What we learnt from The Lock-In: 5 killer takeaways for drinks marketeers.
The Art & Science of Memorability
Two weeks ago we hosted The Lock-In. A closed-door hour with five senior marketers from across beer, wine, spirits and no-and-low, brought together to press on one question: why do some drinks brands get ordered by name when the rest get forgotten?
The answer is a growth question dressed up as a brand-team one. In any given bar, at any given shelf, there's a small group of drinks brands that get ordered by name and a much larger group that get chosen because they're nearest, cheapest, or on. The brands in the first group are growing; the brands in the second are quietly being cut from the plan. Memorability is the mechanic that decides which group a brand ends up in.
We've run the hour back and pulled out five killer takeaways, one from each speaker. Drinks was the room; brand memorability is what applies to any category trying to be remembered.
The Lock-In: 5 killer takeaways for drinks marketeers.
1. The founder is the most crowded shortcut in drinks.
"Your brand is not distinctive because you have a founder. Every brand has a founder. What is distinctive is the energy and the vision that founder brings."
Andrew Nash, ex-VP Marketing Proximo, William Grant's
The founder story isn't wrong, just crowded. Craft, heritage, premium, founder — the four cues every drinks brand plays. They buy a seat at the shelf, because a category cue is a permission to enter. What none of them does anymore is earn memory, because a cue by definition is being played by every other brand on the shelf. Memorability starts with what only your brand would say: the specific obsession behind the founder, not the fact of one. A brand that gets ordered by name is a brand that said something no other brand in the category was willing to.
2. Memorability is tested at the shelf, not in the dashboard.
"I've been stalking people around supermarkets, just listening to conversations. How are they choosing that product at the shelf edge? I even did it last week."
Vicky Wood, Head of Brand and Insights at Kingsland Drinks
The dashboard tells you what a drinker did last quarter. The shelf tells you what they are deciding right now — the three-second hesitation where everything the brand has done either fires in the drinker's memory or doesn't. That moment isn't in any tracker or sales report, and it is the only one that actually matters, because it is the one that decides. Wine advertising has a specific version of this problem: most of it doesn't show people actually enjoying wine. Wine points at the vineyard; the drinker points at their sofa. The brands that win close that gap.
3. The sneer is memorability being filtered out.
"The industry should be embarrassed that a lot of the great innovation seems to be coming from outside the industry."
Nik Keane, Chief Marketing Officer / Founder
DioniLife
Cheap, lurid, "I wouldn't be seen dead with one" — that has been the industry's verdict on BuzzBallz, delivered before the slide is off the screen. And yet BuzzBallz has been doing the memorability work most of the sneering brands couldn't. The drinks room is trained to spot risk, not to spot the brands consumers are actually going to remember. Which quietly ensures the ideas most likely to break through into memory are the ones the room is least likely to back. If your distinctive assets are being shushed in the review, that's telling you something the room hasn't figured out yet.
4. What stays still is what gets remembered.
"It's really important to understand what is the bit that you are consistent about and what is the bit that you want to have fun with."
Alena Linhartova, Head of Marketing at HipPop
Absolut has kept the same bottle silhouette since 1979 and moved everything else above it — Warhol, Keith Haring, forty years of collaborations that keep the brand feeling current in whichever year you meet it. The silhouette does the memory work. Everything else keeps that memory feeling alive. Most drinks brands run this the wrong way round. They rebrand every few years and move the assets that should never move, while continuing to lean on the same category cues every competitor already uses. They move what should stay. They keep what should go. Then they wonder why nobody remembers the bottle from the year before.
5. Experience is the medium, not a channel.
"Experience shouldn't be seen as a reward. It should be seen as part of what the brand is, how the brand lives, and how the brand communicates."
Jason Dobson, Brand & Business Consultant
Most drinks brands treat experience as a reward: the pop-up when the launch lands, the brand home once there is budget, the influencer trip after a good year. All filed under Events on the marketing plan, first to be cut when budgets tighten. But the pour, the ritual, the bartender's introduction, the atmosphere the first time a drinker meets the brand — those are the brand. Not the reward for being a good brand. The thing that gets remembered later, and retold when the drinker is next choosing what to order. The moments a drinker remembers ARE the brand asset.
One observation kept surfacing across the hour. The category has quietly agreed on what a drinks brand is supposed to look and sound like: craft, heritage and premium, plus some family or vineyard variation on the three. The agreed version has become the safe version, and it stays safe because it is the same as every other version.
Everything memorable in drinks lives outside that agreed version — the founder obsession the room finds too specific, the bottle silhouette a rebrand wants to move on from, the format the industry shushes, the shelf-side hesitation the dashboard can't see, the moment behind the glass the marketing plan filed as Events.
If your next brief has none of those in it, someone in the meeting should ask what the plan for being remembered actually is.
Watch The Lock-In on demand via the link below.
