If You Don’t Want to Invest in the Market, There Will Be No Success in the Market. Guarantee It!

We at BevStrat get calls all day from suppliers and importers that want support in the market. They want selling support, marketing support, and distributor and market management. That is wonderful, all of it, and thank you for the calls.

The conversation takes a different turn when we talk fees, expectations, and goals.

The US market is a complicated beast. It requires time, effort, smarts, strategy, marketing, and most of all money. Unless you are P Diddy, Puff Daddy, or Sean Combs (and my kids say that is all the same person), you will need to invest money in the market to sell your brands.

The waste landscape is littered with great brands that hang their hat on quality. The success landscape is littered with average brands that hang their hat on marketing and sales.

Brands need to decide and the importer needs to decide what is a fair dollar amount to invest in brand success!

Brands from Europe, SA, Australia, NZ and China, etc. are so used to a DTR model (direct to retailer) model for selling that the 3 tier system is sometimes difficult to grasp. Each tier will take a cut, and thus raise the retail price, so your go to market pricing will be vastly different than your home country. Remember, that is still no guarantee that you will sell anything.

We are now in a selling world where commissions are high to sales teams, success fees are not easily accepted. For any selling team to accept and sell a brand, you will set aside money to support the brand. Period. End Stop. Finish.

Nowhere in that diatribe did I mention quality of the spirit, grape, or hops. Not once!

When importers and brand owners put marketing and sales on equal footing as quality, you will see brands start to take off from the craft and small batch perspective.

I know hundreds of suppliers, distillers, and brewers, and believe me I, Brian Rosen, BevStrat, etc are on your team. I am one of us. The cruel reality is that marketing will sell your brand, and sales will fuel your brand growth. Quality and craftsmanship will sustain your brand. I look at superstar chefs as a model. You can be Geoffrey Zakarian, a great chef, but if you do not buy google ad words no one will find your restaurant. 

Marketing will get them, quality will keep them! Fact. We need to enter the market with that mentality.

So to my supplier and importer friends, if you do not invest in your marketing and sales teams from day one, putting spendable money aside, there will not likely be a day 365.