How to build a distinctive whiskey brand that sells

We compared more than 200 distilleries across Ireland and the UK. Barely one in ten had an identity we considered genuinely distinctive.

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A good whiskey is not necessarily a good whiskey brand. The liquid may be excellent, the distillery beautiful, and the story perfectly true, yet the bottle can still disappear among a hundred others saying much the same thing.

Whiskey producers have an unusual branding problem. The category has a very strong visual and verbal vocabulary. Heritage, provenance, oak, patience, craft, copper stills, local water, and family history all help a product look and sound like whiskey. Unfortunately, they are also used by almost everybody.

If you are creating or rebuilding a whiskey brand, your job is not simply to make it attractive. You must give people a reason to notice it, understand it, remember it, and buy it. Here are 15 principles you need to consider before spending serious money on naming, packaging, or advertising.

1. Find out what your competitors have already said

Before you decide what your brand should stand for, find out what everybody else stands for. Look at the bottles. Photograph the shelves. Read the websites and advertisements. Record the claims, stories, colours, symbols, bottle shapes, prices, and language.

You will soon discover the obvious trends and conventions. A coastal whiskey will talk about the sea. An old distillery will talk about history. A new distillery will often talk about craft, independence, or doing things differently. Everybody talks about the casks. Almost everybody claims exceptional quality or a combination of heritage and innovation.

These conventions are useful because customers recognise them. The become a problem when familiarity is mistaken for distinctiveness. If 43 out of 50 distilleries already tell variations of the same story, as is the case in Irish whiskey, a better-written version of that story will not give you much territory of your own.

Study the category before designing the brand.

2. Decide what you want to become known for

This is the most important decision in the entire exercise. What do you want somebody to think when they hear your name?

Do not answer with a paragraph. If your desired association requires six adjectives, you have not made the decision.

Johnnie Walker has spent decades associating itself with progress. Jack Daniel’s owns a very particular idea of Tennessee whiskey. Maker’s Mark has built extraordinary recognition around the hand-dipped red wax bottle. These brands contain many stories, products, and messages, but the customer does not have to remember all of them.

New brands often try to compensate for low awareness by saying too much. They explain the founder, the place, the process, the barley, the casks, the flavour, and the philosophy at once. The result is usually weaker, not stronger.

Choose what you would most like to own in the customer's mind. Then make the rest of the branding help you own it.

3. Do not confuse a product fact with a brand position

“Triple distilled” is a fact. “Matured in first-fill bourbon barrels” is a fact. “Made using barley grown on our own estate” is a fact. Any of these might be valuable, but only if you can turn the fact into a reason to prefer the brand.

Distillers naturally become interested in production. Customers are less predictable. Some enthusiasts care deeply about fermentation times and cask provenance. Someone buying a bottle for a birthday may care much more about whether the recipient will recognise the name and whether £70 looks like £70.

Ask what the fact does for the buyer. Does it make the whiskey taste different? Does it make the product scarce? Does it establish authority? Does it create a story? Does it justify the price?

If not, it may belong in the technical information rather than at the centre of the brand.

4. Stop talking exclusively about yourself

Much whiskey copy amounts to a long description of the producer: Our family. Our barley. Our stills. Our water. Our warehouse. Our master distiller. Our dedication.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but it completely leaves out the person paying for the bottle.

People use brands to make choices about themselves. The bottle they bring to dinner says something. So does the whiskey they order in a bar, display at home, or give to a client. Some buyers want connoisseurship. Some want status. Some want discovery without pretension. Some want the reassurance of a famous name.

This does not mean writing sentimental copy about “our community of whiskey lovers.” It means deciding what role your brand can play in the buyer's life.

A useful question is: What does choosing this bottle allow the customer to say about themself?

5. Give the brand something competitors cannot copy overnight

Avoid building your entire brand around claims anyone can borrow:

Crafted with passion. Uncompromising quality. Inspired by our surroundings. Tradition meets innovation. Character in every drop.

A competitor can write all of those sentences tomorrow morning. Instead, look for assets you genuinely possess. An unusual production capability may qualify. So might ownership of a particular place, an established name, a distinctive founder, a recognisable flavour, an object, an archive, a ritual or a piece of culture with a legitimate connection to the business.

The best raw material for branding is often something that already exists and has been overlooked. Invented differentiation is expensive to maintain. Real differentiation gives the advertising something to work with.

6. Create distinctive assets before you need them

Recognition is built from repeated cues. The famous whiskey brands have accumulated them for decades.

Johnnie Walker has the square bottle, angled label, and Striding Man. Maker’s Mark has red wax. You can often recognise these products before you read the name.

A new brand has to start building it.

Your assets might include a bottle shape, colour combination, symbol, label structure, piece of typography, character, unique phrase, or graphic device. It needs to be something that can become strongly associated with you.

Do not expect one exposure to do the work. Recognition comes from repetition. That is why continually redesigning a young brand is particularly foolish. You keep resetting the customer's memory.

7. Design for the shelf, not the presentation

Packaging looks different in a design presentation from the way it looks in a shop.

The presentation gives you a giant rendering on a clean background. The shop gives you three feet of shelf space surrounded by competitors.

Always judge the bottle in company. Put it beside the brands it will compete against. Look at it from six feet away. Cover the names. Reduce the photograph until the details disappear. Which features remain identifiable?

Whiskey packaging contains a lot of inherited elements: cream paper, tall bottles, signatures, crests, age and craft statements, curved typefaces, and illustrations of stills. 

A handsome bottle that doesn’t stand out isn’t doing enough work.

8. Make the price visible

Price changes what people expect from branding.

A £25 whiskey can look straightforward and accessible. At £40, the customer expects more evidence. At £250, everything comes under inspection.

The liquid cannot explain the price while the bottle is sitting unopened on the shelf. The name, packaging, materials, presentation, and unboxing experience have to make the figure plausible.

Do not assume this requires more decoration. Heavy glass, gold foil, and wooden boxes have become clichés in expensive spirits. Sometimes restraint looks more expensive precisely because so many competitors are trying visibly hard to look luxurious.

There is a simple test. Show the bottle to people who do not know the price and ask them what they think it costs. Do this before ordering 20,000 units.

9. Give people a reason to choose you over a famous name

Unknown whiskey brands have a difficult problem. The customer may be looking at your £45 bottle beside Jameson, Bushmills, Glenfiddich, or another name they already know.

Familiarity reduces risk. But trying to look like the category leaders will only reinforce their branding, not yours.

You have to supply another reason. Being “premium” or “small batch” won’t do it. Those descriptions have become common.

You may offer something a large producer cannot. Maybe an occasion that has been ignored. Your flavour might appeal to a particular preference. Your design might make you the obvious gift. Your brand might appeal to people who deliberately avoid the obvious choice.

Whatever answer you choose, make it visible. Do not hide the principal reason for buying the product halfway down the About page.

10. Make the name earn its keep

The whiskey category contains a large number of names involving old men, historical figures, geographical features, Gaelic words, dates, animals, and references to oak.

Do not add another because it sounds appropriately whiskey-like. A good name is easy to recognise, remember, and say out loud for a wide range of global customers. It should not be easily confused with another bottle. It should give you something useful to build upon.

There is also a practical test that branding committees often overlook: can somebody order it in a noisy bar?

If customers cannot pronounce the name confidently, bartenders mishear it, and nobody can remember how to spell it, the brand starts every transaction with a handicap.

A trademark search tells you whether you may use the name. It does not tell you whether you should.

11. Own an occasion

One of the easiest ways to strengthen a brand is to connect it with something people already do.

Jameson has spent years encouraging a simple Jameson, ginger ale, and lime serve. This makes the product easier to order and gives the brand a repeatable place in social drinking.

Your opportunity may be different. The whiskey could become a particularly good gift. Maybe it belongs after dinner. Or it’s the bottle people bring to a gathering. It could even suit beginners, or serious enthusiasts who enjoy discovering unfamiliar distilleries.

The narrower choice can sometimes produce the larger brand because it gives people a clear reason to remember you. Do not merely ask what your whiskey tastes like. Ask when you would like somebody to think of it.

12. Write advertising about an idea

A great deal of whiskey advertising consists of a beautiful bottle, dramatic lighting, and a paragraph about maturation. It looks respectable because the whole category has taught us what respectable whiskey advertising looks like.

Advertising should build an association that belongs to your brand. If the campaign is about place, your particular place should matter. If it is about character, define the character. If it is about an occasion, show the occasion often enough that people begin connecting it with you.

Remove your bottle and logo from the advertisement. Could another distillery run it without changing the headline? If the answer is yes, you are spending money advertising whiskey.

Your objective is to sell your whiskey.

13. Repeat yourself more

People inside a company see the brand constantly. Customers do not. This causes endless unnecessary change. After two years, management is tired of the campaign. The agency wants a fresh idea. The packaging feels dated, and somebody proposes a new strapline.

Meanwhile, most potential customers have barely noticed the old one. If you have a distinctive asset, keep using it. If you have a useful position, reinforce it. If an advertising idea still has life in it, find better executions rather than abandoning the idea.

You are not trying to entertain the marketing department or help the branding agency win awards. You are trying to put something into people's memories and SELL YOUR PRODUCT.

14. Make every new whiskey strengthen the same brand

The first bottle is easy. Then somebody wants a reserve. A twelve-year-old follows. Then a cask finish, limited edition, distillery exclusive, and something created for travel retail. Without discipline, the range gradually becomes a collection of unrelated packaging projects.

Decide what remains constant, what communicates the difference between products, and make the hierarchy obvious enough that somebody can understand it without an employee standing beside the shelf.

The master brand should become stronger each time you add an expression. If every bottle uses a different colour, structure, illustration style, and story, you may be launching products while dismantling recognition.

15. Before approving the brand, remove the logo

This is one of the most useful tests you can perform. Remove the logo from the packaging. Remove it from the advertisement. Remove the company name from the copy.

How much of the brand is left? If the answer is “very little”, you have probably relied too heavily on the name to do the identifying.

Then ask another question: could your nearest competitor use the same words? If it could, rewrite them.

A successful whiskey brand gives the customer several ways to know whose bottle he is looking at and at least one good reason to choose it. Everything else is supporting evidence.

There’s more to it

Coming up with a distinctive brand takes more than a quick look at your direct competitors. We have created a proprietary brand intelligence platform. It allows us to compare hundreds of whiskey brands with their bottles, logos, promises, and customer reception. We use the insights to find your distillery’s unique opportunity before we start designing the brand. But this is special information reserved for clients of Coup.