Are Consumers Really Drinking Better? The Importance of Knowing your Target Audience

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Are people really drinking better? We preach that consumers have elevated their cocktail game, abandoning the sour-mix margaritas and chocolate syrup-loaded mudslides of the 90s in favor of signature Old-Fashioned variations and Palomas with house-infused jalapeño agave syrup.

But while this is true in cocktail hubs such as New York and San Francisco, there are still plenty of pockets in the United States where the Whisky Coke reigns supreme. The rise of the Moscow Mule – a simple combination of lime juice, ginger beer, and the flavorless spirit, vodka – in cities as well as rural markets, is another indication that the majority of consumers, regardless of market, care less about complexity and bartender finesse, and more about easy drinkability and/or visual appeal. The thing is, this is perfectly fine, we as PR professionals just need to acknowledge it and not be afraid to embrace it.

This can pose a challenge, and at times, feel counter intuitive to the world we immerse ourselves in. With brands like Diageo pouring outlandish marking dollars into lavish events at Tales of the Cocktail, or industry publications like Liquor.com focusing almost exclusively on the latest premium craft brands, it’s easy to get hung up on craft cocktail culture. But just because that’s what is considered “cool” doesn’t mean that connecting a spirit with the hottest bartenders in the latest speakeasy is the right strategy for every brand. Sometimes the best tactic might be getting your spirit in front of large gatherings of soccer moms at a taco festival in the Midwest, or saturating the media in your home market of Oregon in order to ensure that the local dive bar goers are ordering their highballs with your spirit by name. Think about it in the context of other brands. Reaching out to a foodie influencer with an invitation to feature Papa John’s, or a Cosmo fashion editor with the new clothing line designed by a former alt rocker, just isn’t quite the right fit, even if there is some level of relevancy.

If the goal is to further boost the premium image of an established rum brand that is well-respected by the bartender community and encourage those discerning consumers to recognize that rum in speakeasies, a good PR team should continue to maintain it’s presence in that space by reaching out to bartenders that are using the product at craft cocktail bars, asking for on menu cocktail recipes, and pitching those recipes to the spirits writers at the Imbibes, Liquor.coms, and Food & Wines of the world. But for an Irish whiskey  that doesn’t have the same bartender appeal, whether it be product quality, brand history, or something else entirely, we can’t force the “craft bartender approach.” Sure, bartenders pour spirits for guests, but there are other methods for getting a product into press (and other writers to reach out to) besides the obvious. A product like our Irish whiskey in this example needs to be pitched to mainstream lifestyle media as a holiday party essential, on the merit of its pretty packaging, or as an example of a foreign cultural experience adopted by Americans, to writers that may not have a beverage beat at all and are looking for different stories entirely. At the end of the day, the general American public isn’t putting as much thought into their liquor selection as we might like to think, so a story strictly about booze isn’t the way to reach them anyway.

Generally speaking, tastes have evolved, and there is a greater interest in craft cocktails than ever before. But as beverage marketers and communications professionals, we must be mindful to step out of our big city bubbles and consider other markets. Some regions are still catching up, others simply don’t have the same tastes or interests. The more we step away from industry formulas to consider the nature of our brands, their target audiences, and the true factors that drive those audiences, the more effective we will be a positioning these spirits in the niches in which they can best succeed – whether that be in a vodka soda at the neighborhood watering hole, or a Penicillin in an underground NYC cocktail lounge.