Less Tiki, More Southwest: Matching the Drink to that Mad Gringo Shirt.

Have I led you astray in the previous post, where I mentioned “a tiki-themed alco-beverage?” Didn’t mean to. What I ended up drinking was El Amanecer de Xalixco, better known as the Tequila Sunrise*.

“Tropical” is really more Southwestern since the figure in the pattern of the new shirt is Kokopelli. Fertility god of the Anasazi. Three thousand years old. Looks good on that shirt, don’t it?

There’s nothing of Polynesia here, though. I also didn’t have any pineapple juice. What I did have was orange juice. Grenadine. Fresh lemons. And Xalixco Reposado Tequila from Guadalajara. So this is a post about liquor brands and marketing. Yay!

Along with the monster tequila marketers there are dozens if not hundreds of craft-made tequilas that are sold at different price points: plenty of entries in a marketplace that’s changed in several significant ways since the last time Signalwriter blogged about tequila, in 2005.

The reviewer nchoward made some interesting observations about the tequila market just a few years ago:

…88 percent of all tequila…is consumed in one of two ways: Shots or margaritas. By the age of 25 the average man has cut his shots consumption by 20 percent. The target consumers…are men 25 to 34 years old evolving to sophisticated drink choices. Now these consumers are drinking whiskeys, rums, and vodkas, usually mixed with cola. For leading brands, about 60 percent of consumption is with cola. Compare that to tequila where 60 percent of consumption is in margaritas.

Or in Tequila Sunrises made by considerably older guys in, say, suburban Houston. There’s more – from a recently published global tequila market review:

Tequila has been displaying high volume growth across a broad spectrum of international markets over the last few years. Indeed, some 13 out of the top 15 global Tequila markets posted gains over the 2003-2008 period. The US and Mexico remain the key markets by far. The most successful part of the US Tequila market in value-growth terms remains the super-premium sector – albeit at a reduced rate of growth.

That Xalixco Reposado from the Signalwriter liquor cabinet is an apparently middle-of-the-pack tequila with a history. Unearthing some background, you can read that Jesus Hernandez founded the original distillery at “the beginning of the XIX century.” Three Hernandez generations owned the distillery named La Invencible until 1962 when it was sold to the Orendain family.

In ’71, Roberto Orendain sold it to Bacardi which subsequently added new technology, expanding the operation (now called Tequileña thanks to another merger) to a daily production of 10,000 liters of tequila; and intro’d the Xalixco brand in the domestic Mexican market.

Forgive the pun, but by 1987 the worm had turned for Bacardi so it sold part of the plant to Mexico’s Vergel Brandy which lost still more market share so in 1990 Vergel sold out to Enrique Fonseca, Sr.

Are you keeping up? Fonseca is noted to be one of the largest agave farmers in the state of Jalisco. He’s credited with reinvigorating the Xalixco formula (with blue agave) and brand, and building exports to the US.

This Xalixco is warm and smoky – none of that burning, numbing sensation you get with cheap tequila – with an aroma of a pinewood fire and a taste of delicate creosote and sugar. It’s a sipping liquor, too good to mix with orange juice. But it’s sitting on the shelf at $18-20 bucks a bottle and will probably never be noticed because it’s not a “super-premium.”

Fonseca doesn’t need another super-premium; the company has a number of aficionado brands like Asombroso that it keeps introducing.

Too bad that consumers have no brand story to grab onto but I think Xalixco is a more of a distribution play: a shelf-filler. Tequila’s a huge big market. The brand has its role to play. Enough, then, about marketing - let this liquor’s value be our little secret.

*Low-grade the tequila and keep it simple. Here’s a recipe from Esquire.

Can I Do Better for Kraken than Blogger Rachel? I Don’t Think So.

A brander’s delight, “...Kraken™ is imported black rum from the Caribbean and blended with over 11 secret spices.” You can watch the overheated commercial on the brand’s website.

Wish I could say something positive about the site’s functionality. But I couldn’t do better in the way of a whiz-bang-design reaction than blogger Rachel in Atlanta. Read her post to get the spirit of the thing.

Hundreds of booze-brands are introduced yearly - see what I wrote about Railean Texas Gulf Coast Rum. Fighting for shelf space would be an awful chore if it weren't for wonderful imagination and empathic design. The right combo can pay off on the shelf.

Svedka Vodka: Strangely Appealing Robot Love-and-Liquor Combo.

Advertisers use robots in the pages of certain trade publications and nerd-mags. Wired, for example. I thought robot-featuring ads were going to take over this magazine in 2009, although paging through back issues I could only spot a couple reliably.

Ford’s SYNC®, “the guru of directions,” is a generic monowheeler. ESET, more I-robot-y, promises to protect us against cybercrime.

These days, I’m enjoying Svedka® vodka’s fembots.

They’re not the first CPG-related robots but I have come late to this brand*. I’m not hip enough myself (anymore if ever); I don’t live in the trendy parts of Houston or other large metro areas like Chicago and New York City, where the brand’s promotion is heavily deployed.

Despite early criticism (New York-based Copyranter, for example, hated these ads), I think the brand has three likeable attributes.

First, Svedka is value-priced, recognizing that there’s quite a bit of hype in the tonier brands of vodka which, no matter what people say, is still “an unaged colorless liquor originating in Russia.” Want to drink a lot? Drink this one. It’s both cheap and good-tasting. It’s from Sweden. Which keeps on being cool without being snooty. The current bottle shape is more reminiscent of Absolut.

Second, Svedka states it’s “voted the #1 vodka of 2033.” Wonderful, this claim: Neatly counter-intuitive, much less pretentious than some of the upscale vodkas. Besides, 20-plus years from now, no one will remember it and won’t need to.

Third, since the brand is invested in an imaginary (and party-hearty) future, Svedka can use…robots. See ‘em on the website, even build your own, a nice but not complicated level of interaction. See ‘em in advertising like the ones shown here, and in a range of other marketing materials.

Constellation Brands bought this vodka in early 2007 and says it’s now the third largest imported vodka brand in the US. As big as Constellation is, the brand is nimble and wry. A year after the purchase, Svedka offered then Presidential candidate Hilary Clinton free vodka for the rest of the 2008 election season.

The offer appeared in a full-page ad complete with fembot and coupon appeared on Page A11 of The New York Times. But unlike Clinton, the Svedka vodka campaign is still running.

*Svedka robots were created by New York-based agency Amalgamated in 2005 and the vodka has been an Adams “Growth Brand” and an IMPACT “Hot Brand” awardee every year since 2006. I’m just behind the curve.

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!

Railean™ Rum

The end of 5th Street in San Leon, TX, is about as far as you can go before you run out of solid land. Beyond it sail shrimp boats and freighters. This is where Matt and Kelly Railean founded their distillery. This is where they make “original” Handmade Texas Rum™.

I wouldn’t blame you if you think I’m a sot, not after writing about Louisiana rum in a previous post.

In the blogosphere, though, one thing does lead to another. So I found myself with an invitation to visit one of the two rum-makers in Texas. Railean Texas Gulf Coast Rum is hand-crafted in a different style than Old New Orleans Rum and the brand is marketed differently, too. (Yes, there’s been a certain amount of tasting going on – this helps me differentiate among brands. Really.) Why miss a chance to observe this brand effort on the basis of the Four Ps* of Marketing anyway? And it’s just down the “Highway of Death,” I-45 South.

These Texas rums are new. The Raileans got their financing in the Year 5 and their permit in the Year 7: Their clear White Rum came out in December last year, the first marketable liquor off their shiny German-made column still. Railean Reserve XO (the amber rum) has just been introduced. Matt Railean is the distiller; in fact, he’s Texas’s first “Master Distiller.” Kelly Railean is the marketer – her background as a First Level Sommelier, with more than a decade’s experience in wine and spirits, means she knows how to go door-to-door.

The initial, Four-P decisions, though, have been joint ones.

One: Product. They wanted to match their product – the rums – with the audiences they saw on the horizon. They believe there will be a market for fine-tuned, hand-crafted rums just as there is for single-barrel bourbons and aged tequilas. In creating the product, they went for “dry” rum recipes. There’s no sugar left in the specially created 720 molasses when it goes in the still. The two varieties are less sweet than most rum – the flavors are rich though not syrupy (the Reserve XO has some sherry-like overtones). So far, bartenders and restaurant owners say they like the Railean rums because they’re different, with an up-market feel and taste that’s distinct from mass-produced rums.

Two: Positioning. The brand name – Railean – is the family name. The makers experimented with different name options, using both friends and liquor-industry colleagues as sounding boards. I’d say there’s no more vanity here than any other entrepreneurs; and a good deal of realism. If you can’t have the brand equity of a Bacardi or Captain Morgan, you have to build your own. They also understood from the get-go that San Leon doesn’t have quite the throw-weight as New Orleans. Rather than load up the rums with pre-conceived notions, “Railean” is neutral…so Matt and Kelly are willing to let their stakeholders help build brand loyalty and image. (I think the jury will be out for a while yet on their brand positioning effort.)

Third: Presentation. In this case, that’s the label design. Look behind any well-stocked tavern bar, or the “Rum” section of a good liquor store. You’re going to see a lot of labels showing black bats, pirates, sugar cane and more pirates. After considerable thought and a huge number of designs, Matt and Kelly looked out the window of the Buccaneer Tavern in San Leon and saw the hundreds of monk parakeets flying around the power poles and palm trees – the little green parrot ended up as the Railean mascot and the anchor of the product labels.

Fourth: Promotion. Kelly Railean is convinced on-premise sales will build the Railean brand and that’s where most direct tasting and promotion efforts are concentrated. I wrote in a previous post about “marketing one bottle at a time;” bars and restaurants are where the 30-to-50-year-old professionals nurture their liquor brand devotion. The company wants to foster this personal relationship with the brand; admits it’s hard work and intends to follow through with it all the same. In the absence of a million-dollar budget, the Raileans will use word-of-mouth to foster brand loyalty.

Forty-plus years back, John C Aspley wrote about the advertising manager of a large manufacturing company who said: Sales promotion moves the product toward the buyer, while advertising moves the buyer toward the product.

The Raileans are using sales promotion – and sweat equity – to construct their brand’s success. Their achievement will be handmade, for sure.

*There are about as many “Ps” in marketing as there are markets – three, four, five, seven…you name it. One 4P set (not mine) can be found at The ABCs of Small Business. I’m grateful to the Raileans for the great chance to see a new consumer brand take its first steps. Their brandsite also features plenty pix.

Celebration Distillation

The last time I had any real truck with Demon Rum was ’63: A post-Marist graduation visit to what was then British Honduras helped me to an acquaintance of the locally produced product which was pretty raw.

Now, thanks to a tasting with Philip Cusimano, I’ve re-made rum’s acquaintance with a higher caliber product. And wandered again into the world of audience-building for artisan products. Here, the heavy lifting’s done by skill and heart and one-bottle-at-a-time marketing.

Phil (and our hosts at Mo Mong) let me taste three different versions of Old New Orleans Rum, from the Crescent City’s Celebration Distillation. The Crystal is your basic light-bodied rum that’s probably good for mixed drinks. The Amber is fine for sippin’. But the Cajun Spice, the one with the red label – it’s just outstanding…like the website says, “with the kick of cayenne & cinnamon…hints of nutmeg, ginger & cloves…”

My but it’s tasty. Every single-barrel rum is distilled and blended the old-fashioned way at 2815 Frenchman Street in NOLA by James Michalopoulos, a well-known local artist.

One of the “country virtues” of marketing artisanal foods and beverages (cheeses and breads, beers and wines, barbeque sauces and handmade pâtés) is that you can succeed without lots of money. You substitute lots of sweat equity and smarts. Boys and girls, Michalopoulos’s marketing the hell out of this stuff, mano a mano.

Michalopoulos doesn’t have the Bacardi USA ad budget, say, or the Captain Morgan “Morganettes” (Caitlyn, Megan and Whitney, no less).

What he does have is a finely honed sense of local color – the Red Hat Society ladies come to lunch at the distillery, e.g. He manages a comprehensive website and maintains an active blog. Old New Orleans Rum has pages on Facebook (I’ve joined up as a fan) and MySpace. You can purchase bottles online and have them shipped…from New York.

If – or when – Michalopoulos succeeds, he’ll have done it with continuous and clever promotion on a local and regional level, slowly building the rums’ audience through brewery tours, event participation and broadening distribution sites. You can find Old New Orleans varieties in Spec’s here, for example, right along with the shelf-hogging Bacardis and Ron Ricos.

Rum, like wine, is an amazingly available product…it comes from just about everywhere. But hard liquor distilled from sugar cane and byproducts is a genuine New World invention. It played a significant role in the European and African colonization of the American continents.

That these rums remind you of beignets and coffee with chicory is positively part of the brand’s image. The appeal is local (where Elysian Fields crosses Abundance), like Shiner Bock and St Arnold beers instead of Budweiser here in Houston. You gave it up for Tito’s Handmade Vodka, right? Made in Austin, right?

Well, you can buy your rum one of the great big labels and watch your money go offshore. Or you can offer up your drinking dollars and sense of style to NOLA, where artisanal branding is alive and well.

No Absoluts?

You think this is a pile-on post but you are mistaken – maybe.

In fact, it’s relatively rare for just one ad to raise such a ruckus. But that is what the Mexico City agency Teran/TWBA has accomplished with this particular execution of the year-old IN AN ABSOLUT WORLD advertising campaign. Unless you live in a hole in the ground or work on Wall Street, you have to be aware of the hell that’s been raised over this ad.

The best tracker of the story – and chief hell-raiser – is Michelle Malkin. Head for her michellemalkin.com website to review the whole tale…the good, the bad and the ugly.

What’s odd is that the goofy (and rather jejune) campaign premiered a year ago, its various executions got a lot of praise – the US TV and print executions came out of TBWA/Chiat/Day, New York City…and you can review various examples on Duncan’s Print. TBWA Creative Director Rob Smiley said at the time, “As the story unfolds you can expect commentary on topics and ideas big and small, serious and humorous, timeless and of the moment.”

Depending on your POV then, Absolut creative is either cutting edge or overly obvious. I put the “Pregnant Guy” into the latter category but quite a few people loved it, apparently believing that this was a fresh idea.

Yet in a semantic sense, IN AN ABSOLUT WORLD represents a contradiction in terms. Either you drink enough the trademarked vodka to enable yourself to view men as capable of becoming pregnant – or you deny the “absolute” that only females of mammalian species can bear young. That’s not commentary, that’s contradiction.

Interpreting the Mexican Absolut ad offers choices. One, it is about contradiction –Mexico might be better off if its ruler of the moment hadn’t sold a huge portion of the country to the US some 150 years ago.

Two, it’s about guzzling too much vodka – envisioning the country as it used to be takes a bottle or two.

Or three, this is a very funny ad (which it actually is) because Absolut’s world is NEVER about the real world.

Over-reaction to a single ad in a single campaign about a single product may be a fact, but it’s hardly crucial in the life of the world. It’s not as though, as one commentator suggested, Absolut’s agencies created an ad showing a map of “Greater Germany” circa 1942, covering France and Poland. Is it?

PS: I’m sending a note to my Dialogue International contacts in Europe to see if they have any opinions about this nationalistic shouting match. I’ll be interested in their comments, if they choose to share ‘em.

Door Prize

Ye don’t think we’d have a St. Andrew’s Day Party without an appropriate door prize, do ye? When you drop by the Stag’s Head Pub this Friday, you can register for our “Pairty Giveout,” a 10-year-old Black Bottle Scotch Whisky.

It wouldn’t hurt if you took a quick, visual peek at the brand’s neat, interactive website. You can even pull down a menu or two and take a look at some of Black Bottle’s advertising, though it’s a bit hard to read with its bitty type and all.

Fact is, Scotch whisky’s one of the Worldwide Web’s favorite subjects. Do a bit of Googling and find out more about Black Bottle than I could fit in half-a-dozen blog posts.

I’m going to make it easy on myself. Spirits writer Michael Lonsford jotted a column in The Houston Chronicle a couple of weeks back. The highlights:

It’s black and green, and it had a red-letter renaissance. It’s a blended Scotch whisky called Black Bottle, and its history is fascinating. Most scotch drinkers start off with the classic, popular blends — Johnny Walker Red, Dewar’s, J&B.

I did, too, later segueing to the single-malts and finally the shores of Islay, the island off the western coast of Scotland famous for its heavily peated whiskies.

If Scotch whisky aficionados fall into two camps — single-malts and blends – Black Bottle might appeal to both sides.

Where did the name come from? In the mid-1800s, the three Graham brothers of Aberdeen launched the label, a blended whisky sold in a pot-still-shaped bottle made of black glass from Germany. When England and Germany fought in World War I, the glass became unavailable. So the Grahams switched to green, which is still used.

Black Bottle is a blended whisky, but with unique Islay attributes. It makes you think of the heather shivering in the North Sea wind and wisps of smoke lifting out of Islay village chimneys.

Poetic enough (shivering North Sea wind and all) for me to steal for this post. But it’ll give you an idea of what the whisky is all about…should you happen to carry off the 10-year-old prize Friday evening. You might get away without giving everyone else a wee dram before you go.

You should thank my colleague, Rob Schoenbeck (good Scot that he is) for anointing this brand as the door prize.

El Tinieblo

On the back of the bottle of El Tinieblo mezcal I bought in Abasolo, the label describes the “close relationship between man and maguey from time immemorial.” Stirring words for a guy who’s more comfortable with gin and craft-brewed beers.

South of the border (down Mexico way), we stopped at the El Tinieblo mezcal distillery and museum, on the side of the highway from Reynosa down to our hunting rancho. Son Doug (the one on the right, apparently standing in a pothole) and I gave pride of place in the photo above to the distillery’s signage – it’s a big sign. You can read more about the distillery itself here. Also, I offer a mystery. Read on and language experts will find a challenge built right into this post.

Any road, why not collect…evidence…of an interesting brand, since the popularity of tequilas and mezcals continues to grow? A half-empty bottle of just such evidence is sitting beside my computer right now…76 proof.

A Spanish-language explanation of El Tinieblo reveals that the rancho began producing mezcal in 1865, using the “juice of the maguey.” One of the best known forms of mezcal, if I understand this correctly, is tequila – in fact, agave-based liquors that aren’t tequilas are, well, mezcals. Or…tequilas have to be made with blue agave while mezcal can be made with any: blue, white or silver agave…depending on how you read Spanish. One website says, “Mezcal is made from the agave plant. The agave is also used to make tequila but in a different process.”

If this is confusing, Google up “tequila” and “mezcal.” Wade through the details for yourself.

This post is about the brand – which does not appear anywhere on one of the best tequila-related sites, www.tequila.net. We’ll just have to wing it.

El Tinieblo mezcals (joven, reposado, añejo) are made by Mezcales de Tamaulipas in Jiminez – a good thing since Jimenez is one of just 11 municipalities in the state that have been officially designated Envasado de Origen by the government. The registered proprietor is Alfredo Perez Salinas.

Part of its most recent incarnation as a brand and an attempt to recapture the spirit of mezcaleras (or mezcal-making artisans) is the marketing help the company has received from 706 Design. The firm’s new website is under construction; the existing one doesn’t work too well but the outfit seems to have several offices throughout Mexico, plus locations in Argentina and the US.

706 Design has done the promotional materials for El Tinieblo mezcal, as well as the brand’s website (which also doesn’t work too well, but has a lot of information if you can get to it). It is difficult to determine just what parts of the brand the design firm has worked on, since the mezcal label’s antlered deer head seems to be an older element. It’s related to the hunting rancho of the same name, in the same area of Tamps. The 706 Design firm has done this work, too.

The freshest elements of the brand look are the logotype, surrounded by Mexican flag-colored bars and a starburst of agave in the center. El Tinieblo has a homemade air, though, when you compare it to better-known mezcal brands like La Fogata and (especially) the sophisticated Divino.

That may be purposeful. If the State of Tamaulipas, for example, is trying to revive the handcrafted mezcal industry and using the effort to establish jobs and grow tourism, then slightly “crafty” brand design fits the bill. Shuffling through websites, you can find other, better executions of the folk-art persuasion among the mezcals of Oaxaca far to the south.

Support your “local” brands. To try hand-crafted mezcal, just drive 150 kilometers south of McAllen, TX – a couple of hours by car. Otherwise, you’ll end up in a big-city liquor store buying some fakey corporate brand off the shelf.

Oh – the language challenge. I’m offering a contest-winning Starbucks gift card to anyone who can tell me the origin and English meaning of the word “tinieblo” – and I don’t mean the Colombian version you can find with a little digging on Google. First, I can’t believe that anyone would consciously name a consumer product after what’s obviously Colombian slang usage. Second, wouldn’t you think the product name would have something to do with the area or the rancho?

If you’re a fan of fine mezcals and tequilas, you might want to start stocking up now. A recent article in The Monitor newspaper which covers the Rio Grande Valley here in Texas announced that there’ll be a shortage of agave – in about seven years.

Old Forester

Is this brand story true? Brown-Forman Distillers Company of Louisville, KY, has been running an advertising campaign for Old Forester, which the company says is “America’s First Bottled Bourbon,” complete with a trademark.

The company has got this story behind the campaign: In 1870, George Garvin Brown, a young pharmaceuticals salesman in Louisville, Kentucky, saw the need for a consistently high-quality whisky that met medicinal standards. With $5,500 in saved and borrowed money, Brown and his half brother started J.T.S. Brown and Bro. They sold Old Forester Bourbon Whisky exclusively in sealed glass bottles to assure its quality.

It’s the kind of classically designed campaign that has come to characterize the upscale liquor market – lots of emphasis on heritage and purity and very nice looking with it. Brown-Forman is working on the brand. But…is the claim factual? I seemed to recall seeing Civil War-era engravings with bottles of bourbon (so labeled) on shelves – that would pre-date the foundation of the Old Forester brand story.

I tried contacting Brown-Forman…got nothing.

Fortunately, the people at my own favorite bourbon company, Jim Beam, were much more attentive. They asked their PR agency to work the problem and I got an outstanding call from Layton Meng, one of the Directors at Qorvis working on the Jim Beam account. (She left a message that I didn’t get immediately, driving through the middle of southern Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Swamp at the time as I was.)

Meng had spoken with Jerry Dalton, Jim Beam’s Master Distiller. His research says that Abram M Bininger & Co. was actually the oldest known source of bottled bourbon: he started doing it in 1848. Nevertheless, it is Brown that’s recognized in the industry for being the first distiller to mass-produce and sell branded bourbon in bottles.

So the answer is, yes…Old Forester is the first bottled bourbon brand. Brown-Forman is correct and the story on the Old Forester website is a good one. (Always tell good stories about your brand.)

For me, though, the stars of this one are Jim Beam and Qorvis – so my special appreciation to Dalton and Meng: more responsive to customers, thank you very much. It’s way early for a drink, but mine will be Jim Beam when the time comes, not Old Forester. Maybe I should have used a photograph of a Beam bourbon bottle instead.