consuming. So there's just a level of education that I think those big companies like Diageo, like Pernod Ricard, they do a great job of educating the consumer across multiple communication points on what's great gin, what's great vodka, what does a great gin and tonic look like? I remember being at Diageo and they were running an amazing programme teaching pubs, bars, how to standardize a great gin and tonic. Because you could go to a pub at the end of the road and a bar next door and a pub across the road and get a completely different gin and tonic.
Claire Warner:It would be one ice cube, the copper glass, a highball, lemon, an old bit of life. There was no kind of quality standard. Part of that is teaching the consumer what to expect and a certain level of like, this is what good looks like. And if you're spending quite a lot of money on a gin and tonic, if you're going for a top shelf gin, it should look like this. It should be full of ice.
Claire Warner:You should have fresh citrus in it. It's just about teaching the consumer to have some discernment in that space and have a level of expectation. It's about trying to engage with the consumer to get them interested and excited about this stuff. And I think no time, although there was a lot of other very negative things happening during this time, but COVID was also a really positive time, weirdly, for consumers to understand a little bit more about cocktails because they got excited about making them at home. Now you've got a consumer who's quite comfortable talking about Negronis or martinis.
Claire Warner:The martini now is a sort of mainstream drink. Everybody's kind of got a view on how they want their martini to be made, which is incredible. A few years ago, it was shaken or stirred, right? And we were talking about Bond. And now everyone's like, no, I want six to one.
Claire Warner:I want a grapefruit trio. I want this, I want that. Which is fantastic because it's empowering the consumer, the guest to get to know what they like and what they don't like. And to feed that back to the bartender in real time. No, this isn't good enough as a gin and tonic.
Claire Warner:I don't want one ice cube in a low ball glass. A gin and tonic should look like this. And then I think everybody tends to sort of benefit then because the big companies have invested in helping to train everybody. I always get it wrong, but something about low, high tides raise all the ships or something, but the Jeu's and the Pernod's and the Mowett's and the Brown Forman's, they are doing a really great job of helping elevate our awareness of what a good drink should look and taste and feel like. And then when we're in bars, we are demanding that and bartenders are helping us trade up with different brands that they love and that they've got stories to tell.
Claire Warner:And all of it ultimately should be in service of giving us a great time in that bar and trying to keep us there as long as possible. Not necessarily through drinking alcohol, but having delicious drinks. The rise of the low and low category over the last ten years has been fundamental in keeping people having those in real life experiences. Because ten years ago, if you weren't drinking, you probably weren't going out. If you were doing dry January or sober October, you were staying in for that month.
Claire Warner:Whereas now we're moderating all year long. We've got incredible no and low ABV cocktails to choose from. We understand what a great drink should taste like, should look like. We're excited by innovative cocktails that bartenders are creating for us. We're seeing more and more cocktail culture talked about on TV and in media.
Claire Warner:So we feel more confident and comfortable figuring out what our preferences are. It's exciting to be part of that culture, which is still relatively new. Cocktail culture in The UK is only about thirty years old. It's still a relatively new part of our industry, but it's the most creative part. I think that trickles down into how brands express themselves through the spritz, through all the different gins that we now have, all the different gin and tonics that we were exposed to.
Claire Warner:The fact that we've now got fig sodas and pickle sodas from 3¢. These flavors would have been disruptive ten years ago. They would have been so niche that the consumer wouldn't have been thinking about having a fig soda or a pickle soda. Now everyone's like, Oh my God, I can't believe we can get pickle soda. Give me like a pickle and whiskey, whatever.
Claire Warner:There's a lot that's being driven by the consumer's interest in this cocktail culture and being elevated by what bartenders are doing behind their bars and being supercharged by programs like World Class, which are helping to generate this ecosystem of learning. We just need more people to come out and spend time in bars because there's so many other reasons to not. We also need to provide greater protection for bars and businesses and hospitality businesses to stay in business because they're also under water. It's great that we've got this expressive, exciting, dynamic cocktail culture. But if we don't protect the bricks and mortar, the places where this stuff actually happens, we won't have that culture anymore.
Claire Warner:And then we'll all be sat at home making our own Negronis like we were during COVID and feeling really miserable about it.
Chris Maffeo:I agree. This level of ease when ordering or like, feeling comfortable when ordering. Now because I was listening to what you was talking about the basic training of how to make a gin and tonic. No? And Yep.
Chris Maffeo:A random pub owner would look at you like, are you serious? You know, like, are you telling me that, you know, how many ice cubes and squeezing the lemon? You know, do you do you think, you know, I've been doing this for forty years. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Maffeo:You've probably been doing it wrong.
Claire Warner:No way. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Maffeo:There is that my wife is complaining about me because I have this fixation. If I go to a pub, I order a beer. I need to feel comfortable with the skill set of that venue Yeah. In order for me to order. Yeah.
Chris Maffeo:So I would never order a pizza in a random restaurant that doesn't have a proper oven. Yeah. I will never order a gin and tonic in a Czech pub where
Claire Warner:There's no ice.
Chris Maffeo:I don't see that like, they don't even have a like, the ice machine is like, I don't even know when they used ice for the last time.
Claire Warner:Exactly.
Chris Maffeo:So there is this thing about building a minimum standards.
Claire Warner:Yes. That
Chris Maffeo:should be the base for building scale. The issue is that no trade marketing person, no brand marketing person wants to do that because it's boring. Because if I'm a brand manager, I wanna organize I world don't wanna train on the Tunker A GMT.
Claire Warner:It's so necessary though. Diageo Bar Academy, but also Brown Formans, they've got an educational platform as well, but it's not about the brands. They're not doing brand training. They're doing standardized drink training. What does good look like from Jack Daniel's point of view?
Claire Warner:Or what does good look like from Woodford's point of view? It's not about Woodford. It's about like, how do you make a great old fashioned? How do you make a great whiskey highball? A lot of the big companies are attempting to deliver brand agnostic training because a lot of venues don't want the brand part.
Claire Warner:They want the drink part. They just want their bartenders to have a certain standard of execution. These hospitality venues don't have the time, don't have the resources to deliver effective trainings. And so are reliant on the big groups to come in and help to train their staff. I think that is incumbent on big groups, big brands to deliver brand agnostic training, because ultimately their brands are being built in those venues and those bars off the backs of those bartenders.
Claire Warner:So I think there's a responsibility of those companies to deliver a great level of service training. And that helps everybody benefit. But the main beneficiary is the customer who's coming in and getting a consistently good gin and tonic at the end of the road. Because we are socializing differently. We are poorer than we've ever been across all areas of resources, emotionally poorer, financially poorer, spiritually poor, energy poorer.
Claire Warner:We're poor, right? If you've got less resources, you need to be picky about where you go and how you spend your limited resources, how you spend your time and money, who you're spending that time and money with. The pubs, the bars, the hospitality spaces, they're the ones that will deliver the best across service, ambience, acoustics, experience, accessibility. They're the places that I will go back to spend longer in. Coming back full circle to good measure, that's what we want to reflect.
Claire Warner:If you've got limited resources, I want you to be able to look at a social score of a bar and go, I'd rather spend my money there than I'd spend my money there. They've got some work to do in terms of how accessible that bar is and how comfortable it is and whether or not I can have a conversation in that bar. Whereas I know I'm gonna have a really good time in this bar because look at their social score. They've really thought about my holistic experience. And I want to go and spend my time and money in that space.
Claire Warner:At the moment, we don't have that. We can't see that. It's not easy to tell apart from if you were to go talk to your friends or go to TripAdvisor. We just want to make it easy to signpost and direct customers into bars that consistently give you a good time. That might be a bar, might be a pub, might be a restaurant, might be a festival.
Claire Warner:It might be a space. But ultimately what Good Measure is aiming to do is to make it easier for us to spend our limited resources in places that fulfil us socially. Because that's something we think deserves to be measured because we think that stuff really matters. We've got Pinnacle, we've got Michelin, we've got fifty Best. We understand who's making the best drinks and who are some of the best bartenders in the world and where we can get some of the best food in the world.
Claire Warner:I want to also know where I'm going to go and have the most incredible time with my friends and spend what limited resources I might have with the people I love the most and do that for an extended period of time. And that's what The Good Measure is all about.
Chris Maffeo:Wow. I love that. I don't want to build anything on this. I would stay another hour with you because it's a very fascinating topic. We'll take it offline, but fantastic.
Chris Maffeo:So I'm aware of your time, Claire. So let's wrap it up here. Thank you so much for this episode and as well for what you're doing also for raising awareness about the small, middle, corner venues that are very dear to you and I.
Claire Warner:Yes. Thanks. Thank you.
Chris Maffeo:Bye bye.
Claire Warner:Bye.
Creators and Guests
