How to secure success for your beverage brand marketing - Comment

While doing Dry January this year, it occurred to me as I sipped on my non-alcoholic beer, tried matcha tea for the first time and generally did my best to be healthy, beverage brands of all sizes have a lot to learn from upstart brands – specifically from newer, challenger brand founders.

Much of my downtime at the start of this year involved discovering and sampling new and interesting non-alcoholic drinks. As I started to investigate them further, it struck me that many of their founders were making their personal stories the face of their brand. What was more remarkable was the success they were achieving.

One such brand is PerfectTed matcha, which since launching in 2021 and appearing on the Dragons’ Den TV programme – and then growing its sales by 434% in 2024 (way ahead of its closest competition) – has become the UK’s fastest-growing tea and matcha brand, according to North Star/Circana.

Another is non-alc beer brand Days, which last year achieved a 283% increase in sales; that’s three-times the growth of its rivals’ beer brands and 14 times the growth of the overall category.

In the case of PerfectTed, founders Marisa Poster, Teddie Levenfiche and Levi Levenfiche leverage their friendship and journey – which includes the trials and tribulations of being a start-up – and the sincerity with which they tell their story are central to the PerfectTed brand.

Meanwhile, Days founders Mike Gammell and Duncan Keith are equally forward-facing. Their personal stories underpin their ‘Scotland born and brewed’ proposition and are central to the brand, its positioning, tone of voice and marketing strategy.

For smaller upcoming businesses and challengers, a founder’s personal brand is their product’s brand. This means that the founder’s story is central and lends the brand true authenticity. As PerfectTed and Days’ successes go to show, authenticity is now a key consumer want.

The moral is simple: you don’t have to be big or famous to tell compelling and engaging stories – so long as the story you have to tell is good enough.

Now, let’s consider the difference in approach among many of the larger, more mature drinks brands with bigger marketing budgets and resources, and with sales targets and shareholders to satisfy. How many of these larger brands tell great stories with authenticity that makes them compelling and engaging?

The answer, I believe, is not a lot.

Take Heineken’s ‘Open your World’ campaign strategy, which ran for seven years from 2011. This was all about how ‘you must cross your border’ to progress in life. While the concept worked for Heineken for a while, the campaign’s success was undermined by its vagueness.

In other categories, a softening of the corporate brand and growing focus on the ‘personal’ is becoming apparent – consider Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recent ditching of his jeans and hoodie uniform for designer T-shirts and gold chains.

My point is that big drinks brands could learn a lot from start-ups and how they use authentic storytelling, showing the wins and near misses to capture the attention of consumers. As founders exit, larger holding companies are left as custodians of the brand, but many fail to really understand and connect with the story, let alone tell it well. Without a strong human and authentic brand at their heart, their message is simply diluted.

As PerfectTed and Days show, get it right and growth can be considerably impressive.