7 Fundamentals For Successful On-Trade Marketing Activation

On-trade marketing activation is one of the hardest disciplines for brand teams to master.

But it is essential you do get it right. Drink brands are built in bars and to get noticed in bars you need to stand out, build unshakeable loyalty and provide real value.

The challenge with the on-trade is you need to appeal to two different groups – consumers and venue operators. Both have different wants and needs.

Where we tend to see drink brands get it wrong is from a lack of understanding or insight into how the on-trade actually works. We feel the big elephant in the room is the proliferation of “big” agencies creating beautiful strategies that don’t actually work in the bar world.

We heard a story recently from a brand manager at a very well-known gin brand that demonstrates our point.

They engaged an agency that works across several consumer product categories – automotive, finance, travel etc to develop a trade marketing strategy to drive the rate of sale in hospitality venues.

After months of creative work, the final presented strategy turned out to be something that would be almost impossible to operationally deliver in the on-trade. The work was stunning and innovative but the brand had to cut its losses and terminate the project as it would not have achieved the desired results.

This is just one example of how on-trade marketing must be steeped in a deep understanding of how bartenders and venues operate as well as being creative and engaging. One does not work without the other.

Below are 7 ways drink brands can win with their on-trade strategy.

1. Don’t Expect Your Customers To Do the Legwork

Hospitality venues are dealing with a world of pressures right now – economic, changing consumer behaviours and brands tending to invest less in venues due to industry struggles.

In addition, even in good times, running hospitality venues is incredibly challenging (our agency has previously owned bars and pubs), with razor-thin margins and a relentless need for standards and delivery.

As such, it is key not to create work for the customers you are activating for. Now this is not to say a collaborative approach is not important but wherever possible ensure your brand is shouldering the work to get this activation live.

2. Bartender Incentive Schemes

We will die on the hill of the critical importance that bartenders have in growing brands and the need for marketeers and brand owners to engage with them on a deeper level in their brand building efforts.

When creating an on trade marketing strategy be sure to include easy to understand and measure incentive schemes for the bartenders working with the activation day to day.

This WILL increase rate of sale.

The GB Bartending Report gave a big insight into the power of bartender recommendation with 91% of bartenders saying they recommend beverages on every shift”. Incentive schemes get your brand to the front of the recommendation queue.

3. Provide value

Remember that your brand needs to create significant value to the bars you are activating in.

What does this mean?

Well, we have seen so many trade marketing activations that are completely self-serving, with the drink brand pushing their own agendas and strategy.
The key for providing value is understanding what is important to your trade accounts you want to work with and finding ways you can provide this value.

This might be via serve strategy that offers high margins or POS that drives the rate of sale.

It could be making investments into the venues via training, brand takeovers or events.

Whatever your strategy looks like, demonstrate the venue front and centre and spotlight the value and upside to the hospitality venue you are supporting.

As is the common understanding with products or services – sell the customer benefits not the features.

4. Lean Into Cultural Trends

Consumers and the bar world are incredibly dialled into trends. Leaning into this to help devise trade marketing strategy that connects with consumers will help drive effectiveness.

So this could be flavour trends for serve strategy (looking at the data, Lychee is trending right now), serve trends (spritzes) or integrating wellbeing trends into advocacy programmes.

An example of a brand hitting this note is a pop up by Lillet, which saw the brand take over New York restaurant Boucherie. Here the brand leveraged the TV smash hit Emily In Paris in a way that made sense to consumers and attracted massive global attention.

5. Aesthetics win

“I want one of those”

This is uttered in bars all the time.

Great serves are not just about the taste, aesthetics play a major part in consumer choice.

We hosted a round table in November with managers from multisite national hospitality brands and a key insight was the power of aesthetic serves in driving the rate of sale – bespoke glassware, unique garnish and attractive liquid colour tone were all cited as drivers for serve rate of sale during activations.

Make your serves stand out aesthetically so engage consumers.

6. Keep it simple

This might be one of the most important aspects of effective trade marketing.

Ensuring your activations are simple for venues to adopt or facilitate is critical to their success.

Trade activation must seamlessly integrate into hospitality venues – if there are ANY challenges, no matter how small, you risk losing buy-in from the first step.

This is why, in our opinion, trade activation and serve strategy should never come from the boardroom – we have seen many strategies fail due to a lack of core understanding of how the on-trade and bartenders tick.

7. Engage bartenders at the ideation stage

You are not the customer. Remember this brand teams.

This is why we established our bartender panels and wider database of on-trade professionals.

There is just too much at stake to assume trade activation or advocacy strategy will hit the right note. Brands need to do more validation work ahead of any launch and really, we feel, bartenders should be engaged at the ideation stage.

The insights you will gather around operation challenges, consumer interest, ease of integrating activations into venues and how to achieve venue buy in will be eye-opening. We talk a lot about bartenders needing more of a voice in how brand develop their marketing strategies.

This is because it makes absolute sense – they are the customers, they will build your brand and they understand how their bars and customers operate.

If you want to discuss how your drink brand can win in the on-trade please get in touch with our team.