Insights on the new spirits consumer from Charlie Mitchell (CGA by NIQ) at Bar Convent Berlin reveal a polarizing on-premise market. While total visits have dipped by 3.4%, “high-tempo” celebrations are seeing a 5% surge in value. The most critical takeaway for brands? Recruit the Recruiter. Research shows that 4 out of 5 guests will change their drink order based on a bartender’s recommendation, and the average bartender influences 11,000 decisions a year.
As Bar Convent Berlin, Imme Ermgassen, Co-founder of Botivo, shared her 10-point summary for premium drinks growth. From securing placements in 38 Michelin-star restaurants to defining the “Yellow Hour” as a cultural ritual, Imme explained why credibility must come before awareness. We dive into her “Sticky Brand” philosophy, the importance of the “10-meter rule” for packaging, and why brands should promise pleasure instead of just “moderation.”
Who is the New Spirits Consumer? And How Can Your Brand Target Them Transcript
Charlie Mitchell (0:03)
Hey everyone. So, yeah, I’m Charlie, and I’ll be talking about the new spirits consumer: who they are, what they’re doing, where they’re going, and how you can target them. First, a couple of myths to bust: today’s spirits consumer is actually more likely to be male than female and, as you’d expect, younger than average.
People visit the on-premise sector—bars, pubs, clubs, and restaurants—for a number of reasons. Our sector is a broad church; it’s where we go to celebrate, commiserate, have fun, relax, and unwind. Globally, if you look at why spirits drinkers visit the sector versus the average person, the biggest over-index is for social reasons. Spirits drinkers go out to socialize, have fun, celebrate, let loose, and party more than anybody else. We should celebrate our drinks as a way of bringing people together to facilitate those consumer need-states.
Charlie Mitchell (1:25)
When we talk about the on-premise market globally, the first thing to mention is that it’s a bit of a shrinking market. There are fewer occasions now than a year ago—not by a lot, but we’ve seen a 3.4% decrease year-on-year in visits to licensed venues.
Underneath that, however, there are a few really interesting dynamics at play. First, the biggest trading days—those days when the most money is spent, like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and big sporting occasions—are increasing their share of importance. They are getting bigger and better, increasing their value by 5 percentage points this year. These are the occasions that are becoming critical when consumers choose to go out and spend money.
Charlie Mitchell (2:26)
While high-tempo event occasions are increasing in terms of spend and value, the overall volume of visits is shifting toward more routine, sedate, and relaxed occasions. This leaves us with polarizing dynamics at play. We need to understand these shifts if we want to know where to seed our brands, on what occasions, and through what rituals we should influence spirits consumers.
When we look at where spirits traditionally play, they dominate the big, purposeful celebration occasions. At these events, consumers are looking for drinks that are indulgent, a little bit different, and stand out. Their beverage repertoire increases, and they choose a wider range of drinks on those big calendar events.
Charlie Mitchell (4:14)
What impacts a consumer’s decision most on these high-tempo occasions? It’s the bartender. The bartender is critical to influencing consumer decisions because guests are actively looking for something different or recommended to them. To influence that decision journey, it’s about influencing the influencer and recruiting the recruiter. You need to be present to get bartenders to advocate for your brand.
Our global research shows that the average bartender in a premium-plus venue actively influences 11,000 drinks decisions per year. Four out of five guests will change their mind—even if they’ve already decided what they are going to drink—if a bartender recommends something else. It is a critical touchpoint.
Charlie Mitchell (5:43)
On those high-value occasions, consumers are looking for quality and premiumness. They want visual, new, and different drinks that are advertised in-venue. This is where large-scale activation really cuts through the experimental mindset. One brand does this better than any other: Aperol. Even if I blurred the logos, you’d all recognize it. They are relentless and consistent about being distinctive, recognizable, and iconic. They haven’t changed their serve strategy; they went big on the “perfect serve” until it became an easy-to-order ritual that consumers habitually choose, allowing it to successfully bleed into more routine occasions.
Those routine, sedate occasions—like a little treat at the end of the working week or a date night—are where the spritz and non-alcoholic drinks play incredibly well. On the other hand, more functional occasions like after-work drinks have traditionally been the home of beer. Beer does accessibility very well. Within the spirits sector, we’ve perhaps been a little guilty of overcomplicating things by focusing too much on distillation methods and premiumness, forgetting that products must remain accessible and easy to order.
Charlie Mitchell (8:34)
Spirits are fighting back by turning the spritz into a ritual. If you can craft distinctive, recognizable serves, you can build routines that interrupt purchasing behavior and stick over time. Part of that success comes from social-media-friendly, “Instagrammable” drinks. When consumers spend money on experiences, they want to buy social currency and show that they are having a great time.
Interestingly, we are also seeing the rise of “digital detox” or disconnection bars, where the focus is on putting phones away. Hospitality is a safe place to connect in real life, and a large majority of consumers find this concept highly appealing. Amazingly, the people who find disconnection bars the most appealing are the ones who use social media the most. It’s not an either/or situation; hospitality simply remains the ultimate place to disconnect from the outside world and connect with each other.
Charlie Mitchell (11:04)
In summary, our activations need to reflect the changing nature of the on-premise market. If those big occasions are becoming fewer but bigger and better, our marketing should mirror that. We need to understand the biggest trading days and ensure our brands are present.
When consumers intentionally choose to drink on those occasions, we need to offer them experiential activations, experiential serves, and a sense of fun. We need to recruit the recruiter by engaging bartenders, focus on highly visual serve strategies, and ensure our activations reinforce the real-world connections that hospitality is all about. Thanks for tuning in. Make sure to hit the subscribe button to keep up with the latest beverage alcohol industry insights from Park Street University.
Distinctiveness over Differentiation: Why Your Spirit Brand Must Stand Out Transcript
Joy Hallman (0:03)
Stranger and Stranger, we are 30 years young in this industry, with three studios in London, New York, and San Francisco, and roughly 36 of us. Over those 30 years, we’ve had the great privilege of completing 7,000 projects with one goal in mind: we make brands that sell themselves.
We make brands that get talked about. We make brands that start cults and hopefully, if we do our job right, win lots of awards, and occasionally become brands that get tattooed. That’s a sticky brand right there. That’s for life. As for what we do, we work across every type of spirit, and for us no two projects look alike. There’s always a different problem, a different opportunity, a new liquid, a new founder story. We design brands backed by celebrities and conglomerates. We design brands that come to us with books of information, and then we have brands that come to us with maybe one little scribble on the back of a napkin.
We build brands from scratch, like Laferte, or brands with centuries of history. For us, drinks are the job not the add-on. And what’s beautiful about that is when you study all the trends and look at the micro and the macro happening in the world, what’s going on in London versus Madrid versus New York are very, very different things. If you’re going to engage with an agency, it’s really important that they know the category. We’ve had the great privilege of practicing 7,000 times. That matters, because if you’re trying to create something new, trying to buck a trend, trying to engage a new consumer, you need to understand the category and when to break it, when to bend it, when to just poke and prod at it.
For us, there is one shared obsession: how your brand shows up in the real world. Not on a slide. Not in a mood board. Not in someone’s inbox marked “final final V9.” Truly, in the culture and the hands and the minds of consumers because people do not buy decks.
Joy Hallman (2:21)
They buy brands. They want to buy whatever makes them stop and stare and say, “That one.” For us, that’s the moment. That’s the measure. That’s where we win. So what I want to talk about is how we get to that point, how do we make a consumer stop and say, “I’m going to take that. I’m going to put that in my trolley”? At the end of the day, we’re selling ethanol and water in a pretty package at fifty quid. So what’s the moment that’s going to make them take it home?
At a high level, the way we approach that is through insight, instinct, and experience. You can have all the insights in the world. You can research your brand to death. But if you don’t have any instinct or experience guiding you along the way, it still won’t be compelling and it won’t necessarily build momentum in the market. Insight is what keeps us sharp. Instinct is what keeps us strange. And experience tells us when to trust which one.
Strategy, design, and production also need to be one single line of thought, because brands don’t come together in tiny little phrases, they come together all at once, or not at all. Verbal needs to meet visuals.Copy needs to meet contour. Form needs to meet feelings. Everything is considered. Strategy doesn’t live on the deck; it lives in the work. The brand is in motion. And if you do it right, that’s the kind of brand that makes decisions easier, names sharper, and ideas harder to ignore
Distinctiveness over differentiation. If you lead purely on insights, you might say, “I’m going to put a different brand in the market.” But if it’s not distinct on its own terms, if it doesn’t have something to stand on it won’t have pace and it might not stay in the market. We don’t chase different things, and we don’t chase trends. We want to build what sticks in memory, ritual, and reach. As Imme was saying, it’s that emotion, the idea that it lands in your gut before it’s in the cart. And hopefully it’s so impactful that it moves on shelf, on feed, and in someone’s head.
Joy Hallman (4:38)
What unites all the work we do is that we always look for and sometimes help create a really strong foundation. And this can come from the smallest of details.
We call it a kernel of truth. You can start with a liquid, an idea, or a scribble on the back of a napkin. But we’ll dig to get to the guts of the story, the ambition, the tension, the space you want to own. It’s not just about the white space; it’s about the edge within that white space that you’re going after. At Stranger, every brand needs to be rooted in truth. Even a brand new to the world, with a sourced liquid and zero backstory, can be rooted in truth. We just need to find it.
A truth can have a unique origin like the jungles of the Philippines for Don Papa. Or the Outer Hebrides for the Isle of Harris Gin. Or it could be the true American West — which isn’t California, it’s actually Kentucky. Or it can be a single ingredient, like peat, which the folks at Laphroaig are obsessive, meticulous, and deeply passionate about.
Or it can even be an island. We worked with LVMH to develop a Cuban rum in the style of the 19th century, and when we did our research we always talked to people, always dig deep it kept being referred to as the Isla del Cocodrilo: the island of crocodiles. And as you can see, the distinct shape of Cuba mirrors a beautiful crocodile. So we wanted to valorize the rum’s origin and connect it in a tactile, tangible way. What better way to do that than a custom glass mold that echoes that shape?
For us, all of these details are not just polish, they are the point. We want consumers to pick up the bottle, to touch it, to constantly engage with it. We’re trying to create moments of story, of tension. No brand should be one note. If it’s living on your bar, it’s going to be there for a year, depending on the whiskey. So let it keep telling your story, what your brand is about, what you’re promising, all of that emotion.
Joy Hallman (7:07)
At Stranger, we’re not precious. We take brands in all shapes and sizes. I always joke that we just want to work with good people, good products, and good briefs, and we get briefs in all shapes and sizes, from the length of phone books to a single one-liner.
A gentleman named Jeppe walked into our studio one day with a piece of fruit, a bergamot, to be exact. This is a good example of where pure research might lead you astray. If you were to research the bergamot and ask whether the modern consumer really knows what it is across all of Europe and the Americas, that research would probably say, “Please do not start this brand.” But Jeppe had a dream and a passion for this liquid, the recipe for which dated back over a hundred years. It was notably known as the drink of kings, and Italy is one of those places that’s very easy to fall in love with. What was also unique about his vision was that he wanted to benchmark it above everything else in the category to create the quintessential super-premium Italian liqueur.
The way we go about this is to do our research, start pulling inspiration, and begin building a narrative. Whether that’s the colors of the Amalfi coast, iconic brands like Acqua di Parma, the quintessential visual style of Italy, Greco-Roman tiles, or iconic typography we look everywhere. We can even take inspiration from the bergamot itself: cut in half, it’s quite lovely. We love that organic shape. Now, no consumer is going to consciously think, “Oh, they put the shape of a bergamot in the bottle” that’s not the point. We’re telling your story in moments. We’re not being literal. It’s those moments that create all the emotion.
Joy Hallman (9:03)
We then took inspiration from Greco-Roman reliefs and Venetian tile, which sit deep in the mind as Italian iconography.
This is an example of the very first pass we presented. You can see how the colors of the Amalfi coast, the textures, and the Venetian tile all come together. This is really important to us, we try to do the work so well that we can tell the story cohesively. And here is the finished pack. There were certain limitations in glass we had to work within, and of course the font needed sharpening, but the essence and soul of the brand was already there from the very beginning.
If we’ve done our job right, the brand activates consistently and tells the same story everywhere, it’s holistic in nature. We’re really passionate about that. The finished pack, the one the consumer holds or sees behind a bar, that has to cut through a sea of glass, is telling your story. The consumer has less than five seconds to make a decision, so we want to bake everything into it.
I’ll leave you with this: we leave nothing to chance. It’s a simple line, but something we at Stranger truly believe in. It’s the Stranger way. We bake the story, the strategy, and the emotion all into the pack.
There may be some of you in this room willing to give away your child’s college fund to finance your next dream. I literally take calls from people who sound like they’ve just had a cup of coffee and decided, “I’m going to make a tequila today,” with no idea how complex this industry is. So first, leave nothing to chance. The glass, the label, the closure: they all need to tell your story behind bar, on shelf, and in the hands of the consumer.
This world, this market, does not need another good gin or the next great whiskey. Give the consumer a story they can get wrapped up in and get lost in. Yes, you need insights — but you also need instinct and experience.
Look at all the insights you want, but sometimes your gut leads the way. Find people in this industry that you trust. Bounce ideas off them. Use their experience. Leverage who they are. Build a brand in truth, the kind of brand that people feel before they fully understand it. That’s how real brands work. No overthinking. No overexplaining. Thank you.
10 Key Drivers of Premium Drinks Growth Transcript
Imme Ermgassen (0:03)
I’m Imme Ermgassen, founder of Betivo, which is a non-alcoholic drinks brand. This is me and my co-founder Sam. We are a British non-alcoholic aperitivo. Sam created the liquid and still handmakes every bottle on Atlantic Farm in Hertfordshire. We’re in a real phase of momentum right now, and there are so many different types of people in the audience here. What I’m going to focus on is the brand-related drivers of growth, because we’re here to talk about premium drinks and premium drinks growth. I wanted to share ten overall takeaways that I’ve found really helpful, bearing in mind that when I started the business, I had zero background in building a business or understanding how the drinks industry worked. This was created with that in mind, for those of you who may have come in equally wide-eyed and trying to make sense of it all.
Imme Ermgassen (1:16)
This has been touched on already and I think it will come up again, because it’s probably the most important of all the ways you can build a brand. Whether it’s a Sunday reset like a Bloody Mary, or a pre-game moment like a Jägermeister, consumers are looking to buy into an occasion. They’re not looking to buy a bottle, they’re buying a feeling, a moment they emotionally connect with. So what is your drink? What’s the moment you’re selling? What’s the emotion? What’s the feeling?
At Betivo, we have a moment called the Yellow Hour, which for those of you who get the reference, is a play on the golden hour. It’s that feeling when you clock out of work, you’re with your friends, the sun is shining, and you’re easing into the free part of your day. That’s our spritz moment, our Yellow Hour. It’s what we go hard after in all of our communications. We want people to understand exactly when and why they drink Betivo. So define your occasion, and sell it.
The second big thing you learn as you move into drinks is that a lot of brands have very fragmented campaigns. They might do something over here around art, something over there around music, and something else around bartenders. Individually each element might look great, but collectively it’s fragmented. What I’ve come to realize is that unless you have a really consistent campaign running across multiple channels, something that holds it all together, very few people will understand what you’re trying to say. The reality is that any given person is likely to see only one or two of your ten touchpoints, not all ten. So if you can make all ten look and feel really similar, that’s when you achieve genuine consistency across on-trade, retail, and word of mouth. You need to build that mental availability.
A great example I’d point to is Perfecta, a matcha brand that’s really taken the UK and the world by storm. They’ve done an amazing job of showing up at every single touchpoint in a remarkably consistent way. It’s not just the green, it’s the playfulness, the fashion-forward energy, the youthful spirit they bring. You immediately know it’s them across every channel.
Imme Ermgassen (3:32)
Something a lot of drinks brands don’t think or talk about enough is that you’re not actually selling people a drink. The best brands out there are culture first, they’re selling a culture, not just a category. Look at Red Bull: they appear in extreme racing, they send people to space, they do whatever it might be, they’re not selling you a liquid. They’re selling you a promise and a culture. The best brands play to that.
Think about Guinness, for example. They took St. Patrick’s Day, an Irish cultural event and made it a European phenomenon. And it’s not actually about the drink. It’s about connection, culture, bringing people together, friendship. They’ve commandeered that, and they’ve become a brand that resonates way beyond the category, whether you drink alcohol or not. So play to culture, not just your category.
For us, Betivo is a non-alcoholic product, and I think most people here have had their experience burned in the past by products in this category that weren’t quite up to scratch. It’s a new category, and there are a lot of liquids out there that aren’t where they should be. One of the key things in the non-alcoholic space in particular is credibility. When you want to sell in the premium space, most marketing campaigns start with awareness — getting everyone to learn about your brand. But in the non-alcoholic space, there’s a stage before that: credibility. Before you even go out and tell people about your brand, you have to earn their trust, because people don’t yet trust the category.
For us at Betivo, that meant spending a lot of time seeding the product with the best bartenders, with food critics like Grace Dent and Jimi Famurewa, with sommeliers at Michelin-starred restaurants in London because these are people who won’t lie when a liquid is good. They’re not influencers you’re paying on social media. They’re genuine tastemakers, creators, and leaders of their craft. We had to go to those people first, use our initial stage to earn credibility from them, and then once they said wonderful things about how unique the liquid was, we amplified their voices in ads, in pitches for listings, in conversations with other Michelin-starred restaurants. We’re now in 38 Michelin-starred venues. Think beyond bartenders: who are the people whose careers depend on always telling the truth about quality?
Imme Ermgassen (6:10)
Beyond that expert-level credibility, there are also micro-communities. Around 25% of the people who discover our drinks do so through peer endorsement, not bartenders or food critics, but people within their own friendship groups. And as a small brand without the budget for massive activations, what you can do is invest in micro-communities. Whether it’s Lucky Saint with their run club in the UK and their pub space, or our support of the queer running community in London, which spreads across many different contexts and creates genuine cultural relevance with a consumer we feel strongly about, or supper clubs, or simply seeding free stock into the right spaces. Once you start showing up in those communities and talking to those micro-audiences, you get your product credibly in front of the right eyes and mouths through peer-to-peer connection.
I said authenticity, lead with authenticity and craft. Though craft isn’t for everyone, so you can set that part aside. For me, the key takeaway here is authenticity. A younger consumer in particular is looking for really authentic stories. In the non-alcoholic space, one of the persistent struggles is that most products are made in factories or fragrance houses. Consumers can’t visit the place where it was made, they can’t see the people who made it, they can’t see what went into it. It’s often shrouded in secrecy, and it lacks the transparency and authenticity that so many people, especially younger consumers are looking for. I think that’s one of the reasons Betivo has resonated: we have a farm, we have Sam and Licky and Fran who make it by hand. It’s those authentic stories and the absence of them elsewhere in our space that leave people feeling cold about the category.
So if you have stories to tell, they don’t have to be craft stories. It could be a founder story, a connection story, a friendship story, a passion story. If it’s authentic, people will feel it. And I genuinely believe that this generation can smell inauthenticity. Don’t just tell a story you’re not living.
Imme Ermgassen (8:31)
Making your brand sticky is something I always come back to. Yellow is our big thing, we have a Betivo sampling piano that opens up into a bar and plays music when we sample, and every single piece of our merch is yellow. But the most important point is that people mostly don’t read things. So what’s the one thing that makes you immediately recognizable? You can show our Pantone yellow to a lot of people in the UK and they’ll know immediately that it’s us the same way Perfect Ted’s green works for them. But stickiness isn’t just about color. It can be rituals: Aperol appears in practically every drinks presentation because everyone knows that red liquid and the serve. Beavertown and their glassware. Hendrick’s and the cucumber. These are simple, memorable elements of ritual that people hook onto and remember.
Pick one thing and go after it again and again and again. A piece of advice someone once gave me: once you think you’re bored of saying the same thing over and over, remember that your consumer probably hasn’t even heard it yet. Keep going until it feels almost crazy — because that’s what will make your brand truly sticky.
Imme Ermgassen (9:50)
This might seem obvious, but I still think it needs to be spoken about more: your packaging. For me, packaging is where 95% of consumers are going to encounter your brand. They’re not going to see it on socials. They’re not going to see it on a bar menu. They’re just going to pick up a bottle somewhere. And the key question is: how do you make it shareable on social media? If you’re speaking to a younger consumer, they are on socials constantly and they discover new things there. If your packaging is worthy of being shared, they will share it.
And when it comes to bottles in particular, don’t just design it to look good in someone’s hand. Design it to look good from ten metres away. Because most people are going to see it in a back bar or on a shelf, and if you can’t spot something recognizable from a distance, it’s going to get lost. We have a bright yellow wax top, for example, and people notice it from across the room and start seeing us everywhere which makes us feel much bigger than we actually are. Think about both dimensions: what does it say when you hold it up close, and what does it look like from far away?
Imme Ermgassen (11:04)
Promise something clear. Why are people picking you up? Corona makes you feel like you’re on holiday. Coke is about friendship and connection. Innocence is about health. You have to anchor your brand in a consumer transformation how is this going to make someone feel when they drink it, emotionally?
One of the problems I see with so many brands in the non-alcoholic space is that they make their promise moderation. And for me, that’s just not exciting. It’s not emotional. I don’t want to be promised moderation — I’m already moderating, that’s why I’m in the category. I want to be promised pleasure. I want to be promised health, sophistication, or joy. Whatever you hang your hat on, moderation is a boring promise. Think about what you’re actually promising people, because that’s what will make them pick you up — and that’s your real premium driver.
Finally, and this is one of the most overlooked things — so many drinks brands, especially those just starting out, are incredibly versatile. But to make their drink taste great or look good on a menu, you need three, four, five, or even seven different ingredients. And the reality is that most consumers simply can’t be bothered. They are time-poor and all they want to do is elevate their everyday experiences in a simple, accessible way.
So how can you give people the tools to serve your drink with one, two, or at most three ingredients ideally just a garnish on top? Because if it requires more than that, they’re not going to bother. You need theater without the effort. The more complicated your drink is to serve, the less it will actually be drunk. Keep it simple, keep it elevated, and make it easy for people to say yes.
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