Southern Comfort: Oh Lord, Won't You Buy Me a Brand Revamp.

This coming October that semi-famous imbiber of Southern Comfort, Janis Joplin, will be dead 40 years. I suppose Brown-Forman, the brand's owners, felt that a brand redo was overdue.

The distillers tapped a great Minneapolis design shop, Cue, to execute the rebranding campaign; it's an evocative and colorful job. Leaving aside the sheer fun of working on a liquor brand as filled with consumer history as Southern Comfort (Joplin aside), the design house filled out the new brand vision from labeling to activation elements – all intent on capturing the “vibe of New Orleans.”

The brand's even more Créole now...styling, illustrations, the lot. At the same time, the brand website states that for every bottle of Southern Comfort sold, the company will donate a quarter to the Gulf Relief Foundation through the end of October 2010. It's trite to talk about “giving back to the community,” but two bits here, two bits there...it mounts up.

No matter what, though, this is a way-back brand. (“Take another little piece of my heart,” Janis!)

Brown-Forman suggests that “Southern Comfort, or SoCo, as it is known to a new generation of consumers, has become a fun choice when good friends create legendary nights together.” IMO, blogger Christopher Null said it way better on Drinkhacker:

Let's be frank. Southern Comfort has a difficult reputation. Everyone I know has a story involving the peach-flavored liqueur, and it usually ends with the blackout or someone's head being shaved against their will.

I wonder how many Cue designers' heads...got shaved?

Previous Brown-Forman blog posts appear here and here.

Civilization’s End

I have met the enemy – it’s the French. Brown-Forman put out a holiday drinks pamphlet this week, an advertising supplement in the Houston Chronicle, bought and paid for by Spec’s, and a proper promotional piece for the holidays.

Various Brown-Forman booze brands are presents, complete with recipes for a number of different seasonally styled drinks. (I’d like to think the beverage conglomerate is doing something right: In the teeth of the economic meltdown we’re having, Brown-Forman reported a 4% second-quarter operating income growth this week: “Jack Daniels and Finlandia, dey been berry, berry good to us!”)

Any road, on the Chambord® Raspberry Liqueur spread, the top recipe is one of the brand’s standbys, the French Martini. It’s not enough, apparently, that this mongrel uses vodka. There’s also some Chambord for flavoring and it reads like a candy recipe:

2 shots Pravda luxury Polish vodka*

2½ shots fresh pineapple juice

½ shot Chambord raspberry liqueur
1 twist lemon peel.

Pour each of the above into a tall bar glass. Shake with ice, pour into a cocktail or martini glass and serve.

Friends, the Chambord mixologists have no shame: This French Martini is more like a Mixed Fruit Cocktail. Purists know that the true Martini uses very, very dry gin!

Googling “Chambord French Martini,” you’ll discover dozens of listing and blogs whose readers top-rate the concoction – 540 Drinksmixer.com readers rate it at 9.5 which is disconcerting.

It’s the end of civilization, foretold in the Book of Revelations or Marvel Comics. Still, on your behalf, I will force myself to mix and drink one or two or three French Martini drinks prior to Christmas – perhaps Santa and his reindeer will arrive with salvation before the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse descend.

What can you expect? The Pravda Perfect Martini not only uses 2 ounces of vodka, but 1 ounce of “pure water.” Horror!