Robin Robinson
Whiskey is in the mainstream now, and the whiskey industry is different from most other industries in the world. That said, some concepts are universal. Whether it be whiskey or tech, consumers tend to purchase products from brands they know, understand, and trust. If a customer feels like they can relate to a company's brand or appreciate the uniqueness of their product, they are more likely to become loyal customers and even advocates for that brand. In order for a brand to achieve this, they have to dig deep and define the truths of who they are. They need to use those truths to preach their gospel to whomever is listening. They need to be honest, they need to be smart, they need to be funny, and they need to be self aware. They need to make something great. A seed from which life can grow. A brand won’t survive without a great product, and the product should be an expression of the brand.
Robin Robinson is a whiskey consultant. He serves on the faculty for Moonshine University, teaching a two day route-to-market class, and he wrote a book (The Complete Whiskey Course: A Comprehensive Tasting School in Ten Classes). But despite his immense expertise, whiskey wasn’t always his life. Back in the 1980’s, Robin was working as an actor in New York City when he was hired to impersonate a Scottish distiller and do a tasting of single malt whiskies for a private dinner party. At this time, no one knew anything about the Scots, what a distiller was, or even what a single malt whisky was. Robin was no different. He liked whiskey, but knew very little about it. He studied up as much as he could, using pamphlets and magazines that were provided to him by the host.
“For four hours I got over on all of these people up on Park Avenue, convincing them that not only was I a scotch whisky distiller, but I was OBE, Order of the British Empire … just nothing but bullshit. But I absolutely fell in love with scotch whisky. The next morning I went out and bought the first bottle I had ever bought in my life. A bottle of twelve year old Macallan.”
This sparked a long term obsession for Robin, but he didn’t dive right into the industry from there. In the early 90’s, he left show business to work in Silicon Valley. He used the skills he had developed as a performer to shape his ideology around storytelling and brand differentiation, and applied them to tech sales. After all, an actor is a brand. They are selling themselves. Tech wasn’t so different. He needed to help these companies effectively communicate what made them unique, trustworthy and effective. While he was hocking B2B technology systems, he continued to seek out new whiskies to taste and add to his collection. In the early 2000s, a friend of his, a third generation distributor, suggested he leave technology and get into the spirits industry, a move Robin had never considered. His friend arranged a connection with a small start up company called Compass Box.
Compass Box, a boutique artisan scotch whisky blender, wanted to transform what they saw as the most underutilized role in the industry, the brand ambassador. At the time they were mostly just presenters, party people, and educators, but Compass Box believed that if you could put a real salesperson in that role, who was capable of doing all those other things, then that person could change the whole industry. Robin became their national brand representative, and he toured around the country working with distributors, retailers, bartenders, and consumers.
In 2015, he started his own consulting company, Robin Robinson LLC, focused almost exclusively on small start up brands.
“I saw the boom happening in the early 2000s. Right around 2010 is where we really started to see a mushroom cloud. Interestingly enough, that sort of coincided after the financial meltdown. There was an enormous amount of refugees from the financial sector, which ended up giving an enormous amount of life to craft whiskey. I thought at the time … that they were going to change the face of the industry. They were going to change how we drank, they were going to change how we think about whiskey and how whiskey’s made. All of the opaque traditions of whiskey were now going to be blasted wide open for inspection, scrutinized and questioned. I found it tremendously exciting.”
Robin believes that whiskey has broken into what he calls “the third tier.” The first tier, he explains, is the avant garde. People who are willing to take risks in search of something new. These people are the beginning of any movement. Once they latch on to something, and get excited about it, that concept can move into the second tier. The second tier are the influencers. These people pick up on the avant garde and magnify it. They become the evangelists, spreading the word and advocating for the product. The third tier is when something crosses over the top of the bell curve and into the mass public. Over the last several decades, whiskey has been making this journey. The fact that the rise of whiskey has coincided with the rise of the internet has certainly helped the cause along. Now it’s on everyone’s mind. People want to know about it. They want to be a part of it. Whiskey emerging into the third tier, and being respected and consumed in the same manner as wine, is what laid the foundation for the craft whiskey movement in America to flourish.
Robin’s goal is to help small craft distilleries become a part of that whiskey movement. He only takes one or two clients at a time and bills himself as a sales and marketing consultant. He performs a business survey of everything a brand is doing and where they are going before he will take them on. Many craft distillers are solely focused on their process and their spirit, with marketing as an afterthought that can feel like a four letter word. Robin’s process requires distillers to be vulnerable and honest, and that often means helping them get their own egos out of the way. Robin is not afraid to be up front and honest with his opinions, and will turn down a client if he feels there is going to be a conflict. He gives a lot of his time and advice up front for free in order to evaluate what the vibe is, because the relationship has to be built on trust.
Once Robin officially signs on to consult with a craft brand, he helps them structure their narrative, or ethos, as he calls it. What he is really helping them search for are their inherent truths. What separates them from every other brand on the shelf? Ironically, while looking for ways to differentiate themselves from their competition, many craft distilleries wind up using the same tactics in their marketing. They lean on the words like “terroir,” a word Robin doesn’t believe applies to whiskey due to the manufacturing process it goes through. They bill themselves as grain to glass or attempt to define distillation on their website as if they are remaking the wheel. Robin says that it’s not a problem to fall down a rabbit hole, but distillers are falling down the same rabbit hole as all the other rabbits.
Robin gets personal when helping a brand find their story. The hard work and challenges a person/people struggle through to bring a brand to life can be ugly. But the process in which they overcome these hardships to create something for others to enjoy is what truly makes them special. It’s human and speaks to something universal and emotional to forge a real connection.
“That’s where people buy things. We buy things using the same chakras in the bottom of our beings. We don’t buy things from an intellectual level. We buy from a security level... I always think of great whiskey like great sex. It’s a completely personalized pleasure center. If you can touch that realistically and honestly, and not layer on the titlation bullshit of sex, but really the emotional satisfaction of sex, then boom! That’s where you’re really differentiated. That’s where you make the distinction.”
Once the story has been established, it needs to be articulated differently, depending on who’s listening. Who is the audience and what are they dealing with? There are people on the wholesale level that need to hear something different than the retailer. Within retailers, your big corporate giants like Total Wine are going to need to hear something different than a mom and pop store. Bartenders, whether they are elite level “startenders” or at a Jersey shore pump and dump kind of place, all need to hear the story in a specific way. And we haven’t even mentioned the consumer yet. Robin uses the visual of a house with many windows and doors as an analogy, representing the different points of view that can draw people into the same place.
Distributors like things simple. It has to be wrapped in a good story, and give them three fact-based elements that are easy to remember and communicate. It’s important to remember that the salesperson has a job to do. Bartenders are more personality based. They’re going to want to know more about what the product is like. The elite bartenders are also being inundated by every other brand out there that wants them to be an influencer for them, including the upper tier brands that have the money to out incentivize smaller brands. Consumers will pretty much love anything that you tell them, tying back to this concept of whiskey being in the third tier. Everyone wants to know about it and everyone wants to be a part of it, but they will be able to sniff out the bull shit in time. Unlike a distributor or possibly even a retailer, most consumers will not have an opportunity to have a direct relationship with a brand, so the story has to be compelling, relatable and most importantly, authentic. With the internet at everyone’s fingertips at all times, you better be telling the truth.
“Everyone wants to have you when you’re new, and you’re only new once. If you don’t take advantage of that newness, then you get exploited.”
A common pitfall for upstart distillers is listening to bad advice from distributors who push the idea that you should make three products and mass distribute them to as many markets as possible. The problem with that is that once your distributor sells to the retailers, their job is done. If you’re a big corporate entity with deep pockets, maybe that is an effective strategy, but for craft distillers it will drain their wallets while their product depreciates. If you have hundreds of points of distribution, you most likely don’t have the money to service every retailer with market support that will help communicate your brand story. Without that support, bottles wind up sitting on the shelves and retailers won’t reorder them.
“My whole thing is ‘nobody cares.’ Nobody cares how brilliant you are. Nobody cares what it’s smoked with. Nobody cares until you make them care. You gotta make them care.”
Robin also suggests going to market with three products, but only in markets where you can afford to provide support. You need to own your own backyard. Not only will the area around your distillery be the easiest and therefore most cost effective place to push sales, but it’s where the low hanging fruit is. People are more likely to support something from their hometown than from somewhere else, because your brand is already inherently relatable by virtue of sharing that common place. Start with them. They become influencers who can help your brand grow over time.
So now you have your story, and you know you have to communicate it to different people in different ways. You have to think wisely about distribution, and develop a strategy that will educate consumers and turn them into evangelists for your brand. Robin has one word for how to accomplish all this. Humor.
He references the famous Nirvana lyric from Smells Like Teen Spirit, “here we are now, entertain us.” Whiskey is in the entertainment business. If you’re entertaining someone, then you can slip in some knowledge here there. That person can then share those little pieces of knowledge at a barbecue, or maybe more fitting to our times, a zoom meeting, and feel like the smartest person in the room.
“When I was in software, I was with these small Silicon Valley companies, and we were up against Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP, and they had already defined the marketplace… How do you get your message in there when someone else is dominating the marketplace? You get in there by being honest and funny without being jokey. When people hear that, then they ascribe to you elements of sincerity and trust. That’s exactly what you’re looking to do. Then you can change the conversation. Now it’s not about that big mass market messaging anymore, it’s really about the quieter truth… That’s what people are missing.”
Since the outbreak of Covid-19, Robin’s consulting calendar has cleared out quite a bit, but he recently started a podcast called Whiskey And …, where he uses whiskey as a backdrop to speak with guests about non-whiskey related topics that are important in the world today, like racism and antisemitism. The pandemic has been devastating to the craft spirits industry, with profits dwindling and the threat of shutdowns looming across the country. The pain is real, and Robin feels for a lot of his friends who are struggling through it, but he believes it could also be healthy for the industry in the long run.
“[American Craft Whiskey] was a great force. It’s absolutely transforming what has happened over the last twenty years. [Right now] we’re all sticking our hands into a black curtain, and we have no idea what we’re feeling on the other end of this, but it’s going to come out. It’s going to come out in a different form with not as many players, but I think it’s going to be stronger.”
We asked Robin, “Who has a better chance of surviving? Someone with a strong product or a great story?” He says it’s all about execution. There are a million incredibly gifted actors that you’ve never heard of. There are thousands of small tech companies that never saw the light of day. Now, more than ever, craft distillers will need to be smart in how they build their brands, because with over 2,000 distilleries in this country, and a sea of labels on the shelves, no one will care unless you make them care. So you better have a good story, built on honest truths. One that people can connect with from the root of their being, whether they are just looking to get a job done, or are desperate to be a part of it. You better be strategic in how you grow. Plan to be in it for the long haul instead of shooting for the moon, and come by it with humility and humor. A strong product is a good start, especially if it reminds you of great sex, but your chances of getting lucky are a lot better if you’ve mastered the art of seduction.