Walking Away With the Wrong Lessons
Thirty-plus years of conflating alcohol's success with our own
Looking back at past recessions, the beverage industry’s resilience created a dangerous complacency. Because alcohol weathered the hard times (the dot-com bubble, the Great Recession, and the pandemic), we walked away with dangerous fallacies.
For decades, the “good times” of booze business masked faulty logic and “prayer-based” marketing. We thought we were making good choices when it was simply a matter of having the wind at our backs. This is what writer Annie Duke calls resulting, our tendency to judge the quality of a decision based solely on its outcome.
Among the false lessons we learned:
Alcohol is recession-proof. 💪
Double down on tradition, legacy, and heritage because that has always worked in the past. 🎩
Celebrity clout is a permanent competitive moat. 🤩
The current market correction lays bare today’s realities:
Consumer values change faster than production cycles. 🛒
Brands must constantly evolve or face retail delisting. 🚨
Data-driven strategy must replace “gut feeling” and hype. 📊
The “liquid” and/or brand must solve a specific problem. 💡
Velocity must justify shelf space; distribution without demand is just expensive warehousing. 🚚
Wellness and non-alcoholic categories are now part of the pie, and increasingly important. 🥧
These changes needn’t represent a wrecking ball, but they do follow the same course as a pendulum. This one is likely far from reaching it’s extreme position.