At Bar Convent Berlin, our seminar on innovation strategy delivered insights for spirits brands looking to captivate today’s consumers. From pioneering new categories to reimagining established ones, our expert speakers shared their proven frameworks for meaningful innovation that resonates in the marketplace while building authentic brand equity.
At Bar Convent Berlin, Maurice Doyle, Chief Executive Officer, Compass Box Whisky, revealed how to make alcohol innovation interesting to consumers. Doyle dives into how to incorporate culture and motivation into the alcohol innovation process.
Morten Rinder Stengaard, Co-Founder and CEO of Bemakers, discussed his tips for building a new alcohol category. Stengaard uses his experience building a fruit wine brand and why finding the right niche category is so important.
Audrey Bruisson, Marketing and Brand Advocacy Director at SPIRIBAM, touched on the power of innovating with humility in beverage alcohol. Bruisson used Clément, a renowned rum brand, as a case study, diving into the brand’s venture into creating a unique banana liqueur by listening to the market and collaborating with experts.
How to Make Alcohol Innovation Interesting to Consumers Transcript
Maurice Doyle (00:04)
It’s a pleasure to be here. I am indeed Maurice Doyle, and I’m the CEO of Compass Box Whisky. We exist in a really interesting—or what should be a very interesting—category for our consumers. But there is a real cost of being dull. Consumers aren’t as obsessed about our brands as we are, so we need to make our stories as interesting as possible.
If you want to Google Adam Morgan, he’s done a lot of research on the financial cost of brands being dull. Brands have to be interesting, and when we’re telling stories, they have to be interesting stories. That’s true of brands in general, and it’s absolutely true for innovation. The problem is that so much innovation is very well-intentioned, but actually quite dull. We know the statistics: I think at least 80% of all launches fail, and they fail because they’re dull. With innovation, you’re trying to get a consumer to change their behavior, and if what you’re offering is something fundamentally quite dull to them, they’re not going to change that behavior. The world doesn’t need another kumquat-flavored blank-blank-blank; it needs something more interesting. I’m not having a pop at anybody because I’ve probably launched more dull innovation than anybody here in the room, but there is a real opportunity to do something interesting and different for our consumers.
Maurice Doyle (01:32)
So if dull innovation is the enemy and what we’re trying to avoid, then what are we looking for? Well, we’re looking for interesting innovation. That’s very easy to stand up at a podium and say, “Yes, we’re looking for interesting innovation,” but what do we mean by that? What do we mean by innovation? What do we mean by interesting, and interesting for whom?
I take a broad view of innovation: that it’s new ways of doing things that are meaningful to your fans or your buyers. It’s broader than just new launches, although new launches are a very tangible part of doing that. It should be things that are meaningful. We have all done lots of incremental line extensions which don’t really change the world and don’t change our consumers’ world, and we should be pushing for more. It needs to be things that are interesting and meaningful—not to the CEO, the CFO, the chairman’s husband, or the chairman’s wife, or even to your distributors and retailers, although they’re very, very important stakeholders. It needs to be something that is really interesting and meaningful to your fans and to your buyers.
Again, that sounds very simple: “Just ask them what they want, and it should be fine.” Unfortunately, we know that isn’t the case because, as consumers, we often can’t articulate what we’re looking for. There’s the famous Henry Ford quote before he developed the Model T car: if he had asked people what they were looking for, they would have said, “Faster horses, please.” People can’t articulate what they don’t yet know.
Maurice Doyle (03:07)
There are ways that we can make innovation more interesting. The first one is to have the right motivation. From experience, if your starting point is “We want to sell more boxes or make more revenue,” it almost certainly won’t be successful. Now, especially in the current climate, we all would like revenue and we all like selling more volume, but that should be the byproduct of doing the right thing. The motivation can’t be driven solely by revenue; it has to be about doing something interesting to our target market.
Maurice Doyle (03:43)
Having a culture that really encourages innovation is absolutely key. Now, I’ve worked for some of the best, large spirits companies in the world, and I wouldn’t be here without that experience. I have nothing bad to say about any of them, but it’s very, very difficult in a big company to do really meaningful, radical innovation because the culture is not designed for that. The culture is designed to support the big brands, and they do that very well. They relentlessly drive out the big brands in a more efficient way. The processes are designed for the big brands, and the incentive schemes are designed for the big brands. So that isn’t really encouraging a culture of risk-taking; in a big corporate environment, it’s easier not to fail and easier not to risk than to actually risk something. That makes true innovation very difficult.
In a small, agile, scrappy company, it should be easier to have that culture, but that doesn’t mean it’s a given. There are many small companies that don’t have that culture, and it comes from the top. What you have to be able to do is encourage failure—or not even calling it failure, but calling it learning. What happens when people gain learning? How do you react to that? Do you reward that? Do you encourage that? What are you doing to encourage curiosity? What are you doing to encourage people to dream? Having the right culture is absolutely critical to being able to drive meaningful, relevant innovation.
Maurice Doyle (05:19)
A critical thing also is to involve people. You may have somebody who has the title of “Innovation Manager” or “New Product Development Manager.” That’s okay—we have one of them, too, at Compass Box—but it can’t be their responsibility alone. It has to be the entire company, led from the top, to make it successful.
A critical rule is that less is more. You basically can’t churn out meaningful innovation every month or every quarter. We all know brands out there that get on this doom loop of frequency with innovation launches: maybe they do one every year, then one every six months, then one every quarter. This relentless treadmill is terrible. You can only do incremental innovation that way; you can’t do pioneering innovation.
Maurice Doyle (06:11)
To conclude, we’ve got to avoid as much as we can doing dull innovation. The world does not need more dull, incremental drinks innovation. It really needs interesting, meaningful innovation that’s relevant to our target market. So that’s our responsibility as those of us working in the drinks industry, and long live interesting! Thank you very much.
5 Tips for Building a New Alcohol Category Transcript
Morten Rinder Stengaard (00:03)
It’s great to talk about brand building. There’s one thing I want to dive a little bit into here, and that’s the idea of choosing which category to play in before you basically start building your brand. You can have an academic discussion about whether you build the brand or the category first—I don’t really care. I think the important thing is to know what you do and find the right playing field.
So briefly on me, my name is Morten Stengaard. Today, I would like to talk about category building and basically practical learnings from establishing a premium sparkling fruit wine brand and category. As I said briefly, we built Andersen Winery, which is a sparkling fruit wine brand out of Denmark. You could say it’s almost champagne-style, but made from anything other than grapes—the same méthode traditionnelle when we produce, and so on—basically a product that can stand next to a champagne in terms of present style and so on. But I’ll come more into that.
That’s one of the experiences I come with today, and then on top of that, we work with a little bit more than 200 brands in Beverage Makers. A lot of these brands are doing exactly that: they are building new categories, expanding existing categories, and all of them are basically working on their positioning. So that’s what I bring to the table and what I want to talk a little bit about.
Morten Rinder Stengaard (01:32)
I tried to think back to when we started building our sparkling fruit wine company and figure out what were the five most important lessons that we took away. Many of these lessons also apply to the discussions we have today with our brand partners in Beverage Makers when they start distributing in a new country or building their brands in Europe. We always start with the categories: what is it actually that they’re getting themselves into?
There are five different points I want to dive into:
- Finding the right playing field.
- Price point and how you position.
- Drinking occasions—how to position your brand (which I think is super important and often underestimated).
- Demand building—actually going out, finding customers, and figuring out how you make it work.
- Persistence—staying working, staying learning, and then applying the learning.
These ideas can be applied to any brand in any category, whether you’re building a new brand in an existing category or a new brand in a new category. In my opinion and from what I’ve learned, I think it’s super important to have this in mind when you start building a brand.
Morten Rinder Stengaard (03:43)
The first thing is basically to find a niche category that you can establish, grow, and potentially own. If you cannot find a way to differentiate compared to what’s out there already, then I think it’s worth stopping and figuring out, “Is this actually something I should do?” Because you all know it: there are plenty of brands out there, plenty of spirits in basically all the big established categories, so the world doesn’t necessarily need another gin, whiskey, or wine. It’s our job as brand builders to basically figure out why the world needs exactly what we are planning to offer.
What we figured out with the Andersen brand when we started building it was that there were all these perfectly positioned sparkling grape wines out there—Champagnes, Cavas from Spain, Sekt from Germany, Proseccos, and so on. Plenty of sparkling grape wines of all sorts of qualities and price levels, but no one had really built something based on fruits and berries other than grapes. In Denmark, there’s a rich tradition from many years ago in building low-priced fruit wines—basically because we didn’t have grapes, so they tried to do all sorts of other stuff, much of it poor quality. But we figured out that we could use all these great raw materials out of Denmark (rhubarb, apple, blackcurrant, raspberry, and so on) and apply all the techniques that you use when working with grape wines to build something that was new and fresh. That became the idea behind Andersen Winery: namely, to use these proven techniques from the wine world and combine them with quality fruits and berries to develop a premium sparkling fruit wine brand and category.
Morten Rinder Stengaard (06:10)
One of the most important decisions is to figure out how to position in terms of perceived quality. Quality is really perceived because while we all talk about the liquid needing to be great—and it does, I totally agree—there’s also a lot of perception around a brand and a product. Does it look good? Does it taste good? Quality is very much a perceived thing, and the same goes for price in principle.
There can be no doubt that there needs to be a proper ratio between perceived quality and price, and you need to figure out from the start where you want to play. A lot of craft brands start at a relatively high price point. That can be absolutely fine and work well—and we did the same with our sparkling fruit wine company—but you then need to build the perceived quality of it, because when you come in with a new brand, people wonder if it’s worth the price. There needs to be a match between quality and price.
I often recommend to the brands we work with that if you want to position high, that’s great, but you need to understand that it takes longer and costs more to build that perceived quality in the mind of your customers. We positioned our product at around €30 in retail, which is roughly index 80 of a standard champagne in most of our markets. We deliberately chose to position the Andersen product in the same price range as a premium sparkling grape wine and not as a cider (which is usually much lower priced). Positioning next to a premium sparkling wine helps build that perception in the customer’s mind.
Morten Rinder Stengaard (09:08)
Thirdly, identifying drinking occasions where you can fit in. Looking for drinking occasions where the product fits, you can either build new demand or substitute into existing demand. Initially, we started building dry sparkling apple wines because we thought we could go into restaurants as an alternative when customers wanted to try something new instead of champagne. That worked relatively well, but we also quickly saw that we could tap into the dessert segment.
The trick with fruits and berries is that the acidity is much higher, especially in the Nordics. With high acidity, you can add a lot more sugar and still have a very balanced wine, which means it suddenly works very well with desserts where most sparkling grape wines don’t. Once we figured out there was a need to present something sparkling and refreshing for desserts, we could start tapping into the dessert wine category. It’s all about finding the right drinking occasions and making your customer shine.
Morten Rinder Stengaard (10:47)
Fourth, building demand. When you’re launching a new brand in a non-existing category, building demand is essential. No one is better than the brand owners to tell the story, build demand, and get the product to market. We spent a lot of time visiting restaurants, bars, and specialty stores in the early days to get the product in, get feedback, and figure out what it actually takes to succeed across specialty retail, restaurants, and e-commerce.
As Chris Maillard says, brands are built bottom-up by going out and talking to customers at the end of the value chain, not so much by pushing the brand into a distributor to push down to the wholesaler. You cannot build a category by just pushing something down the throat of a distributor; it simply won’t work. When we launch in a new market with the Andersen Winery brand, we go to a new city, book meetings with 8 to 10 restaurants over three days, ship our products, and do tastings. Usually, we can close about 50% of them because by now we know what restaurants are looking for. No one knows how to open a market better than the brand owners, so don’t be lazy—go out and do the work, because that’s exactly what it takes.
Finally, persistence is key. Get started, adjust your approach as you learn new things, and keep on going. It’s so easy to be frustrated and demotivated because customers don’t get it at first, but continuing to build and learn is really what it takes to get a brand off the ground. With the Andersen brand, we are innovating within other categories as well now—including the RTD space with sparkling gin and tonics where we ferment a tonic from scratch, create small champagne-like bubbles, and add gin in the dosage. That was all for me. Thank you so much!
The Power of Innovating with Humility in Beverage Alcohol Transcript
Audrey Bruisson (00:03)
My name is Audrey, so I’m part of the spirit team. But today, I wanted to talk about something a bit dear to my mind, to my heart, which is to be humble in innovation. I believe when you are innovating, you need to know that you will keep learning more and more, especially when we are trying to do a side project and innovate in a field that we are not experts about.
Rhum Clément is one of the rum brands that we represent. The idea is that in the Rhum Clément range, we also have some liqueurs. We already had an orange liqueur and a coconut liqueur that we launched a long time ago. The orange liqueur is like a tradition in Martinique—every single family has an orange liqueur recipe, and we wanted to replicate it in our brand. The coconut liqueur as well is something that we created back in the ’90s for the brand, using natural aromas and blending it with rum. It’s something that has been successful for a while.
Audrey Bruisson (01:25)
Then we were like, “Okay, we have liqueurs that are quite successful, and we want to go a step further with that category.” We ended up launching a project from scratch that is not part of our culture of making rum. The idea for me was to tell you guys a case study of a brand trying to follow all these steps. The three points that you want to remember in product innovation are really: to listen, to collaborate (because you are not an expert at everything), and then to keep learning on the way.
First, when I’m talking about listening, it’s mostly listening to the market and listening to the environment where you are located. The liqueur category that we had—the orange liqueur and the coconut liqueur—even if we were a rum brand, they were already our bestsellers in the USA. So when we were like, “Okay, we will repackage and try to find a new way of proposing our liqueur to the market,” we decided to focus on the USA first.
When talking to the US market and our people on the field, they said, “Okay, we are quite good at the liqueurs, but because we are a rum brand, it’s kind of blurry for everybody. We are experts in aging rum. Rhum Clément’s identity is kind of conventional, even in terms of packaging and so on, and when we replicate this idea in our liqueur category, it doesn’t fit. Of course we have a good liquid, but when we want to showcase it to the world and go a step further to the end consumer, it doesn’t ring a bell. People cannot catch the idea of the expertise that is inside.” We were reaching a level where we would not be able to go further if we didn’t change everything.
Audrey Bruisson (03:59)
The second point is the insight from our partners and key consumers, who are the bartenders. Bartenders have been using our liqueurs for quite a while, which is why it was so successful in the US. Because they were good clients for us, we are used to bringing them back to Martinique to learn about our process and our island.
In discussions with bartenders coming from the US to Martinique, as they were discovering our rum world, they were like, “Okay, we are driving a lot throughout the island. We see sugarcane fields everywhere, but we also see banana fields everywhere. How come you just have an orange liqueur and a coconut liqueur? It would be great to fuse both agricultural parts of Martinique island into one liqueur that will fit the market, because we love banana. We want a banana liqueur, and if you make this, of course we will buy bottles from you.” So we were like, “Okay, that’s a good idea, so let’s go further and answer that need coming from the market.”
Finally, in terms of end consumer habits, we needed to listen to our consumers as well, because they were consuming our liqueurs at brunch, in a stylish way, and so on, and we were not answering that need in terms of packaging. All of this together made us realize we could create a new SKU with it—the banana liqueur—and make it in a sexier way with beautiful packaging. So let me try to create banana liqueur and repackage our orange and coconut liqueurs.
Audrey Bruisson (06:11)
For the banana liqueur, it was not just a matter of packaging; it was creating a liquid. We are experts in rum, but we are not experts in liqueurs. Banana liqueurs that we know on the market always have that caramelized, flambéed flavor of the banana. But for us in Martinique, we have bananas everywhere, and we would love to use those bananas to create our liqueur. However, we were not able to find the correct way to do so.
Instead of staying in our loop and trying to innovate on our side, we partnered with a local brand. It’s a startup called Kadalys, and their tagline is “sustainable banana science.” They are experts in the cosmetics world—totally not what we are doing—but we knew that they were able to extract the benefits of the Martinican banana into their cosmetics. We were like, “Okay, we are not in the same industry, but we will partner with someone from the same island and try to find some connections and learnings.”
Our R&D team partnered with the scientists of Kadalys to find a way to extract the banana flavors that we were looking for. We didn’t want to have a caramelized banana; we wanted to have the fresh banana fruit flavors that nobody has in their market. On the liquid side, it was a check for us, because now we were surrounded by experts.
For the packaging side, we already had a bottle shape that was the same for the entire range of our rum brand and our liqueur range, but we didn’t want to confuse consumers anymore. We found help from our bottle supplier, Saverglass, who helped us pinpoint a bottle in their range that we could customize to make it fancier for our end consumers, because we listened to the market and knew that they were expecting something like this from us.
Audrey Bruisson (08:38)
After securing all the partners and collaborating with everybody, we learned and learned and learned so much. Every single day we needed to relearn, and we learned again what we learned before because we had issues. Building something from scratch is not easy, and this project to develop a banana liqueur took more than two and a half years to reach the final project that you have here.
In terms of technical challenges, we had challenges with our bottling line. Creating a new shape that you are not used to bottling means that you need to adapt and find the correct tools. You need to make sure that you will be supplied by your suppliers, and you need to wait—especially during COVID, you needed to wait and wait again to get the tools and run the tests.
Even just this label that you see on top was kind of tricky. For us, we just had a cap on our bottles before. Having a label on top of the cap going that way—everybody is doing it in the market, and it’s kind of beautiful on every single shelf—required reorganizing the process and reorganizing the order of bottling to be able to do so. So we learned and learned again, and waited and waited again for the tools to run the tests.
Audrey Bruisson (10:24)
For the recipe on the liquid side, we partnered with Kadalys and were really firm on what we wanted to have at the end of the project: the fresh banana, the banana from Martinique, not the caramelized banana that we already have on the market. We needed to test and learn different techniques of banana extraction with them. When you play with banana, it’s really tricky to find the correct extract, and most methods to extract the flavors of the banana will cook the banana. That’s why all the flavors that are available on the market are always the flambéed, caramelized, and sugary bananas that you get.
We wanted to have the fresh one, so we found a scientific method called the microwave method—it’s not the microwave that we have in the kitchen, but one much more specific—to be able to extract the flavor that we wanted and define the level of maturity of the banana.
After nearly 100 tests—a lot of back and forth with the R&D team—we figured it out. Then we needed to mix the extract with the rum, leading to another round of tests with the blend to find the correct balance with the Rhum Agricole, which is really powerful in aromas. We had 50 more tests and 50 more recipes that we needed to choose from, and then at the end, we finally got it. So thank you! If you want my contact, thank you so much.
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