Brand Advocacy Needs A Shake Up

Brand advocacy in it’s essence is meant to support the on-trade, create loyal fandom and as a consequence grow your brand. It’s about creating relationships so strong that customers become your ambassadors.

Somewhere along the way, it’s become about serving brands own agendas

Today, advocacy often looks the same wherever you go: carefully curated guest lists, trips to brand homes, beautifully told provenance stories, and content designed to look good on social feeds. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but in a saturated drinks world, where most brands have a cookie cutter approach, it’s no longer enough.

Bartenders don’t need another origin story. They need advocacy programmes that actually help them do their job, build a career and thrive in the industry.

The Saturation Problem

Today, the drinks industry is noisier than ever and so incredibly competitive. Bars are exhausted by oversupply and menus are battlegrounds. Every spirits brand has a heritage story. Every liquid has a reason for existing. Every campaign claims authenticity.

In that environment, we feel brand-centric advocacy struggles to land. Not because bartenders don’t care but because brand narrative, unless incredibly unique, is ten a penny.

Most bartenders are time-poor, under pressure and increasingly burnt out. If an advocacy programme doesn’t deliver something practical or genuinely useful, it becomes background noise. We’ve heard from so many bartenders that advocacy efforts are out of touch and uninspiring. And it’s no wonder, as many agencies that develop advocacy projects have many degrees of separation from the trade.

In a crowded market, utility beats narrative every time. So let’s explore what this means practically for your brand.

Advocacy has drifted from its core mission

Advocacy mainly has good intentions: education, community, skill-building. But much of it has drifted into what we call marketing performance.

We see programmes measured by:

• Who was invited
• How exclusive it felt
• How good the content looked online

Less attention is paid to what actually changes for the bartender afterwards and it’s reach.

Did the bartender upskill?
Did it improve confidence?
Did it help someone progress, earn more, or stay in the industry longer?
Did it help connect people outside of the brand?

If the answer is no, then the advocacy may have served the brand, but not the trade.

The top 1% problem

Another uncomfortable truth: a large amount of advocacy is built for the same small group of bartenders.

The competition winners.
Top 50 Bar teams
The well-connected.
The names brands already know.

This creates a closed loop. The same faces are developed, elevated and rewarded, while the majority of bartenders, the ones keeping venues running day to day, are excluded.

If we genuinely care about the future of the on-trade, advocacy can’t just cosy up to the the top 1%, it needs to focus on the wider talent pool to help raise the bar, now more then ever given the challenges in the bar industry since Brexit.

A more democratic approach doesn’t dilute quality. It strengthens the entire ecosystem.

What bartender-first advocacy actually looks like

The shift required isn’t complicated, but it does require brands to change perspective.

Modern advocacy should start with a simple question:

What does a bartender actually need right now?

More often than not, the answer isn’t another brand centric actrivity.

Bartender-aligned advocacy focuses on:

• Transferable skills that work across venues and brands
• Practical training that improves speed, confidence and consistency
• Career development, not just product knowledge
• Support outside the bar, not just activation inside it
• Developing community, outside of the top 1%

This could include category training (where you present your brand among competitors), financial literacy, mental health support or community based activity thats consistent rather then one off.

When advocacy helps bartenders thrive professionally and personally, brand affinity follows naturally.

Patrón currently deliver an excellent training activity for the trade whereby they educate bartenders on how additives affect flavour and how to work with different tequilas (not just their own). We have heard from bar teams these sorts of sessions have a fantastic turn out because they are training outside of their brand world.

3 Questions To Ask About Your Advocacy Programme

Now not all advocacy programmes have the same objectives and we understand that there is a time and a place for focusing on the top players and pushing brand first.

Thats said, we are seeing too much cookie cutter advocacy.

So, to keep a wide lense in the strategy stage of planning, we have come up with these 3 questions to ask of your programme.

1. Does this improve a bartender’s working life?

In practical terms, not theory.
Does it make service easier, faster or more confident?
Does it build a skill they’ll still use if your brand isn’t on the back bar?
If the value disappears without your logo leading the story, it’s probably brand theatre, not advocacy.

2. Is this accessible beyond the top 1%?

Good advocacy shouldn’t just reward the already successful.
Can everyday bar teams realistically access it?
Does it develop broad capability across the trade, not just competition winners and familiar faces?
If the same names keep appearing, the programme looks impressive but changes very little.

3. Does this build trust, not just visibility?

Real advocacy compounds over time.
Does this create an ongoing relationship rather than a one-off moment?
Would bartenders still value it if there were no campaign attached?
If success is measured mainly by attendance or content output, you’re optimising for visibility, not loyalty.

A necessary reset

If advocacy is to remain relevant, the industry needs a reset.

Brands must move:

• From visibility to value
• From exclusivity to access
• From brand worship to industry service

In a world full of stories, usefulness is the real differentiator.

Brands that want to win from in advocacy need to go back to basics and start creating meaningful relationships. To do this, you need to focus on your customers pain points and help to ease them. So think about how you can put the bartender as the main character of the story, rather then your brand.