Eric Sampers spent 16 years with Pernod Ricard before breaking out on his own in 2019, founding the low-alcohol spirits venture, Illogical Drinks Co. Just over three years ago, he joined Brockmans Gin as global marketing director, leaving the business late last year. This comment article was initially posted by Sampers on LinkedIn. Head here to add your comments.
There’s a lot of doom and gloom surrounding the beverage alcohol industry right now, and the share prices of the major listed operators tell the story well: Over the last couple of years, the shares of the likes of Diageo and Pernod Ricard have fallen by half, reflecting poor sales performance in their key strategic regions. This has been attributed to an unprecedented shift in consumer behaviour in western economies and beyond.
What really annoys me (and many others), however, is the familiar narrative pointing the finger at young LDA drinkers to justify these negative results.
Yes, there are external factors impacting sales (the cost of living crisis, for example, which is hitting consumers’ wallets). Yes, moderation is on the way up (per capita consumption in volume terms has been declining for decades though, this is not new news – check your expensive data subscription services).
But these explanations fail to account for the phenomenal success several brands are experiencing with young drinkers and Gen Z in particular.
What do Guinness, Buzzballz, Au Vodka and the functional drink Trip CBD have in common? Not much you might think, but you would be dead wrong.
First, they are thriving in an adult beverage industry that is currently depressed. Okay, Trip isn’t an alcoholic beverage, but it’s certainly making a dent in the alcohol market. Secondly, these brands share solid common traits and patterns that explain why they’re proving successful with younger consumers and particularly Gen Z.
Guinness strikes gold – Post-craft coolness driven by genuine preference rather than marketing
Guinness is going through a formidable post-pandemic resurgence: from becoming the most popular pint in the UK in early 2023 to Diageo claiming at the end of last year that one in every seven pints served in London is a Guinness, while opening a GBP73m visitor centre and microbrewery in the heart of the UK capital.
How did that happen?
Gen Z has played a major role: Through social media, peer influence and personal experimentation, they’ve discovered that Guinness offers a rare combination of functional benefits, visual distinction, accessible sophistication and authentic heritage. And they’ve massively bought into it, turning their back almost entirely on the craft beers that millennials were craving.
Exit funky microbreweries & IPAs, enter the reign of Guinness.
Guinness has achieved what craft brewers have spent years pursuing: Organic advocacy from digitally native consumers who voluntarily create content, develop rituals and recruit peers.
Functional benefits? The moderate ABV of Guinness (4.1% in the UK) is frequently cited as a key driver for younger consumers who wish to ‘keep up with their mates and not die’. Visual distinction? The traditional two-step perfect pour of its ‘camera-ready liquid’ and the ‘split the G’ phenomenon are active rituals that young LDA drinkers can participate in and document on their social media, leading to a fetishisation of the stuff and a permission to socialise.
To them, Guinness feels both cool, authentic, reliable and ‘non-threatening’, is easy to drink, self-regulating and sophisticated. Guinness effectively beats the craft out of craft beers by removing all the complexity and snobbery that surrounded craft.
Buzzballz delivers on its name with brutal efficiency
These colourful and easily identifiable RTD cocktail spheres may have raised questions regarding responsible drinking and legal drinking age, but Buzzballz’ success with younger consumers is undeniable.
Since having exploded in the US, the brand has now reached Europe and the UK, becoming synonymous with ‘pre-drinks’ and ‘pre-party’; established occasions that resonate particularly well with cash-constrained young drinkers.
What Buzzballz excels at is ‘intentional functionality’: Maximum effect (speed) with minimal friction (portability), something that the alcohol industry can never responsibly promote but that Gen Z consumers and their matter-of-fact relationship with authenticity and product proposition value particularly.
Aesthetically, the Buzzballz pack is perceived as a ‘toy’ that triggers impulse and is an instant meme, functioning as a fidget-like object that’s highly ‘grab-able’ and instantly recognisable in low-attention environments (check out in US gas stations and UK convenience stores).
Its bigger insight is behavioural: The brand naturally invites short-form content because of its visual distinctiveness and user-generated content has inundated TikTok, bypassing the platform’s strict policies regarding alcohol advertising.
Devilishly inappropriate, borderline anti-ethical for the industry and brutally successful.
Au Vodka successfully bridges the gap between luxury and accessibility for a young audience
My other ‘real’ spirit example is also going to raise a few eyebrows among purists and those who think that what matters is inside the bottle.
In the on-premise, Au Vodka keeps building on the successful ‘bling’ trend that emerged a decade ago and that many had predicted would die. Instant flavour (easy and fun), instant party and instant status object.
Here again, intentional functionality strikes gold with its younger audience. The shareable moments provided by the brand in all its forms are far more important than connoisseurship to Gen Z. The golden bottle delivers party kit semiotics, amplified by social media content (ice, mixers and lighting function as props).
The liquid delivers fun and low-effort mixability. It’s party building ritual (occasion amplifier) and a social signal. Au Vodka’s extraordinary commercial success has been fuelled by Instagram-optimised aesthetics and accessible flavour profiles, dismissing any questions around its credibility as a liquid.
Au has almost positioned itself as the alcoholic equivalent of fast fashion: Affordable, visually appealing, functionally adequate and socially acceptable in specific contexts. No heritage cultivation, no collector mentality and no brand loyalty beyond convenience and price. This is disposable luxury, but it’s also brutally effective.
Trip nails the alcohol ritual replication without the consequences
While not an alcoholic drink, Trip continues to successfully challenge alcohol brands at their own game.
‘Calm you can hold’, ‘spa retreat’, ‘tiny, fizzy vacation in a can’… These consumer comments are better than superlative product reviews. They evidence why Trip has become an adult alternative to alcohol drinks by nailing a strong occasion; an alternative that keeps the ritual (ritualised calm), not the liquid (‘I still have a drink, I still wind down, without the consequences alcohol brings’).
Trip satisfies the desire for a treat that retains a clean feeling for the drinker afterwards. Imagine this with a social element to it and what we have is a scarily efficient proposition to challenge a huge chunk of the alcohol industry.
Trip provides a socially acceptable exit from habitual, low-energy drinking without requiring a sobriety identity or complete abstinence. The psychological hurdle for trial is minimal: instead of opening a bottle of wine or fixing a G&T, open a Trip. The ritual architecture remains intact.
With premium design aesthetics, low-calorie health & wellness credibility and premium botanicals territory, Trip is also a premium delivery format in the convenience space with emotional baggage attached to it.
A perfect contender to premium alcoholic drinks.
Recent data indicates that Gen Z’s alcohol consumption is normalising to levels comparable with previous generations. Yet the industry narrative remains stuck on ‘Gen Z doesn’t drink’.
These four brands didn’t accidentally stumble into Gen Z success, they are winning precisely because they’ve abandoned the industry playbook and the patterns are clear: Functional intentionality over discovery, ritual immediacy over education, social media currency, value transparency, accessibility/non-threatening simplicity over craft complexity. And convenience, obviously.
Cans have been completely normalised and adopted, even making their way into the on-premise; something unthinkable just a few years ago.
These new generational drivers are radically different from the ‘premiumisation meets craft’ strategy that added sophisticated complexity and niche product explosion, which was incredibly successful with the previous generation (Millennials). It feels almost like a U-turn on some aspects, but this generation of drinkers dictates the agenda and tells us what their expectations are and how and where to meet them.
The playbook needs rebuilding, not tweaking: updating the strategies, the touch points and delivering the innovations that matter. This is what our industry has always been great at.
