It’s no secret that every major company today has specialized marketing departments, allocating substantial sums for advertising from their overall budgets. Marketing for alcohol brands is no exception; in this industry, the power and reach of strategic marketing efforts play a significant role, often deciding the survival or demise of brands.
The primary idea behind marketing alcoholic products is to bring the brand to the attention of potential customers. Whether the brand operates in the spirits, beer, or wine market, a similar tactic often prevails. However, the approach to marketing campaigns usually differs based on the type of product, platform, and the target age group. Without the right methods to engage the market and potential customers, a brand will always lag behind. In today’s trends, someone else will quickly emerge, truly standing out and surpassing others.
Think Uniquely – Think Differently!
When a new brand enters the competition with industry giants, how can it best distinguish itself? The worst thing it can do is use a similar appearance to create its image. The key is to be different, especially if the other brand is well-known.
Perhaps the most crucial element in creating a brand or product is choosing the name. It must be direct, easily memorable, and, for instance, easy to pronounce. It should also somehow reflect the brand’s message, story, or vision.
The bottle’s appearance and impression have become almost as important as the content today. Brand manufacturers and designers must consider how to package their brand with respect to their target customers. For a healthier, more environmentally friendly consumption, companies must also introduce smaller packaging with consideration for the environment.
Decisions about label design and product packaging are often as important as the ingredients used to create the product. The product’s origin story can be an excellent design and marketing tool, which a quality marketer will immediately leverage to make the new product visible and distinguish it from similar ones in the same category.
Clean, minimalist design, elegant sans-serif fonts, and clear, vibrant colors currently dominate the labels of new products. Alcohol packaging plays a crucial role in alcohol marketing strategies, and we increasingly see paper wine bottles, whisky pouches, and other alternatives to classic packaging.
Modern Digital Marketing
Global brands understand the importance of a personal connection with their customers. That’s why most of them have created local or regional social media accounts to provide content closely related to individual markets. Localizing content and posts for each market allows for a more accurate cultural representation, making it more relevant to the audience on social media. Adapting content for different regions can focus on events and opportunities, local drinking culture, typical activities, or everyday life characteristics.
Beverage brands offering various flavors or unique ingredients have the opportunity to integrate them as visual stimuli for their followers. Using recognizable tastes and ingredients helps replace the experience in situations where the consumer cannot taste the product and automatically leaves a desire to do so.
At least two-thirds of alcohol brands also promote their products on social networks in connection with food. Pairing a drink with food is another way to recommend to the audience how to enjoy your product. Incorporating food helps add important social context and inspires the audience to imagine opportunities for consumption centered around the promoted product.
Another crucial factor is using cocktails and presenting ways to serve a particular product. Brands can create various drinks inspired by seasonal ingredients, events, or opportunities. It helps connect with local customers in culturally relevant ways and can leverage current trends. Just the simple use of non-traditional garnish or an interesting drink color is not only visually exciting but can also inspire consumers to purchase and taste your product. And maybe even share it on Instagram.
All of this and much more is needed for brands to have a chance to succeed in the saturated alcohol market. It’s no longer just about impressing with taste; you also need to focus on modern design and a catchy name.
In recent years, we’ve witnessed several brands that, thanks to excellent marketing, managed to establish themselves, grow rapidly, and even reach top sales positions in their categories. From the world of gins, products like Hendrick’s Gin or Monkey 47 are certainly well-known. These brands don’t have a centuries-old history, but apart from the quality of the liquid, well-thought-out marketing strategies, excellent work in local markets, and exemplary work on social media and in the media have significantly helped them. They managed to create a unique image that captured consumers. Monkey 47 even started as an independent project by a German entrepreneur, who captured the gin wave at the right moment and, after several years, managed, especially thanks to the mentioned approach, to sell his product to a global alcohol distribution giant for several million euros.
A less-known tequila, Casamigos, also has an interesting story. Once invested in by actor George Clooney, he later sold it to Diageo for an amount that reportedly reached somewhere around a billion dollars. Founded only in 2013, and in four years, mainly due to excellent marketing and exemplary brand work, it became one of the fastest-growing alcohol brands globally, making significant profits for him and his partners. Although the bottle presentation is relatively simple, and the content is not the best on the market, thanks to a well-established strategy, a focus on the product’s advantages, and last but not least, the popularity of the actor himself, this brand quickly rose to the top.
In today’s oversaturated era of brands, no brand aspiring to significant success or simply wanting to maintain it can do without thoughtful marketing. It starts with the product name and ends with the story on Instagram.
