Why Modern Classic Cocktails Stopped After 2012 with Robert Simonson
Your brand is not scaling at the pace you want.
You have distribution. You have accounts. You have activations running. And the velocity numbers are still not where they should be.
The instinct is to add. More touchpoints. More education. More presence. But the problem is not the quantity of what you are doing. It is something structural. And it has been running in this industry for over a decade without most people in commercial roles being able to name it.
Robert Simonson spent twenty-five years documenting the modern cocktail era as it happened. Not reconstructed afterwards. Not filtered through brand mythology or oral history passed between generations of sales managers. He was in the room. He talked to the people making the decisions while the bars were still open and the drinks were still new.
His account is a primary source. In an industry where almost everything gets retold until it resembles something useful to whoever is telling it, that matters more than it sounds.
Listen to the episode
The modern classic cocktail canon ran from 2000 to 2012. It produced drinks that are still being ordered today by people who assume they have existed forever. After 2012, the list closed. Nothing has joined it since.
Most people in the industry have an opinion about why. Almost none of those opinions are based on a documented account of what actually happened. They are based on what someone told them, which is based on what someone told that person. And somewhere in that chain, the sequence of how categories actually get built got reversed. Most brand directors in this industry are working from the wrong version of events. Not because anyone misled them deliberately. Because the oral history that travels between generations tends to flatter whoever has the budget to repeat it.
The reason the canon closed is specific. It is mechanical. And the same dynamic is running inside your brand's commercial strategy right now, producing the same result at a different scale.
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