What If The Drinks Crisis Is About Obsolete Playbooks? (and why I use bottom-up empiricism instead)

When most drinks leaders hear "bottom-up brand building," they think grassroots marketing. Influencer seeding. Community building. Word-of-mouth tactics.

Wrong.

Bottom-up is empirical strategy development. It's how you know what's actually true about your markets when everything keeps changing.

Why Playbooks Don't Work

I used to think I could build a playbook. Document what works. Create repeatable frameworks. Then apply them across markets. But playbooks assume static conditions. The drinks ecosystem doesn't work that way.

Distribution structures change. Bartender cultures evolve. Consumer expectations shift. Regulatory environments differ. What worked in Copenhagen last year doesn't automatically work in Prague this year because the conditions aren't the same.

Playbooks are instructions: "Do X, get Y." That only works when conditions stay constant.

Principles are frameworks for interpreting evidence: "Under these conditions, X has a higher probability of working." That works when conditions change because you're updating based on current evidence.

I stopped building playbooks. Started refining principles. A completely different set of tools.

That's Bayesian thinking. You don't defend fixed instructions. You update prior beliefs based on what's actually happening.

What Bottom-Up Actually Means

Empirical bottom-up reverses the normal sequence.

Top-down marketing starts with theory. Demographic targeting. Brand positioning frameworks. Campaign concepts. Then look for evidence to support it and retro-fit it on a PowerPoint Deck.

Bottom-up starts with evidence. You observe what's actually happening in accounts. Recognize patterns forming at the bar level. Update your beliefs based on field evidence instead of defending frameworks.

Evidence first. Framework second.

I saw Mezcal work in Negronis before I understood why. Observed bartenders twist occasions, not invent categories. Watched tequila fail in the same structure where mezcal succeeded (despite being agave). Only after patterns repeated across markets did the framework emerge: familiar structure plus natural substitution equals scalable introduction.

The pattern (twist occasions) is transferable. The execution (which spirit, which bartender, which account) isn't. That's local. Requires new evidence every time.

Small Samples, Strong Signal

Here's where empirical bottom-up differs from academic evidence-based marketing.

Academic approach: big data, quantitative studies, large sample sizes, statistical significance. Rigorous but slow. "Here's what the data shows across thousands of consumers."

Field-based bottom-up: small samples, qualitative observation, strong signal. Fast iteration. "I heard this problem in three bars, that's a pattern forming, let's test it this week."

You don't need massive datasets when the signal is clear.

One bartender at NoMad in New York suggesting Mezcal Negroni isn't statistically significant. But the pattern (familiar structure + natural substitution) carries strong explanatory power.

Academic research would need thousands of consumers surveyed before making a claim. I need three bartenders solving the same problem before recognizing a micro-category forming.

Different epistemology. Different speed. Different utility.

The Intellectual Honesty Requirement

This is what actually separates empirical bottom-up from everything else claiming to be evidence-based.

No ego. No dogma. Frameworks serve reality, not the other way around.

I have a set of Core Principles of Bottom-Up Brand Building. But they're not scripture. When field evidence contradicts one, I update it. When a market behaves differently from what the principle predicts, the principle loses, not the market.

Top-down operators struggle with this because their priors are expensive. Brand positioning cost $$$ to develop. Campaign creative took six months. Admitting the prior was wrong means admitting the investment was wasted.

Bottom-up operators update cheaply. Test one account. Adjust. Test another. The prior costs €50 in product samples and two bartender conversations.

That's the difference. You stop being empirical the moment you need your framework to be right more than you need to understand what's actually happening.

Why Consultants Miss This

Consultants protect their frameworks because their business model requires being right. I protect intellectual honesty because my business model requires being useful.

They interview people (secondhand observation, not direct experience). They analyze data (aggregated reports, not field reality). They build frameworks (logical derivation, not pattern recognition). Then they claim their recommendations are "evidence-based."

Real empiricism means: I sat at the bar. I watched what happened. I noticed patterns. I tested whether those patterns held in other venues. When they didn't, I updated my understanding.

This is why I'm still in bars every week in Prague, Oslo, Paris, Venice. Not romantic attachment. Empiricist requirement. You can't practice Bayesian updating on field evidence if you're not in the field collecting evidence.

Consultants visit. They interview. They analyze. They leave.

I'm still in it.

What This Means for Drinks Leadership

You already know the tension is real. Board wants growth. Distributors want margin. Bartenders want products that solve their problems. These aren't reconcilable through better communication. They're structurally opposed.

Empirical bottom-up helps because it forces both layers to update based on evidence.

Bottom-up evidence: what's actually working in accounts right now. Not what should work according to plan.

What's working this week.

Top-down evidence: what constraints actually exist at board level. Not what the field thinks those constraints are. Actual pressure actual leaders face.

I bridge these because I've observed both layers long enough to recognize their patterns. When board says "we need scale," I understand the pressure. When bartenders say "another agave brand," I understand the resistance. Both are rational given their priors.

The work is helping both layers update their beliefs based on the other's evidence.

What You Get from MAFFEO DRINKS

What You Get

If you're drinks leadership managing board pressure and field reality, here's what MAFFEO DRINKS offers:

Bronze Membership (€500/year): Deep dives on all podcast episodes. The Core Principles with monthly updates. Multi-episode analysis showing patterns across conversations. Access to MAFFEO Confidential private podcast (coming soon).

This is for drinks leadership who want systematic access to field observations from 115 episodes across 111 countries - practitioners sharing what they actually observed, not case studies or success stories.

Silver Membership (€2,500/year): Everything in Bronze, plus one annual brand/market diagnostic. I examine your P&L, value chain, marketing activities, and commercial operations. Then deliver a 3-page executive summary identifying where your current approach conflicts with market reality.

You get clarity on which conditions determine whether your strategy has high or low probability of working - before you spend six months discovering it the expensive way.

Gold Membership (€25,000/year): Everything in Silver, plus two monthly advisory calls (45 minutes each) with direct email access between calls.

Monthly Bayesian discipline. We review field evidence from the last 30 days. Identify patterns forming or breaking. Update strategy based on what's actually happening in accounts, not what should be happening according to plan.

This enforces empirical thinking monthly instead of waiting 18 months to discover the approach doesn't work.

The model exists because drinks leadership needs someone who understands board pressure AND field reality. Someone with no quarterly target, no team to manage, no operational job to protect. Just access to conversations that don't usually happen in the same room.

Insights come from sitting at the bar. But only if you sit there long enough to separate signal from noise. And only if you're willing to update your beliefs when the noise you thought was signal turns out to be just noise.

That's empirical bottom-up. That's Bayesian thinking applied to drinks strategy.

Not grassroots marketing. Not big data studies. Not consultant playbooks.

Field observation, pattern recognition, continuous updating, no ego protecting frameworks that reality contradicts.

Bottom up.