The "Insights Sitting at The Bar" How-to Guide: The Five Steps to Gather Insights in Bars by Yourself
(Instead of Waiting For an Invitation From your Sales Team That Will Never Come).
(Instead of Waiting For an Invitation From your Sales Team That Will Never Come).
Dear Drinks Builder,
In the drinks industry, there’s a problem. People tend to spend more time in the office than in the market. This is quite counterintuitive for an industry that prides itself on being a people business. It creates an echo chamber that provides biased feedback while building the brand.
Most people I speak to (small or big brands) are uncomfortable visiting the on-trade to sell.
There is a tendency to overfocus on the internal aspects of brand building—creating the brand, perfecting the liquid, the look of the bottle, and the marketing stuff. There’s so much effort in these aspects that people think their brand is so great that it will sell alone.
When it doesn’t happen, there’s a cold shower effect. Very few people in the industry understand the importance of cracking sales and distribution.
Last week, in one of my LinkedIn posts, someone asked me a question. Why didn’t I mention “the brand” as one of the top 3 factors to win in the market? It’s simple: the brand has become only table stakes. It’s like trying to get hired for a job because you can use emails, work with MS Office, or speak English as a second language. Those things are not mentioned anymore in CVs. They were often enough 20 years ago. Not anymore. Two decades ago, it was also enough for a brand to be excellent, do great marketing, and have a great liquid. Now, they need to master sales and distribution.
A strong brand is necessary but not sufficient condition to get listed, displayed in a back bar or picked up from a shelf.
The future of drinks industry insights is sitting at the bar.
Selling a product is hard. You’ll get more doors on your face and negative answers than you can imagine. But that's not a good enough reason to give that task to someone else in your team.
Founders hire a salesperson who “knows the market and has contacts.” Marketing teams delegate selling to their sales colleagues.
It’s not by running focus groups and talking with influencers that you understand the market. They will mostly give you obvious answers to biased questions.
It’s not by speaking to random target consumers who think like you that you make a bullet-proof brand. It’s by getting a “no” to your sell-in story and a "so what" to your brand story. It’s by talking to bartenders and observing consumer behaviors.
Great brands are not built in the echo chamber. By talking to your colleagues and inner circle, you will get the answers you wanna hear, not what you need to hear.
I've heard marketing colleagues complaining they hadn't been "invited" by sales to a market visit. Bars are not dangerous places; you can only enter them after a SWAT sales team has cleared them.
Bar owners are ordinary people. They may be flamboyant, true. If they act too cool, you're in the wrong place, or maybe you don't have the answers to argue back.
So, what's the best way to gather insights effectively? I don't have a silver bullet, but here are five tips to consider:
Tip #1: Spend more time in the market
Spending time in-house is important, but it's a given. If you don't understand the market, you will pile up pallets of bottles in your warehouse.
I once heard that the main thing to building a drink brand is having good shoes. Spend time on the streets and understand the needs of distributors, sales reps, and bar owners. It's an ecosystem; you must master the levers to make it work smoothly.
Chris Maffeo
You can't delegate sales. You need to be in the streets every week (if not every day), not just when you have time. It's like going to the gym. If you don't make time for it, you will never get there (that's me).
