The Lock-In 2.0: 3x takeaways for drinks brands navigating the new premium.
The Lock-In 2.0
Five years ago, a canned cocktail was something you bought for the train and forgot by the next station. Now people pay £4 for one and photograph it before they open it.
The signals people use to spot a premium drink have moved, and brands still signalling the old way get bought once and then forgotten. That was the thread running through The Lock-In 2.0, our second session with Billy Abbott of The Whisky Exchange, Keegan Giannoni of Infinium Spirits and Emil Stickland of Kocktail.
Here are four takeaways for any brand that wants to be remembered, not just paid for. (P.s
1. Own the moment and the moment brings you back.
"Let's not try and do cans. What's the point at which cans no longer fulfil the need?"
Emil Stickland, Co-founder, Kocktail
A £30 bottle of wine at a friend's house is generous. Three bottles of spirits so you can make everyone a Negroni looks like you might have a problem.
Premium RTD has spent five years fighting over the same shelf: the same stubby can, the same £4 price. Kocktail stepped off it and built a glass format for the one moment a can can't handle, which is arriving at someone's door.
That's the memorability play. A brand that owns a shelf position gets remembered when someone is already standing in front of it. A brand that owns a moment gets remembered every time the moment comes round, and every dinner invite is a reminder.
2. The heavy bottle stopped working when everyone had one.
"The days of using a heavier bottle and a nicer label and just an overall fancier package and charging more and it working are over."
Keegan Giannoni, Director of Brand Marketing, Infinium Spirits
For years, weight meant worth. A heavier bottle and a better label did most of the work of justifying the price. Once every premium bottle is heavy, weight stops telling anyone which brand they're holding.
What sticks now is something people can say out loud: what's in the bottle and who made it. That's why the founder and the master distiller have overtaken the celebrity. A celebrity can be hired by the brand next door. A founder with a track record belongs to one brand only, and a story about them is something you can repeat to the next person at the table.
3. Single serve got promoted.
“The really interesting side of premiumisation in this current era is the premiumisation of single serve, because a single serving pack is not a premium thing."
Billy Abbott, Ambassador, The Whisky Exchange
Single-serve formats were built to be cheap. A can has no resealable lid because it's meant to be finished in one go, usually on a train, while wine comes with a cork because it's meant to be shared. For decades that split kept premium on the sharing side.
Trust is what moved it. Pre-made used to mean a bartender reaching for the sour-mix gun. Now one of London's best bars batches its own martini, and expectations of anything pre-made have risen with it.
For memorability this matters more than it looks. With a bottle, the brand hands over to a glass and a bartender. With a single serve, the format stays in the drinker's hand from shelf to last sip, which is how a shape like BuzzBallz becomes the brand itself.
Our take.
Premium used to live on the bottle. You could feel it in the weight of the glass, and the price did the rest.
Across an hour with our panel, it kept turning up somewhere else: after the drink, in whatever people carried away from it.
That's the shift. Premium used to be something a brand showed. Now it has to be something people remember. A price can get a drink bought once. Being remembered is what gets it paid for twice.
So if your brand disappeared from the shelf tomorrow, what would anyone still be able to tell you about it?
At The Behaviours Agency, we build brands worth paying extra for, and distinctive enough to be remembered long after the shelf. If you'd like to know what yours would leave behind, we'd enjoy finding out with you.
The next Lock-In is in November, date to follow.
