How to build a distinctive premium whiskey brand

We compared more than 200 whiskey brands across Ireland and the UK. Barely one in ten had an identity we would consider genuinely distinctive. That is useful information if you are building one.

Most distilleries are fishing in the same small pond of ideas. Things like heritage, provenance, craft. Just take a look at the whiskey shelf and 5 of your competitors' websites, and you know what we are talking about.

If you want a more desirable brand, start by finding out what everybody else has already done.

Study the category until you are sick of looking at it

Before deciding on the name, story, bottle. or identity, put the competition in front of you. As many as you can reasonably find. Line up the bottles, group them by price, read the websites. Then look at their advertising. Write down their stories, colours, names, symbols, and all the things they claim make them special. Patterns appear rather quickly.

When we looked at 50 Irish whiskey distilleries, 43 were telling some variation of the same story around heritage, place and process. That does not mean you cannot talk about where you come from or how the whiskey is made. If you own a wonderful estate, by all means use it. Just don't expect the existence of an estate to separate you from everybody else who also has one.

The point of the exercise is to find the bits of the market where everybody has crowded together. Then stay out of them. If almost every premium Irish whiskey is solemn, heritage-heavy and dressed like a Georgian drawing room, perhaps there is an opportunity in doing something with a pulse.

You are going to have to take a risk somewhere

This tends to make people nervous. Good. There is a strange idea in branding that being different should somehow come without the risk of looking different. It can't.

If the bottle has to feel familiar to everybody, including the retailer, distributor, and the customer, you have already put fairly tight limits on how distinctive it can become.

The risk should be calculated. We are not suggesting fluorescent plastic bottles because nobody else has one. But there will usually be something about a strong brand that would make another distillery say, “I wouldn't do that.” And that is exactly the point.

Maker's Mark dipped the bottle in red wax. Johnnie Walker put the label on an angle. The important part is not to copy either of those things. It is that somebody once approved an idea without first asking whether it looked enough like everybody else's whiskey.

Being different for the sake of being different gets unfairly dismissed. Sometimes difference itself is useful. A bottle seen among a hundred others has to earn eyeballs first

Consider an unusual bottle design. Borrow from another category if you have to. Things can be elegant without looking ridiculous. More on that later.

Give the buyer a world worth entering

A great many whiskey stories tell me an enormous amount about the distillery and almost nothing about why I might want to belong to it. A local legend can be interesting. So can a dead king, saint, smuggler, giant, or whichever unfortunate historical figure has been dug up for the occasion.

But what does buying the whiskey say about me? This becomes much more important as you move into premium and luxury.

People use expensive things partly to express taste, identity and belonging. Sometimes that expression is public. Sometimes it is entirely for themselves. Either way, there is a person on the other side of the bottle.

Look at the best fashion houses, watchmakers, hotels or car brands, and there is usually a very clear world around them. You have some idea of the person who belongs there.

Whiskey can do the same. The world might be eccentric, austere, rebellious, scholarly, decadent, modern, obsessive, deeply Irish, barely Irish at all, or something we haven't thought of yet. It can have its own art, language, places, rituals, collaborations, and behaviour.

The customer should get something from entering it. A story about a mythical warrior who died in 643 is not a brand world. It is a story about a mythical warrior who died in 643.

Putting the price up is the easy bit

You can change £45 to £85 this afternoon. Nothing magical happens to the brand when you do.

Premium starts when the customer sees enough value to accept the higher price without having to be persuaded that you have lost your marbles.

The further your price moves above the market average, the more brand and trust matter. Price itself can create an expectation of quality, but the rest of the experience then has to live up to the expectation you have just created.

This is where an awful lot of “premiumisation” becomes expensive decoration. Get a heavy bottle, slap on some foil. "Black is premium, right?" And a carpenter is summoned to make a box.

Might end up looking beautiful. It just isn't a premium strategy.

Premium has to run through the entire business. From the photographs on the website, the retailer carrying it, how the box opens, and the paper inside, to the email after the order, the distillery shop, the tasting, and the language used by whoever answers the telephone.

Luxury buyers are particularly good at noticing when the expensive bit ends at the packaging. The invoice, email address, and even the hold music belong to the experience too.

If one part says £300 and another says £39.99, people will notice.

Limited editions have two competitors

Suppose your normal bottle sells for £45 and you are launching something at £250. Most distilleries compare the £250 bottle with their £45 bottle. Quite right. It needs to feel substantially more special. And that's where they stop.

What they forget is that the £250 bottle now also has to sit beside other £250 bottles. That second comparison is much less forgiving. You can create plenty of distance from your own core range and still arrive at exactly the same dark box, heavy bottle, brass plaque and numbered certificate as everybody else at £250.

So an expensive release has two jobs: It needs to justify the jump from the products underneath it, and it still needs to be more desirable than the products around it.

Scarcity does not rescue a dull idea either. “Limited to 500 bottles” has become so common that the words barely register. Genuine rarity can add enormous value. Manufactured rarity with a serial number is another matter. Your affluent buyers are quite capable of telling the difference.

Make a bottle someone would cross town for to look at

This seems to be the bit the whiskey industry occasionally forgets. The bottle is sitting on a shelf. Possibly beside 50 or 100 other bottles. Irish whiskey. Scotch. Bourbon.

Before anyone reads the tasting notes, learns about the barley or develops a deep appreciation for the significance of your local water source, you have a much simpler problem. They have to notice the bloody thing!

Go into a good whiskey shop and stand six feet away from the shelf. All the expensive design disappears into a soup of beige, burgundy, navy, and dark green. Why? Because too much spirits packaging is designed beautifully in isolation, usually by the same few people.

Here's what sells: Do the opposite. Put the first concepts in the middle of the competition. Make them small. Blur them. Cover the names. See what survives. A bottle can be elegant and still have presence. It can be restrained and strange. It can ignore half the normal whiskey cues and still hold £200 worth of liquid.

Please make something interesting. There are enough perfectly tasteful whiskey bottles already.

Premium is the result

You don't build a premium whiskey by adding premium things to it. You find something distinctive that the rest of the category has missed or ignored. You make the brand recognisably your own. You give people something they want to associate themselves with. You carry the same standard through the entire experience and, when you move further up the range, you look at the competitors waiting for you there.

Then the higher price starts to make sense. For some distilleries that means making a £45 whiskey far more desirable than the other £45 whiskeys. For others it means building a brand with enough gravity to sell comfortably at £100, £250 or considerably more. Either way, start by looking at the shelf.

There is a good chance your competitors have already shown you what not to do.

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