Advocacy Dies The Moment You Count Cases | with Filiberto Amati | Bottom-Up Cut #010
One of the biggest challenges that I see around the world of drinks is the ability for the brand owner and the inner team to translate that love and care and passion to the other links of and connection of the DRINKS ecosystem. I see that a lot of time they struggle explaining that first from the founder to the people they hired. And then from the people they hired, how do they manage to translate that to the people that at many degrees of separation from them are not going to be thinking about, okay. Filiberto launched this brand because his grandmother had a fantastic recipe. Really, everybody that has actually met and drank the product in your distillery.
Chris Maffeo:How do you see this happening? What's your experience?
Filiberto Amati:Big hurdle is sometimes the route to market, it's made of people who are gonna care so little about you. Because think about Italy. Italy, you have independent agents who fulfill orders for the wholesalers. And these guys are usually independent freelancers. They are a muscle for you, but these guys have a portfolio.
Filiberto Amati:So they can dedicate to you so little time, especially when you are so small at the beginning. So the challenge, depending on the market, focus on the route to market and make sure that each one of the important pieces, gears in the chain are well oiled because otherwise, that's never gonna move. No speed. Little maximum speed, it's never gonna move. So that's number one.
Filiberto Amati:Then for me, which is why I've always been a fond of brand ambassadors, but, you know, that's also a term that now in the industry means a lot of things to a lot of different people. But people that can go and explain the narrative because you will need agents to pick up the orders and to fulfill the orders because that bar, it's gonna buy only from distributor x y zed for logistics, financial reasons. But you will need someone who can tell your storytelling and can share that passion. The agent is not gonna be that guy. And the founder, the cofounder or team are usually, at the beginning, their own brand ambassadors.
Filiberto Amati:First, because they're gonna have the resources to to be able to hire a full time ambassador. They whoever they're gonna be hiring at the beginning is not gonna have the stamina or the passion and the knowledge about the brand and the product that these guys have. So I would say for me, that's the key. It's always start with the value chain, but then focus on build your listings, your narrative, consumption occasions. Okay.
Filiberto Amati:And then you're gonna be sure in this way, which is nontrivial, that you hit the right target, you hit the right occasion, and you have the perfect self. Because with that focus, which the agent again is not gonna have, you're sure you're doing moving in the right direction. And the one glass is gonna become a bottle and the one bottle is gonna become several bottles and the cases and so on and so forth.
Chris Maffeo:Yeah. Listening to you talking about Brand Ambassador earlier was like Advocacy and but what is your take on you mentioned that you are a big fan of Brand Ambassador, people that are doing the advocacy program that are in charge of advocacy and, let's say, not so number driven. They're not measured on sales, but they're measured more on other on other thing. What is your take on I keep evolving in my thinking on should they sell, or should they just focus on what they do, which is driving advocacy and not be measured on hard KPI. What's your take on this one?
Filiberto Amati:And they should sell without having objectives based on KPIs, quantitative moving cases KPIs. Their objective should be if you do an advocacy training or program done well, it sells. If you try to measure how much he's selling and you're trying to give a bonus on the basis on the number of bottles he's selling, he's gonna forget about the advocacy program, and he's gonna start pushing cases by giving all sorts of incentives around. And that's an issue. So advocacy, it's fundamental.
Filiberto Amati:Training is All smaller and medium sized brands, unless you have gadzino in euros to do campaign. And I'm not saying influencer campaign anyway because whatever that means these days. That's a whole new dollar box. I'm not gonna open it.
Chris Maffeo:Let's not open that one, please. Medium
Filiberto Amati:sized brand. And company is very well company needs a lot of advocacy. Aperol needs a lot of advocacy. How do you do the perfect serve? How do you maximize the opportunity of every spritz, you know, on your list?
Filiberto Amati:That requires training. You can ask them to be measured. Or if you have people on the on premise, they do advocacy on how many bottles of Campari have sold. They're gonna take whatever budget they have or find money to do happy hours. So they basically sell the bottles and a quarter of the price.
Filiberto Amati:Whiskey is, you know But
Chris Maffeo:be careful what you wish for.
Filiberto Amati:Notion of genes. Until five, six years ago, we basically had a world with two rating wait. No. No. The two was real because they were 45 wines.
Filiberto Amati:And then, again, we had the renaissance of the category. But how if I am a good bartender, how am I gonna choose between 350 genes in a in but what's the bartender to shell means stories to tell. And sometimes the stories come from the advocacy training. You need to feed the beast in that sense.
Chris Maffeo:I've got two questions. I hope I don't forget them. But one thing is about how to build advocacy. I have this feeling that imagine I spent a lot of time with bartenders now here in Prague, and I'm going to events. I'm sitting at the bar talking tonight, and I can see how they interact with each other.
Filiberto Amati:No?
Chris Maffeo:I can see how they interact with brands because the dream or that what big companies think is that they can own the share of mind of a bartender. But ultimately, bartenders are free individuals. No? And they can space between brands and categories, and they can be creative, and they can test and improve and do different things. But the feeling that I have is that if I haven't been building the demand before I get into the bar, it's a useless effort.
Chris Maffeo:If I go into a bar and I propose my brand that it's supposed to be the new hit, and this person is one of the most connected bartender. He's on Instagram. He's he's at Barconvent. He's at Athens Bar Show, at Roma Bar Show, at Barconvent Berlin, Brooklyn, and he has never seen my brand, then he's gonna say, like, what are you doing here? If I haven't heard it, it means there's no radar of anybody of my circle.
Chris Maffeo:So probably you have an issue here. So how do you create that demand before actually approach the bar?
Filiberto Amati:The real demand you create at the moment. Okay. But we were Galvanina, which is a client of mine, some mixology user, organic drinks. We attended the Roma Barre show launching our mixology line. And we got a very well known bartender in the local scene, okay, who was basically doing a little project with us for his own distillery partner.
Filiberto Amati:And the way we got him was, okay, we do mixology. Do you have a project? And we knew he was the right person because we knew he had a project where he's on developing his own distillery products. Let's work together on that. Okay.
Filiberto Amati:He's developed with a a large bunch of guys his own bitters selections, and he's trying to discover the bitter and say, okay. These are our products that work with a bitter. Can we develop some cocktails together? And their mechanic, okay, which was a a referral in which we converted in a social media campaign and in training and testing and then a little master class as well. That's what generates the month.
Filiberto Amati:So, of course, you always say, you know, when you go and enter a bar before you hit them with would you like? You need to know who you're talking to. Okay. You need to do your And as usual
Chris Maffeo:You have to do your homework.
Filiberto Amati:You're gonna do your homework. If you go and look for Calabrese and suddenly show up in his bar and he's there and you start vomiting your commercial spill, it's gonna smile. Thank you. Thank you. Yes.
Filiberto Amati:Yes. Yes. And then couldn't wait longer to get you the hell out of his door. But at the very beginning, you need to find matches. Oh, there are a lot of bartenders who work on certain project.
Filiberto Amati:They have their own things on the side. And how can you create value for them on their own projects? Because maybe that's the key. Okay. I help you to do this.
Filiberto Amati:Let's work together. And you had the first guy, and you had the second guy, and you had the third guy, you build demand, and then you can start developing and focusing on your real advocacy. It's marketing or one to one at the beginning before it becomes marketing.
Chris Maffeo:And that is the demand. So there is that step that you do that looks like it's done on the moment, but in reality, for that person, it's done on the moment. But then for the rest of the city, is created before because you have approached this person before approaching the others. And then through the network of this person or by associating with this person and so on, you can then expand into the network and you get the kinda like seal of approval. No?
Chris Maffeo:And I feel that a lot of brands don't do that and they already start they go into the poll meeting stage right away. And then it becomes like they basically get a lot of doors on their face. And then I always tell people, I say, watch out because you may have done your homework and have a fantastic list of target occasion. You have the 100 outlets in which you wanna get in, but the more you go out, the more you are burning them. So if you haven't done the job before, at some point, you will reach number 99, number 100, and you've got 97.
Filiberto Amati:It's not the game.
Chris Maffeo:So then move to next seat and and run because they are looking for you in the previous one.
Filiberto Amati:You know, we did this activity with Bergeronale in Italy, which is this cocktail
Chris Maffeo:Trade magazine.
Filiberto Amati:With engine city. And we decided, you know, let's co create cocktails with some people attending this event. And first of all, it gave us a lot of flexibility in what we could do as galvanina. Basically, we got customers submitted because once they have co created the event with you, they're gonna use your own technique to, you know, fill in their own outlets. And then some of their friends reached out to, can we do the same in this contest?
Filiberto Amati:Or can we do an event? All of this was made possible not by the marketing or commercial department, but by the various brand ambassadors, Galvanina is a major city, feel the narrative, believe in the story, and tell the story. If they wanna make Galvanina grow bigger, but they're looking for opportunities, not quantitatively how many cases of Galvanina have you moved this month. Because that's what the agents and the wholesalers are doing.
Chris Maffeo:One thing that I feel people forget is that all this that we are now seeing in a nice five minutes moment, it takes time and takes ages because you need to go out and have a drink and sit at the bar and talk to the guy and invite for a drink. And you need to have that kind of conversation, and you need to connect on social media and then tag them and message them and go back. And this is like a normal social interaction flow.
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