How Cocktails Can Strengthen Your Brand in 2024

If you haven't started already, now is a great time to reset and consider strategies for 2024. Whether you plan to focus on increasing your on-premise listing, retail placement, or improve product recognition, expanding your cocktail recipe portfolio is a great way to achieve many of these goals.

Cocktails show consumers the expanded potential of your product. It also aligns with trends to more social consumption, an expanding taste palate among consumers, and a desire to bring home certain luxuries and crafts, such as mixology.

House cocktails are a great way to control your brand image and establish a baseline content library. Sourcing cocktails from bartenders and online mixologists (influencers) opens up other opportunities, including social media exposure and validation of your brand by a growing community of experts.

Having local on-premise relationships, and being featured on local menus is a great way to validate the need for retailers to carry your product. Alternatively, showing on-premise locations and retailers an active and engaged community of enthusiasts helps validate listings!

Some Recommendations:

• Keep it simple - a short list of easy-to-find ingredients and simple instructions. 

• Align to your brand - make sure the cocktail and the image fit your brand.

• Local tastes - consider your local audience's tastes: spicy, salty, smokey, fruity.

• Collaborate - encourage bartenders and bars to create and communicate your product.

• Visuals - photography is critical. Consider the set-up, lighting, and background. 

• One recipe, multiple formats - photo, video, TikTok, etc.

• Build a seasonal portfolio - have seasonal cocktails ready well in advance.

Once you have a good portfolio of recipes and content creator relationships, using those recipes is a strategic task. A few ideas:

• Social - amplify your recipes on-line, post, collaborate and report.

• Tasting rooms and events - Make sure consumers that experience your product leave with ways to use that product at home.

• Sales efforts: show retailers your community of engaged and authentic consumers, while using recipe portfolios as a simple way to educate on-premise bar staff on the opportunity of your product.