SHOWCASING THE WORLD’S FINEST PROPERTIES AND THE STORIES BEHIND THEM

The gentle art
of selling whisky
by Nielsen Dinwoodie

You might like your whisky straight, but curves define the experience. A re-charred barrel, a bulbous onion still, and the roundness of a rich, mature, glowing single malt waiting to be nosed and swirled in a traditional Glencairn tasting glass. (Shutterstock)

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Here’s a question I posed to a conference of high-flying salespeople one day in sweltering Singapore. “How do you sell refrigerators inside the Arctic Circle?” To humans, I explained, let’s not trouble the polar bears. Silence followed. Well, let’s think. A lot of sales wisdom revolves around the concept that people only ever buy two things: people buy people, and people buy benefit. So if your bright besuited smile isn’t enough to warm the inhabitants of the Arctic Circle, you’re left trying to sell a machine that keeps stuff cold when it’s minus 20F outside.

What those silent sales brains in Singapore forgot was to put themselves in the snowshoes of those specific customers. A refrigerator is exactly what those folks want: a machine that keeps food cold, not frozen.

The romantic trap

Back in my home patch of Scotland, on dark winter nights when a roaring fire and a glinting crystal glass might draw a dram from the decanter, I sometimes wonder what it takes to sell whisky. What makes it our biggest consumer export? The Scotch Whisky Association calculates that, every single second of every day in 2023, 43 bottles of Scotch were shipped worldwide. And home sales grew 18%.

What exactly is it that whisky customers want? And what are the tricks of the amber elixir trade?

Well, phrases like amber elixir for a start. Anyone who’s cast a casual glance at whisky advertising down the decades knows that the single most relentlessly applied motif used to generate the drink’s appeal is: romance.

 

Left: Archetypical advertising circa 1950s, no opportunity for romantic tartan and a swinging sporran left unturned.  |  Contrast (right) the informed narrative approach in 1964 when whisky drinkers were apparently thirsty for knowledge. Ads remain a pendulum of the times. (Alamy)

The romantic notion of Scotland is a whisky-seller’s dream. Oh, how we love to sit by the embers in thrall of our glowering purple mountains, all suffused with grandeur and melancholy, a weepy dram saluting the victims of the Clearances after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, when the clan system suffered dismantlement and the bagpipes and the plaid were outlawed for 36 years by the English. Not that we spend every Tuesday skirling at home ourselves. Scotland is a modern, vibrant, massively entrepreneurial nation. But murk, mire and swirling mist is a powerful tool in the hands of the adman. The only trick is to stop short of full-tilt Brigadoon.

The heritage reel

Of course, it’s the makers of whisky themselves who determine how their (ahem) liquid gold is sold. With 151 distilleries spread across the five natural food-groups of single malt Scotch – Highlands, Lowlands, Islay, Campbeltown and Speyside – and each one by law employing the same three ingredients of water, yeast and barley – the game of differentiating your brand from your competitors’ requires more than a soggy reference to the nation’s common history. This is where your individual heritage enters the fray.

Obviously the older your whisky brand, the more heritage you have to play with, and the more characters through which to sign your name in florid copperplate. Story-telling becomes story-selling.

 

With 151 distilleries – each by law employing the same three ingredients of water, yeast and barley – the game of differentiating your brand from your competitors' requires more than a soggy reference to the nation's common history.

Glenfiddich, that stalwart of Speyside, is a case in point. The brand’s website opens with Our History A Family Story, a faux-grainy film depicting founder William Grant and one bare-handed stonemason building a distillery from the ground up in the Speyside village of Dufftown in 1886. Cracked photographs chart the generational timeline of the Grants and the 130 years they’ve spent continuing the founder’s legacy to remain one of the few independent family distilleries left in Scotland. Stirring stuff. This is heritage marketing with brogues on.

Glenfiddich fans can thank this man in bronze for founding the distillery they favor. Along with his wife Elizabeth and their seven children, William Grant was progenitor of the longest continuous whisky dynasty in Scotland and the brand that today produces the biggest selling single malt in the world. True to the precepts of continuing success, in 2020 Glenfiddich undertook an exercise in renaming certain releases and redesigning the cosmetics of the appeal. (Alamy)

The landscape spiel

But what if your distillery can’t claim the slow drip of age? What if your archive library lacks the sepia prints of bewhiskered Scotch terriers in human form welcoming Queen Victoria from the royal train? Beyond the River Spey, distilleries must play a different card. Which is why so many enlist their surroundings – the unique geographies and geologies of place – as a central character in their own narrative of authenticity. And here’s another whisky marketing truth that’s more than a motif: authenticity is the one ingredient you cannot do without.

Phrases like maritime salinity, briny sea spray and smoky Hebridean peat sweep through the tasting notes on bottles from Glen Scotia, the gem of Campbeltown, to Lagavulin and Laphroaig on the coast of Islay.

Every single malt is born of the land that surrounds it. Local water, local barley for the cream of the artisanal crop. But these base ingredients are perpetually enveloped by the mysteries of weather and the elements. It’s a narrative that island distilleries robustly exploit, with rocky shorelines and tumultuous waves surfacing in language that transports us to the edges of taste. Phrases like maritime salinity, briny sea spray and smoky Hebridean peat sweep through the tasting notes on bottles from Glen Scotia, the gem of Campbeltown, to Lagavulin and Laphroaig on the coast of Islay.

vintage whisky advertising line for Laphroaig on white tile

Laphroaig has always challenged marketing logic. Its phenomenally phenolic peat delights aficionados, while others run in fright 200m down the road to the refinements of Lagavulin. Different water from different Islay burns is one point of difference. But it’s the medicinal peat that lets the ad lads grasp the nettle. (Alamy)

Arguably no distillery evokes the authenticity of place better than the Isle of Raasay. It has to, because the first spirit left the still here in only 2017. And when a brand has no history to speak of…

The miniature island of Raasay uses its isolation to the full. A 30-minute ferry ride off the east coast of Skye, it’s home to just 160 souls, of whom two dozen work for the distillery. Their average age is 30, and they are set to stay – a small reversal of the Clearances, and sign of the youthful reinvigoration of Hebridean life. The brand has made a mission of making its homegrown provenance its core identity. And here, they even make the language uniquely their own – you don’t down a dram of Isle of Raasay, you drink in a Draam. 

That coinage was spun by Scotland’s most celebrated advertising creative, Jim Downie, cousin of the co-founder, Bill Dobbie, whose 31-year-old son William Dobbie is Isle of Raasay’s MD. So here, as well as pounding waves and landscape, for customers seeking stories – as all customers are – is a whisky venture at the start of the heritage trail but burning an innovative beacon from where it sits.

 

The evening view from the Isle of Raasay distillery, towards the rugged Cullin Hills on Skye, one of Scotland’s most dramatic landscapes. When your location looks like this, it’s not hard to help people enjoy a glass of whisky. (Isle of Raasay Distillery)

“We respect tradition,” says William Dobbie. “Our island’s rooted in centuries of illicit distilling, but when we came to build our distillery we started from scratch. Likewise that’s why we chose to use three uncommon types of cask and both peated and unpeated spirit. That’s what makes a Raasay a Raasay.”

Other wiles

As all salespeople know, limiting supply increases demand. Yet oddly, that principle can operate in reverse around malt whisky today. As the 1980s ushered in two decades of relative affluence, distillers took the opportunity to promote the single malts they’d habitually sold to bottlers of blended Scotch for generations. In response to such re-adventuring, a stream of consumers and new hobbyists quickly flowed. The malt whisky craze was born.

It’s still forging ahead. Take Talisker. Coming a little late to the marketing party, before the early 2000s their only malt offering was their standard Ten Year Old. Today, an additional 13 different versions of Talisker fly off shop shelves. And, just to revert to the conventions of supply and demand, nearly half of those are prestige limited editions. Age statements and cask variations multiply the exclusivity of the permutations.

 

Keeping the customer satisfied, the original Talisker 10 Year Old (right) is joined by four of its 13 new cousins, each with different age statements, cask-wood variations, finishes and bottling strengths. The more permutations on offer, the more possibility of adding layers to interest and loyalty. (Shutterstock)

Finally, as far as marketing beguilements go, how’s this? Scotland’s oldest distillery, Glenturret (est. 1763), is also its most modern. At least it is in how its new owners, Lalique, have tapped into the current appetite for active consumer experiences over tangible products. Such as, in terms of the tangible, a black Lalique decanter filled with a rare release 1972 Glenturret, the first of 150 sold at auction for £63,000 (USD$76,500). Which means that, after visiting the mash tuns and the backwash at the distillery end of things, dining in the adjoining Glenturret Lalique Michelin two-star restaurant may seem an experience affordable every day.

But before you start saving up or splashing out, time for a dram? Or indeed a Draam? I wish you Slàinte Mhath.

Topics in this article

  • Reporter: Nielsen Dinwoodie
  • Nielsen Dinwoodie is a writer, editor and content consultant specializing in lifestyle journalism. He is editor of Forbes Global Properties and co-editor of Storied. After work stints in the exotica of Barcelona, Paris and London, he's recently returned to the vigorous air of his native Scotland.

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