For any brand looking to engage with the on-trade, advocacy is fundamental. Beyond the obvious benefit of introducing your products to the people who you want to make drinks with them, if done correctly it can give a brand something far more valuable – a sense of community.
When it comes to trade advocacy, Coca-Cola-owned Schweppes has been busy. Last year the brand
announced a full roster of ambassadors at both individual market and wider regional levels. Now, the mixer brand is swinging for the fences with a line-up of bartending galácticos to launch its new advocacy platform – Schweppes Pioneers.
“People relate to people more than they will relate to the brand,” says Millie Tang of De Vie in Paris.
“Chefs in the food industry have been so influential for a long time and I think the same kind of thing is
starting to happen with drinks. It makes for a more collaborative experience – rather than advocacy coming from within a brand or from a company head, it can be a collaboration between the brand and industry leaders. We’re developing training modules, two each based on our strengths, which will then be disseminated to local regions and ambassadors who will be able to give a more targeted educational approach for their markets.”
The modules created by each of the Schweppes Pioneers will form the foundation of the advocacy programmes delivered by country brand ambassadors to bartenders of all levels in Schweppes markets around the world.
Tang’s modules will focus on drinks photography and highball garnishes; Iain McPherson, owner of Panda & Sons in Edinburgh, will focus on freezing techniques and temperature; Simone Caporale, co-owner of Sips in Barcelona and the recently-announced Montana in Hong Kong, has created modules on vessels and menu development; while Vasilis Kyritsis, co-owner of Line and The Clumsies in Athens, will focus on colour, balance & carbonation and the circular economy in bars.
“As an advocacy platform, there will be a toolkit which can be mixed and matched,” says McPherson. “Every market is so different so, that flexibility for the brand ambassadors to be able to tailor the educational content to their region is so useful.
“One of the reasons that I have turned down other offers like this from spirits brands is that once you work with a bourbon brand, for example, you can’t use any other bourbons, but with Schweppes we can use
any spirits so it means we can be a lot more flexible and accessible.”
Clear logic
The element of accessibility is fundamental to how the platform could succeed or fail, but the logic is clear - bring together the industry figures with the furthest reach and have them develop education around the
most affordable element of their menu.
“Almost every bar in the world stocks soft drinks so it’s important for the category to engage with bars,” explains Caporale. “But also, it’s important to develop drinks even without alcohol. Taste is the most important thing for a drink and if a soft drink has a meaningful taste, I value it as much as the most
expensive bottle of tequila. We all have access to the same bottle of Schweppes tonic water but it’s the
application of it which is valuable, that’s why it’s so useful for training purposes.”
And as Kyritsis explains, there’s never been more demand for high-quality, lower-abv drinks in bars than right now.
“The lower-abv trend is huge now so there are a lot of benefits to focusing more education around soft drinks,” he says. “It’s important for the industry to be able to create amazing cocktails that are full of flavour, creativity and identity but with less alcohol. The more bartenders you inspire, the more different points of view will be approaching familiar products. It’s exponential. We’re all always learning – last year we did a Schweppes competition in Greece and I got so much inspiration from the judging process that afterwards I went back to Line and came up with two or three ideas drawing inspiration from the competitors. That exchange of ideas and inspiration is what we’re looking for.”
