It took just two words from my friend Luca for me to realize the drinks industry has a thing about big brands.
By contrast, the world of food and recipes tends to be more brand-agnostic. Most bakers would agree that toll house cookies can be made with any chocolate chips, not just those from Nestlé. Ranch dressing is obviously delicious, even when it’s produced by someone other than Hidden Valley Food Products Company. The bacon in a BLT can come from Oscar Mayer, Smithfield, Jimmy Dean, or your local smokehouse. But when I tried to say something similar about cocktails, Luca, who works for Slow Food in Italy, was decidedly not open to my line of thinking.
Cocktail recipes shouldn’t be brand-specific, I posited, and you can arguably make an excellent Negroni with something other than Campari. There are several brands of red bitter aperitivo. We shouldn’t feel forced to stick with just one.
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After I finished speaking, Luca stared at me intensely. A moment later, he leaned forward and said two words, quite slowly. The first word started with an F.
Obviously, it’s not only Italians who feel this way, and it’s not exclusive to Campari. Across the industry, a handful of drink categories are dominated by monolithic brands that virtually define their type of beverage. For bar owners and drink makers, these category-defining bottles can present real challenges. For customers, these monoliths can provide comfort and familiarity — or a sense of the same old thing. For smaller, less famous producers operating in the same space, they often make survival difficult, while also offering unexpected opportunities to stand out.
So how does a brand like Campari come to dominate its category? And how can drinks professionals work with — and around — these monoliths?
Multiple Factors for Dominance
The author of “Inside the Bottle: People, Brands, and Stories,” Palm Springs-based Arthur Shapiro ran U.S. marketing for Seagram for years before launching his own consulting company and blog. When I ask about category-defining alcohol brands, he cites several, from Fernet-Branca to Baileys Irish Cream. Such brands often have three elements, starting with being the first to market.
“The first to break through a category will often establish it,” Shapiro says. That alone isn’t necessarily enough to dominate a category, however. “There are two other major factors, I believe: [being] both ‘unique’ and ‘relevant,’” he says.
Uniqueness can depend on circumstances. If there are 40 producers of a given type of spirit in its homeland, but only one that is imported and marketed successfully in a particular region, that can be unique enough, at least in that specific place. That appears to be how Fernet-Branca initially gained its North American foothold in San Francisco, where The Atlantic reported it was responsible for 25 percent of the brand’s U.S. sales in 2008, despite competition from other producers like Luxardo, which claims to have made its own version of fernet since 1889. (In that article, author Wayne Curtis predicted that Fernet-Branca’s popularity might soon “spread beyond the Bay Area.”)
“One of the things that we are always telling brands is don’t invent a drink in your ad agency or in your office. Start from the classics.”
Relevance is also subjective — and potentially slow to arrive. Campari has a history dating back to 1860, but its dominance in the red bitter aperitivo category only really came about with the rise in popularity of the Negroni, according to Chris Maffeo, a Prague-based consultant and podcaster who teaches courses on drinks marketing.
“Campari has always been pushing that there’s no Negroni without Campari,” he says. “That’s been their ad for decades. They pushed the Negroni even when nobody was drinking the Negroni.”
With the Negroni only really getting its first taste of mainstream popularity around the early 1950s, as Dave Wondrich has written, that adds up to most of a century before the spirit found its true relevance — and a route to dominance in its category, which was further cemented by the cocktail’s second star turn in the cocktail renaissance of the last two decades.
But that doesn’t mean that the brand will stay in the catbird seat forever. Captain Morgan once almost completely dominated the spiced rum category, Shapiro notes, but upstarts like Sailor Jerry and Kraken have taken shares of those sales in recent years, with Captain Morgan sales dropping by 6.5 percent — or about 800,000 cases — in 2023, according to one report.
Not every type of spirit has a dominant, category-defining leader, as a quick glance at the gin and bourbon shelves will tell you. Nor is the phenomenon exclusive to spirits. Amelie Tassin, founder of the U.K.’s Tipple Marketing, points out that some beer styles are in the same situation.
“I would say that Guinness is its category,” she says. “It’s quite funny, because when we’re doing studies and we ask people what beer styles they like, some of them will not tell you, ‘I like nitro stouts,’ or ‘I like porter,’ or ‘I like dark beer.’ They’ll tell you ‘I like Guinness,’ as a style itself.”
How Smaller Brands Can Compete
Category dominance can lead to weird situations, for both the leading brand and for its competitors. In the case of Guinness, the beer’s recent surge in popularity created a newsworthy shortage in the U.K. that could have benefitted other brewers — if it weren’t for the fact that many of the drink’s newest fans weren’t very interested in beer. When Diageo couldn’t keep up with the demand for Guinness, that lack of awareness meant that many drinkers simply moved on to another type of drink, Tassin says, rather than trying a stout from a different producer.
While Heineken probably profited the most from the Guinness shortage by quickly promoting the availability of Murphy’s, its own imported Irish stout, the same approach might not work for small producers, which usually do better by highlighting the distinctly local nature of their products, rather than an “imported from the same country” angle used by Murphy’s. Tassin cites the example of the London craft brewer Anspach & Hobday, which gave its connoisseur-approved, Guinness-rivaling nitro porter a clearly not-Irish name: London Black.
For Maffeo, small brands have several paths to enter the categories that are dominated by massive brands.
“I usually say, ‘Start from your flavor profile,’” he says. “The liquid might be hiding some ideas that you might have missed.”
Any differences or standout features can be used to argue for use cases. If a spirit has lower ABV than the category leader, it can help bartenders create lower-alcohol versions of drinks that are already on the menu. If it features specific botanicals, it can be presented as an ideal pairing for mixers with the same characteristics. Generally, Maffeo says, the best sales pitch is as a variation on standard recipes.
“You need to be able to put a foot in the door for a consumption occasion that that consumer wants to have at that moment,” he says. “One of the things that we are always telling brands is don’t invent a drink in your ad agency or in your office. Start from the classics.”
Why Brands Need Stories
That might sound like the exact situation I found myself in with Luca. However, it’s possible that things have changed in recent years, or maybe the future just hasn’t reached Italy yet. Erick Castro, VinePair’s 2024 Next Wave Drinks Professional of the Year, says he remembers people getting “livid” about Negronis made with Campari substitutes, or Cadillac Margaritas made with Grand Gala instead of Grand Marnier, though we’re arguably in a different cocktail era today.
“Sometimes it becomes almost a Kleenex or Xerox type of thing. Eventually, does the name of the brand get lost in the shuffle?”
“I think most bartenders are beyond that now — they’ll make their Negroni with whatever they have or whatever they want to use,” Castro says. “We’re not as dogmatic about that sort of thing as we used to be.”
Playing with recipes and developing variations is obviously a big part of the fun. But that kind of creativity gets more questionable, he notes, when customers order a brand-name cocktail like an Aperol Spritz and instead get a drink that is made with a competitor like Aperitivo Capelletti. For drinkers, is a vodka and Red Bull really the same as a vodka and Monster?
“Sometimes it becomes almost a Kleenex or Xerox type of thing,” Castro says. “Eventually, does the name of the brand get lost in the shuffle?”
Maffeo notes that a preference for smaller brands, instead of category-defining spirits, can be a way for both bars and customers to show off a bit of “social currency,” presenting themselves as insiders who are knowledgeable about drinks beyond the obvious. But for bars, that really only works if the math adds up.
Since small producers usually don’t have the same economies of scale as the category leaders, they often only make financial sense in super-premium cocktails, which limits their use — a situation that, in turn, keeps dominant brands at the top of their categories. In Shapiro’s eyes, every brand should have a compelling reason for buying it, as well as a compelling backstory. But there are strong headwinds for smaller brands versus the makers that have long dominated their categories, especially when consumer behavior seems to be in flux.
“In an environment where people are drinking less and drinking better, they’re not going to go after a wannabe or a look-alike,” he says. “It’s just not going to happen.”
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