A Special Relationship: Running Your Bar With the Help of Sales Reps,Brand Ambassadors &...

A Special Relationship

Running Your Bar With The Help Of SalesReps, Brand Ambassadors & Consultants

by Philip Duff

Copyright © Liquid Solutions Limited, 2009. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, carrier

pigeon or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of reviews) without the prior

written permission of Liquid Solutions Limited.

For commercial use or reproduction, please contact [email protected]

All photos, logos and other images are used by kind permission of the companies and people

involved. Please email me if I have omitted crediting you/your firm. I drink, you know.

The views and opinions expressed in this document are exclusively those of Liquid

Solutions Limited unless expressly otherwise stated. No reference is implied, nor should

one be inferred, to any person, company or brand (living or dead, extant or extinct) not

specifically named in the text.

In the text I have used he/his, but only because he/she and his/hers gets old real quick. As

anyone who knows me will testify, I am a great admirer of the female sex, both in bars and

out of them.

What you are reading was a worthless, poorly-formatted pile of crap until it was lovingly nursed

back to eBook awesomeness by Darcy O’Neil, creator of the world’s most-read cocktail blog

and author of “Fix the Pumps” which you should click off to buy right now, and then

subscribe to his fine blog. Thank you Darcy. Let’s do a shot of Buckley’s some time soon…

[email protected]

"...better drinks"

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.artofdrink.com

http://www.artofdrink.com/ftp/


Table of Contents

About The Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Tune In To WII-FM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

First Help Yourself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

On-trade Brand-Building. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

The Cast of Characters – Who Wants What? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Working with Sales Representatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Representatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

The Parallel Universe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Private & Public . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

To List Or Not To List . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

The Myth of Visibility: An Undisguised Rant. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

To List or Not to List . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

A Word To The Reps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

The Fake Listing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Branding Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

Working With Brand Ambassadors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

Who Are They? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

The Nature of Brand Ambassadorship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

The Modern Brand Ambassador . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

The Life of the Ambassador . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

What Brand Ambassadors Do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

Working With Brand Consultants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

Hiring Consultants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Things To Specify In A Contract: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

Get More from Reps & Ambassadors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

About The AuthorPhilip Duff (that’s me), was going to become a doctor in his native Dublin

but inadvertently got in the wrong queue.

Starting bartending at the tender age of 15, he picked up a degree in market-

ing (useful) and French (not so much), then quickly spread his wings to

become a bartender, trainer and manager in Dublin, London, New York and

the Cayman Islands before inexpli-

cably moving to the Netherlands

in 1995. One of the mixology

world’s first global brand ambassa-

dors, Philip and his company Liq-

uid Solutions create and teach

award-winning training programs

to more than 10,000 bartenders,

sales & marketing staff and people

who wandered in by mistake in 50 countries across the world (last time we

checked). His drinks-business clients include Diageo, Pernod-Ricard,

EuroWineGate, MaxXium, Beam Global, InBev and Heineken.

In November 2008 Philip woke up to discover he had co-founded the

Netherlands’ first neo-speakeasy bar, door 74 in Amsterdam (it had been a

long night). By May 2009, door 74 had won the first nomination ever for a

Dutch bar in the World’s Best Cocktail Bar category at Tales of the Cock-

tail, the only one that year from Europe. In December 2009 it won Best

Cocktail Bar and Best Bartender at the Dutch Hospitality & Style Awards,

and in January 2010, job done, Philip sold his interest in the bar to his

co-founder. It’s a nice place, drop by when you’re in Amsterdam.

As a consultant, trainer, writer, brand ambassador, training-program man-

ager, bar founder, Irishman, womanizer and drinker, Philip brings a 360º

perspective to the topic, and has recruited and trained over 30 full-time

brand ambassadors.

1

Chapter 1: About The Author

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=765002783

http://www.scribd.com/Philip%20Duff

http://twitter.com/philipduff

AcknowledgementsThis paper grew up out of the panel discussion “A Special Relationship:

Running Your Bar With The Help of Consultants, Sales Reps and Brand

Ambassadors” that I concepted and moderated at the annual Tales of the

Cocktail symposium in New Orleans in 2009. My job on the day was to

throw gasoline on the fires of discussion among my panel members, and it

was a memorable session. Either on the day or since, each panel member

helped enormously with this paper, so without further ado, thanks to:

Antoinette Cattani learned the business from one of

brand ambassadorship’s most revered figures, Sidney

Frank. She now reigns supreme at Cattani Imports, who

build brands in the US on-trade dollar-for-dollar better

than just about anyone.

Simon Ford is a bon viveur and the only person ever to

win Best Brand Ambassador two years running. After

helping build the Plymouth gin brand in the UK

bar-by-bar, he chucked it all in to move to the USA and

do the same again, from scratch, with quite staggering

success. Simon now commands a team of 20 brand

ambassadors for the noble Pernod-Ricard corporation.

Philippe Rochez is the Export Manager for Chartreuse,

long the thinking bartender’s herbal liqueur of choice.

In the absence of dedicated brand ambassadors, he

doubles as ambassador for Chartreuse in the many

markets he visits annually, and—like Antoi-

nette—brings a brand-owners perspective to the table.

2

Chapter 1: Acknowledgements




H. Joseph Ehrmann is owner of both San Francisco’s

multiple-award-winning Elixir and Cocktail Ambassa-

dors, LLC. Uniquely qualified to tell it like it is from both

sides of the street, H is almost as well known for running

America’s most famous “green” bar as for being the

Brand Ambassador for Square One Organic Spirits, LLC.

Dilettante, gourmand, and globetrotter, Angus Winchester

is one of the world’s best-known bartender-trainers and

presenters, and has been a brand ambassador, and hired

and trained brand ambassadors, in half a dozen countries

around the world. He is currently the Global Ambassador

for Tanqueray Gin, Executive Bartender at Nimb (Copen-

hagen) and El Presidente of Alconomics.

Mauro Mahjoub is, as well as being fluent in about seven-

teen languages, the global ambassador for Campari and

the owner of the esteemed Mauro’s Negroni Club bar in

Munich, Germany. Like H, Mauro brings a wealth of

experience to the table from both sides of the equation.

3





Sponsor

No writing on the topic of brand ambassadors, consultants and sales reps

would be complete without tipping our hat to the sponsor of the aforemen-

tioned panel at Tales, G’Vine Gin, the tastiest thing to come out of France

since Brigitte Bardot put on a bikini.

Available in two iterations, Floraison and Nousaison, G’Vine is one of the

most successful modern gins around, and rather good too.

4





“It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles.”

-- Niccolò Machiavelli

6

Introduction

Let me begin by saying that despite the tone and text that follows, I have the

utmost respect for all the players in the bar business mentioned hence. Own-

ers, managers, sales reps, brand ambassadors, consultants and bartenders; I

love you all, you mad bastards, from the bottom of my heart. Hell, I am most

of you, at one time or another. I mean no disrespect by referring to sales rep-

resentatives as “reps” when they may well have more involved and demand-

ing functions than merely pushing booze; similarly, there is a real job behind,

say “On-Trade Relations Manager” that far exceeds the role of “brand

ambassador”. For the same reasons I chose “he/his” over “he/she” and

“his/hers”, though, I have chosen to use the terms owner/manager, rep,

ambassador, consultant and bartender: simplicity and clarity.

I have taken a bit of artistic liberty here and there, refreshingly free of anything

even approaching political correctness. In plain English, I’d like you to smile

from time to time as you read through this and even chuckle once or twice, so I

have injected humour into some of my words. I am trying to be as entertaining

and charming a version of myself in print as I am in real life. Should you wish

to contact me and express your displeasure at some real or imagined insult, I

ask only that you first consider this story from Scott Adams before putting pen

to paper or finger to keyboard. Adams, a globally-syndicated cartoonist, reports

that when he draws a cartoon featuring, say, a clown being nasty, he will receive

a hundred or more emails from readers outraged over his thoughtlessness for

the feelings of clowns. None of those complaints will be from clowns.

This paper was written for the bar owner/manager. We’re assuming you own

or run a decent bar, which operates under the same sort of limitations as

most small (and many large) businesses: undercapitalized, lack of training

structure, over-dependence on key staff, no formal policies, manuals or good

7

Chapter 2: Introduction




communication structure, staggering from day to day like Amy Winehouse

from recording studio to rehab facilities. Change is difficult, expensive and

scary. (In my experience, the game isn’t hugely different if you are bar man-

ager of a massive bar or part of a chain; you just have to deal with office and

corporate politics on top of all the issues just listed. What’s harder; not hav-

ing a manual or time to write one, or having one that needs to be changed

and which you’re not allowed to?) It’s enough to drive a man to drink (with

gin, dry vermouth, Bitter Truth orange bitters and a lemon zest, please).

If the bar has been open for a while, and survived, then there is another prob-

lem, the it’s-always-worked-fine-before mindset. Nobody – not the staff or per-

haps even the managers – feels it necessary to change. The proper counter to

this, of course, is to screw up your eyes and mouth and put your fingers in your

ears and stamp your feet while screaming “IF YOU ALWAYS DO WHAT YOU

ALWAYS DID YOU ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU ALWAYS GOT, YOU

MORON! If nothing else it will enliven the Monday pre-shift meeting.

One key to business success is adapting to change, even anticipating it, instead

of sitting around on your well-padded arse and moaning about how things

were better in the old days. Running a bar these days means facing up to any

one of a dozen challenges that literally didn’t exist a decade or two ago. Legisla-

tion has gotten tighter, staff more expensive, guests more experienced, cosmo-

politan and demanding (while drinking less – people don’t drink like they used

to) and suppliers more numerous, and desperate, than ever. At the same time,

there are opportunities now that didn’t exist a decade ago either: you can

outsource a very large part of your training program to brands, get paid just for

selling certain brands, and use consultants to keep your bar cutting-edge.

8





Tune In To WII-FM1

As a bar manager/owner, your first thought on hearing of anything new in

your profession should be WII-FM – What’s In It For Me? How can I make

some money off of this? There is gelt to be earned by making smart use of

resources on offer. Do it right, and it’s like finding money in the street.

Screw it up and it’s like trying to return a ten-year-old toaster without a

receipt to an out-of-state Wal-Mart while wearing bloody overalls and

frothing incessantly at the mouth as a damp stain spreads accusingly on the

front of your pants.2

The modern bar owner/manager has to contend with a dizzying array of

characters dropping by: brand ambassadors who aren’t sales reps, sales reps

who aren’t brand ambassadors and consultants who aren’t either. They are,

by and large, each expert in different things, in their own way, things you

aren’t expert in. This expertise, enthusiasm, and their contacts, can all be

harnessed for your benefit, if you’re willing to put in a bit of effort yourself.

Thank you. Sitting comfortably? Drink to hand? Then let the festivities

commence…

9


1 with thanks to Sullivan & Roberts.

2 It’s hard, is all I’m trying to say.




“This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

-- William Shakespeare.

10

First Help Yourself

It is silly to think about sales reps, ambassadors and consultants helping your

bar unless you have your bar running reasonably well yourself. Nobody can

help you if you cannot help yourself. Indeed, very often accepting the help of

reps and ambassadors for a poorly-running bar can actually make things worse,

like sticking a band-aid on a festering, gangrenous wound. This is why most of

those celebrity-chef-revitalizes-a-restaurant TV shows inevitably wind up with

the restaurant going quietly out of business a few months after the show is

taped; the problems ran far deeper than could be remedied by having a shouty

chef bang on about fresh ingredients and cleaning for a few days.

Is Your Bar Running Well? A Checklist...

1. Sales increase every year.

2. Profits increase every year.

3. You can pay all your bills on time, including taxes and your own salary.

4. Guests in your target-market segments are the majority of your guests.

5. You know how your bar earns money and where—food/drinks/entry

charges/private hire/drink catering/bar training—and you know where

the priorities lie.

6. You know who your target markets are, and what you do/do better than

the competition to attract and keep them.

7. Service speed, accuracy and food and drink quality are at the same

minimum standard no matter what time a guest comes in, no matter

which day or who is cooking/bartending/serving.

8. There is a training program with manuals, a member of staff designated

as trainer, spec sheets and checklists, for all the departments (bar,

kitchen, floor, manager).

11

Chapter 3: First Help Yourself




9. You have no trouble attracting, recruiting, training, managing and

developing both staff and managers.

10. You can take a holiday for three weeks, relax completely while away and

when you return everything is running the same—or better—than

before you left.

11. You update the drinks, cocktail, and alcohol brands offered quarterly,

taking the opportunity to review the service and prices of all current and

potential suppliers. You set, or follow closely, trends in food and drink.

12. You are always planning at least two quarters ahead, and review your

marketing strategy annually, keeping up to date with the bar business

in your area/country and around the world by reading national and

foreign trade magazines, attending national and foreign trade shows

and visiting new bars, both nationally and – you guessed it – abroad.

13. You have statistics coming out of your ass. You know how many bottles of

liquor you sell annually in each category, broken down by brand, and what

you pay for each one; you know how many cocktails you sell per month,

and by exactly how much sales increase for a cocktail if it’s featured on your

chalkboard or as Cocktail of the Day; you know your monthly gross profit

margin percentage, monthly dry-goods cost, sales per seat per hour per day,

and every other statistic you can get my hands on.

Perhaps this all sounds a bit too much? Appropriate for a large chain of

mega-bars, maybe, but a bit over the top for a smallish single-unit bar?

Here’s the thing. If you’re a small operator, you need to be more on top of

all these things than a large operator; a large bar or chain of bars will have

the comfy cushions of finance and cashflow that a smaller bar usually will

not. Nothing in the checklist costs much to do, but everything makes your

bar sales increase, raises profits, and future-proofs your concept. You are

12





failing as a manager/owner if you spend less than eight hours per week

inputting, extracting, analyzing and acting upon such statistics.

Armed with this very clear idea of what your bar is, you’ll be able to make

better choices when in discussions with outside agents like reps/ambassa-

dors/consultants. Remember, they can only help you run your business –

not run it for you. And they have differing agendas to you.

In the old days, there simply weren’t a tenth of the brands floating around

that there are now. There were mega-brands available everywhere, and local

brands available, er, locally, but very little else. There was no such thing as a

brand ambassador or a bar consultant – at least, not with those titles – and

sales reps were mostly slick-suited people with pricelists and promotional

goodies. They didn’t much care where you bought a brand from because they

worked for the only company importing or selling it. Reps worked for the big

brands because little brands couldn’t afford reps. Everyone knew their place.

In the last two decades, though, improved logistics made it possible to

move anything anywhere for cheap. Media – largely the Internet – meant

brand-owners could inform the global community of their brand with a

few mouse clicks, and all of a sudden there were not just perhaps five or six

reps in your area, but twenty or thirty, representing hundreds of brands,

some monstrously large, some tiny. The big brands of yesteryear are lum-

bering mammoths now, with vast budgets at their disposal. Everyone is

angling to be the next global brand, building it from the ground up, one

bottle at a time. In your bar.

13





On-trade Brand-Building

The Holy Grail of a liquor marketeer is to have a brand that sells itself

quickly and easily with minimum effort for a premium price and healthy

profit margin – i.e., in a liquor store or duty-free outlet. Selling a brand

through the on trade – bars, restaurants, clubs – takes a larger investment

of money and effort and usually delivers a lower profit margin. But, build-

ing a brand in the on-trade creates word-of-mouth awareness and general

publicity which helps (a) to get the brand listed in liquor- and duty-free

stores and (b) to encourage consumers to pick Bottle X off the shelf in the

store instead of another brand.

Brands have been built in the on-trade since

time immemorial. Michel Roux did it one bar at

a time with Absolut vodka in 1979, repeating

the success with Bombay Sapphire gin in 1988;

Sidney Frank did it with Jagermeister, whose

entire marketing strategy was reputedly sug-

gested to him after observing Louisiana State

University students partying with Jager. One of

the most spectacular successes of the last few

decades was Ketel One vodka in the US, which

dared to both price itself significantly above

Absolut (the then-market leader in the pre-

mium vodka segment) and to build the brand

bar-by-bar, because they didn’t have the money

for a full-blown marketing campaign. This was

a risky strategy in the 1980s. Sons of the Nolet

14


Michel Roux

The late Sidney Frank




family (owners of the brand) personally gave tastings and trainings in bars

and restaurants in order to get their brand listed. It worked so outrageously

well that other brands began to be built using on-trade brand-building,

famously the Grey Gooses of this world (Frank again).

On-trade brand building became a marketing best-practice even for brands

that did have the money for a full-blown marketing campaign, as well as for

the hundreds of smaller brands that did not. On-trade brand-building is

now somewhat a victim of it’s own success: everyone’s doing it, so it is no

longer enough just to participate or just to have a program or just to

employ a brand ambassador. As a brand, you must stand out, and be as

ahead of the pack now as the Rouxs, Franks and Nolets were, more than

twenty-five years ago. Few do.

These days, even if you operate a Bar, Grill & Live-Bait store in East Asstickle,

you can barely open the doors before being stampeded flat by majestic,

roaming herds of charming, helpful people with iPhones and designer Con-

verses, all of whom want just an hour or two of your time, preferably with

everyone who’s ever worked at the bar in attendance as well.

Every single one of them, every time you see them—which feels like

“daily”—has got something new for you to taste, some new nugget of

information to teach you. Have you tried the 12 year old? The 18 year old?

The six-hour-old? How about this one? This is what they use at Milk &

Honey. This one’s only available in Botswana, you know, but—you know

what? This bottle’s yours. ‘Cause I like you.

15





The Cast of Characters – Who Wants What?

You, the owner/manager, want to build, maintain or increase sales in your

bar, and although you probably have an idea of how you want to do that

and with which brands, you don’t care which exact brands you sell to do

this. The most important brand to you is the brand of your bar. Your first

responsibility is to have a healthy business.

Reps want to build, maintain or increase sales in their area, and although you

might have a good working relationship with a rep, the rep doesn’t much

care which exact bars he sells to so long as he achieves high sales and place-

ment in prestigious bars. The most important brand to a rep is the brand of

the company he works for. A rep’s first responsibility is to sell bottles.

Brand Ambassadors want to make their brands better-known and

better-loved in their area. The most important brand to an ambassador is,

duh, the brand he works for. An ambassador’s first responsibility is to

increase the fame and regard of his brand, which means having good rela-

tions with bars that sells lots of liquor, or are prestigious.

Consultants should want to build, maintain or increase the business in your

bar, but may well have different ideas to you about how to go about it. The

most important brand to a consultant is the brand of his own company. A

consultant’s first responsibility is to have a healthy business for his company.

16





“The ability to deal with people is as purchasable as sugar or coffee

and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the

sun.”

-- John D. Rockefeller

17

Working with Sales Representatives

Who Are They?

Also known as: sales executives, on-trade representatives, on-premise man-

agers, area managers, channel managers, etc.

These are people whose job is to sell you booze: they are hired, trained and

rewarded on the basis of case sales1. They control budgets and can give dis-

counts. Usually, though, ultimately the sales budget comes from the total

marketing budget.

Representatives

Relationships with a sales rep should be approached with an eye on the long

term, because as time goes by a good rep will learn the ropes in every portfo-

lio and category and get promoted upwards, their budget increasing with

every promotion, until they can rain largesse down on you like hailstones.

Sales reps will work for one of three parties:

For an importer/marketer. In many countries the importer is the marketer

and also the distributor. But in some countries like the USA, the importer

might be just that—the importer. Marketing and distribution will be done by

another party. Some countries, like Sweden and Canada, have government

monopolies: the government becomes your importer. A rep who works for

an importer will spend a lot of time developing and maintaining good rela-

tionships with the distributor, who will in turn have their own sales reps.

18

Chapter 4: Working with Sales Representatives

1 The standard unit of measurement in the drinks business on the marketing side is “a case”which refers to 9 liters of product, regardless if that’s the amount that might come in anactual case of that brand. So when a marketing director says to a sales rep “we sold 10,000cases last year” he means 90,000 liters, whereas if a rep says to a bar owner “I can get you agood price on 5 cases” the rep means actual cases, which might be, say, 5 cases, each 6 x750ml bottles.




For a distributor. Distributors market and physically distribute brands in a

country, both brands produced domestically and imported brands. A typical

distributor might have lots of different brands, hopefully none that compete

directly with one another; mega-distributors will have dozens and dozens of

brands in each category, most of which do compete with each other. In the-

ory, a sales rep can sell all the brands of the distributor, but personal prefer-

ence combined with the type of outlets he/she calls on will influence which

brands an individual rep emphasizes. Hence, hairy old guys have to push

Scotch, cute young girls usually get lumbered with the liqueurs, sharp-

dressed young chaps do vodka, bleached-hair Twitter-addicted partyboys call

on the nightclubs, etc.

Directly for a brand. Essentially, a single brand will have it’s own importer,

distributor and sales force.

A sales rep is usually a good-looking/charming (if you’re lucky, both) per-

son, because that’s a big part of how they get hired. The best reps combine

a friendly, attractive appearance with business skills and persuasion tech-

niques: they really, truly DO want to become your partner, because then

they will sell you more, and you will get a better deal. Because they can get

moved from portfolio to portfolio (from wine to spirits, for instance) or

from category to category (from nightclubs to fine-dining restaurants), a

rep may appear to not know very much about your business; not necessar-

ily because he’s clueless, but because each portfolio or category requires dif-

ferent, specific knowledge and contacts. Selling ultra-premium vodka by

the magnum to strip clubs is a different ballgame to selling ultra-premium

gin by the bottle to renowned mixology bars, and different again to selling

discount wine to supermarkets in the ‘hood.

19





The Parallel Universe

An interesting twist on the job of the sales rep in the 21st century is

so-called “parallel goods”. These occur when several regions—which can be

states, countries or other economic areas—have free-trade agreements,

such as the EU (European Union) or NAFTA (the North American Free

Trade Association). Here’s how it works: if say, Tanqueray gin is being sold

very cheaply by a whole-

saler in Germany, a Dutch

wholesaler can legitimately

buy a pallet or two and sell

it to his Dutch clients. Bars

love this because you can

get really sharp prices on

brands—but reps typically

do not, because they are

only rewarded for sales of

their brand(s) through the

official national distributor,

which usually sells the brands at a higher price than an independent distrib-

utor who trades in parallel goods. Brand owners aren’t usually crazy about

this either, as it cheapens the perception of their brand. It is, however,

nothing less than good business practice for bars to buy their goods at the

cheapest price they can find. It does mean you may get less or no “sup-

port"—in the form of listing fees, sponsorship, free bottles etc.—from the

local rep if you use parallel-goods wholesalers instead of the official distrib-

utors. He may also take you off his Christmas-card list.

20





Private & Public

When drinking in your bar, a sales rep should be a great guest. He or she

should be well-dressed, funny, charming, drink well, tip well and respect

the boundary between having a drink with colleagues or friends or clients

in your bar, and doing business. It is uncomfortable, not to say unproductive,

for a rep to start demanding why you don’t stock his brand after five cocktails

with his college buddies. Be firm. Only discuss business deals during business

meetings, in the daytime, with nothing stronger than sodas on the table.

When a rep comes into your bar as a guest he is an honoured guest, must

behave as such, and deserves to be treated as such, even though he may be (in

his own mind) working, visiting bars with colleagues, staff, bosses or agen-

cies. Never refer to his previous visit if he is with people you do not know,

and always try to make him and his brands feel, and look, good in front of

others. If a rep consistently whines about you not stocking his or her brand

while he is a guest in your bar, you will have to take him or her aside and

explain your no-talking-business-outside-meetings rule again.

To List Or Not To List

On the topic of stocking or not stocking brands: this is a choice that only you

can make, and you must be led by your research into your target market. If

you stock only the biggest, most familiar brands, you are reducing dialogue

between your guests and your bartenders, and removing the possibility of

earning a premium price; everyone stocks those brands, which reduces the

amount you can charge for them. At the same time, you are increasing

speed-of-service and—for some guests—making your bar more relaxed and

comfortable, because they don’t have to deal with unfamiliar brands and

21





reveal they don’t know much about liquor. If you choose to stock only unfa-

miliar—but great—boutique brands, you have a unique reason for guests to

come to your bar, but your bartenders and servers will have to engage in

much more dialogue and selling with the guest, which requires more training

and product knowledge. A third consideration is of a more practical nature:

you’ll need enough shelf space if you want to display more bottles.

Depending on what is locally legal, reps have a varying array of incentives

to get you to stock and sell their brands. Free branded promotional items,

for instance, to help sell the brands: branded glassware, staff clothing, bar

tools, menus and so on. My position on this is simple: only take a branded

item if you absolutely cannot buy an unbranded one.

The extra financial benefit of free cocktail shakers or glassware does not

weigh up against allowing a liquor brand to invade your bar, and because

everyone else does take the freebies, your bar will stand out all the more if

you do not. If your bar is a good one, you do not need promotional toys or

gimmicks at all: your staff can sell the brands.

22


AROMATIC TINCTUREEXTINCT

Bitters were traditionally used incocktails to help relieve America’sraging case of dyspepsia, not as aflavour enhancer.

Aromatic Tincture was created bychemists (pharmacists) for thepurpose of improved flavour.

“The Chemists Alternative to Bitters”




http://www.artofdrink.com/shop/US/aromatic-tincture.php

The Myth of Visibility: An Undisguised RantLet me, if not detour, then certainly noodle around a little bit here. The

word “visibility” to a rep or ambassador or brand manager is like the word

“transubstantiation” to the Pope, or “lipgloss” to a Pussycat Doll. It is an

article of faith, and beyond all rational debate. The drinks industry’s mar-

keteers believe that brand visibility delivers sales: that having your brand

plastered over every available surface in a bar will deliver sales of a brand

quickly and easily, compared to the long haul of training bartenders to be

knowledgeable and, indeed, educating guests to brand-call. There is truth

in this: studies (that I can’t be bothered to look up the reference for - I’m

far too busy betting on the horses and thinking about beautiful ladies) con-

sistently indicate that more than two-thirds of guests have not made their

mind up what to order when they approach the bar. And many, many

liquor sales are made in places crammed to the roof with guests, booming

and shuddering with music at a volume that makes the glassware vibrate. In

such places, there is zero chance for a charming conversation about the rela-

tive merits of añejo ver-

sus reposado tequila, or

whether Pikesville 80

proof is better than

Rittenhouse 80º. In

those places, visibility

should deliver sales.

But.....

23

Chapter 4: The Myth of Visibility: An Undisguised Rant

Really?




In my experience the “power” of having a brand visible is nowhere near so

powerful in creating sales as is commonly thought. It is simply a business

practice that nobody in the drinks business knows, dares or cares to chal-

lenge. It is, if not the Emperor’s New Clothes, at least The Emperor’s Flimsy

G-String. Designing and updating POS (branded point-of-sale merchandis-

ing materials to you and me) gives brand managers something to do. An

otherwise difficult to obtain bar tool will make a bartender’s eyes light up if

he gets a free one, even if it’s branded, and there is nothing wrong with

making bartenders happy. It can be cheering to see enormous displays of

your brand and it’s bottles when, as a brand manager, you travel to foreign

markets, alone and far away from the MILF2 you are married to.

Undue influence to achieve visibility is sharply felt in the trenches: sales

reps are put under stupid pressure to create “visibility” in “their” bars, and

often reprimanded if, when showing visiting bosses and brand managers

around town, the brands are not ‘visible’ enough. I’m not talking about just

bottle displays here: I mean posters, neon signs, wall murals, branded

straws, napkins, glasses, shakers, barspoons, jiggers, mixing glasses,

spremaduras, knives (!), cutting boards, pour mats, bar caddies, fruit trays,

bar towels, staff clothing, bar furniture, outdoor ashtrays, menu holders,

menus themselves, check-holders and God knows what else. Vast, stagger-

ing sums are spent on these items and to what avail?

Well, like I said visibility does work—a bit. I cannot believe it is worth what

those items cost to make. Bear in mind, a POS item costs more to produce

than the unbranded equivalent, because it has to be bought and then

24


2 Or HILF, of course, if H = husband…




embellished with the brand. Often, the portion of a listing-fee agreement

that doesn’t rely on volume of sales relies on “visibility”. I think this just

helps the brand managers to feel like they are getting something in return

for their investment; if it comes down to it, many sales- or brand-managers

feel a bit sheepish handing over large sums of cash to a bar for the privilege

of it selling their brand. Visibility seems like a plausible thing to ask for—it

should work—and assuages their internal conflict.

In my experience, in a booming, busy SRO bar, visibility does not make guests

order brands very much. Not very much at all. In such bars, either the guests

don’t care what brand they get, or they already know which brand they want,

or they want a brand or (more usually) a drink they have just seen someone

else drinking. Sure, sales of a brand go up in a bar where the brand is excessively

visible—but how much of that is because the staff has been trained and the

product is stocked, usually as an exclusive pouring brand, and how much is

because there is an enormous display of bottles behind the bar?

There is often little thought given to the negative effect created by coun-

ter-productive visibility. This is when a competing brand is served in/using

another brand’s POS item (e.g. Havana Club & cola in a Bacardi & Coke

glass, or a bottle of Taittinger in a Piper Heidsieck icebucket) or when the

sign/poster/display/POS item is present but the liquor itself is out of stock

or even no longer stocked.

What you do see, often, is brand-overload. There is so much branding visi-

bility in a venue that guests simply ignore it; everywhere they look there is a

brand, so they ignore all of them. It makes no difference if the bar is over-

loaded with one brand or many; the result is the same. Often, if it is an

upmarket brand, excess visibility serves to devalue it. A previously fine bar

25





in Amsterdam, that romantic

drug-crazed Venice of the

North where I hang my hat,

was closed for quite a while and

reopened not so long ago. In

the meantime it had been out-

rageously, ridiculously,

mind-bogglingly over-branded,

principally with an upmarket

vodka brand and an upmarket

gin brand from the same com-

pany. Let’s call them Green

Gull and Delhi Ruby, shall we?

There were Green Gull/Delhi

Ruby pourmats, napkins, shak-

ers, linen coasters, Green Gull

ice-buckets every half-meter along the bartop alternating with Delhi Ruby bar

caddies every meter...it was breathtaking in it’s over-branded-ness. You could-

n’t move for the visibility. Knowing a bar stocks your favourite brand is a

minor plus point for you as a guest—it saves you that frankly unforgivable sec-

ond or two of having to ask one of the staff if they stock it—but ultimately

over-visibility cheapens a premium brand.

Visibility for brands is the same as makeup for ladies and aftershave for men;

you really don’t need it, but a tiny little bit is fine, for your own self-confidence

if nothing else. Any more than that works against you. Your friends won’t dare

to tell you for fear of hurting your feelings—or because they wear too much as

well—so you’ll slap on more and more and look sillier and sillier.

26





Finally, there are several global trends that contra-indicate increasing

investment in visibility:

1. Smaller, high-service high-dialogue bars. Neo-speakeasies are one extreme

example, but also neighbourhood bars, 20–60 seat restaurants, etc. Talk-

ing—with each other and knowledgeable staff—is why you go there.

2. Diving birth rates and aging global population, especially in the US and

Western Europe. Only the youngest, most inexperienced, visibility-led

drinkers go to packed, noisy bars where dialogue is difficult, and that

young generation is dwindling at a severe rate.

3. Lifelong brand switching. The accepted wisdom of marketing used to be

the same as that of the Jesuits: give me the child until he is seven and I

will show you the man, i.e., brand choices made in youth will endure

into maturity. This is no longer true, otherwise we would now be liste-

ning to digital Sony Walkmans, not iPods. One reason it’s not true, by

the way, is the rise of the Kidult: the single, child-less thirty, forty- or

fifty-something who spends all his money on himself and his various

grown-up toys. It is, in short, no longer necessary or even desirable to

try to bond a consumer to your liquor brand when he is young.

4. Increasing expertise among consumers in food and drink.

5. Increasing niche-nature of premium brands; a desire among consumers

to hear and internalise the story and soul of a brand instead of simply

having it’s name or logo thrust at them.

OK, rant concluded. Deep breath…

27





To List or Not to List

Training is increasingly used as a listing incentive: stock our brands and

you will get free training sessions from superstar bartender X, who may be

an ambassador for the brand. We’ll deal with this in the Ambassador sec-

tion but this can be very useful. You should value brand-sponsored

trainings from a respected bartender as if you had paid for them.

And on top of the incentives is Listing Fees. Kaaaaaaaaaaaa-ching! Firms

will pay you money to sell their brands, and if you have a very well-known

or successful bar, you might not even have to sell very much; it’s enough

for them just to have you stock the brands, as a prestige outlet. Listing fees,

though, are not always everything they are cracked up to be...

Drink Firm XYZ has the brands A, B, C, D, E, and F. This year, they have

gotten a nice big budget from the head office of brand A. They can give,

you, say, €8,000 for one year up-front to stock brand A, have lots of bottles

on the back bar and use it as a pouring brand.

Great, right? Well, not entirely.

XYZ will most likely also demand that you stock and use as pouring brands B,

C, D, E, and F—essentially, giving these brands a free ride on brand A’s money,

and making your back-bar display look exactly like a dozen others where XYZ

have dropped some cash. XYZ will also demand that you buy the bottles from

their recognized wholesaler in your country, which will sell it at higher prices

than you would pay for the exact same bottles from an independent, alternative

distributor. As much as 5 or even 7 euros a bottle more, to be exact.

28





Now, say you normally go through 20 bottles of liquor per week:

( x 5/bottle x 52 weeks = €5200). So the “free money” part of the deal is

now only (8000 – 5200) €2800, which comes down to just €54 per week

for a year. For that paltry amount you have sacrificed your whole back-bar

and most of your pouring brands. Your bar looks like any other where XYZ

did a listing-fees deal. On the one hand, you do get the cash up front, and

eight grand up front can make a big difference—on the other hand, you

only get one chance to make a first impression on your guests…

Not all listing fees are done that way, though. In Germany, it’s common to

do a deal where you agree to buy from recognized suppliers but at the end

of the year you receive a euro or two per bottle sold. The amount you get

varies, and it varies depending on how many bottles you sold: there might

be a minimum of, say, 500 bottles, and if you sell more than that, you get a

higher amount per-bottle.

There are other benefits to taking listing fees: sales reps and marketeers will

come by your bar more often spending money, and they may book more

special events and parties at your bar (ka-ching!) at which you get bottles or

even cases of free booze as well as a room-hire fee.

The ideal situation is one where rival drinks firms will compete to pay a

premium for you to stock their brands because of the prestige of your bar,

where you are free to buy the bottles from whomever you like, and where it

is decent brands that do not compromise the image of your bar. In all this

talk about liquor brands, never forget that the most important brand is

your own one—the brand of your bar. You can damage it by stocking stu-

pid or inappropriate brands.

29





A Word To The RepsThe best agreements are self-enforcing, where each party is motivated to ful-

fill their part of the deal, hence sales-tied listing-fees agreements are prefera-

ble to ones where money is paid up-front. One twist on this I have observed

recently is using mystery-guest reports as an element of listing agreements; I

suggested the very thing to a major brewery more than a decade ago. As a rep,

especially with premium brands, you want sales but not at the cost of the

brand’s image; how it is sold is often as important as how much is sold. Tying

investment to hitting targets on a mutually-agreed mystery-guest report

form, filled in by anonymous visitors from an external agency, makes the

whole listing-fee situation transparent. The bar owner is motivated to sells

lots of the brand (which can be tracked, as he is required to buy from official

distributors) and to promote and serve it correctly (which is determined by

the mystery-guest reports). Everyone wins, with the added bonus that the bar

owner gets additional input on his own bar operation from the mystery-guest

reports. And trickling the investment over the 12-month period makes it

more likely that it will be upheld for the full period.

You will often—perhaps always?—be accosted for listing fees from bars

that have not yet opened. This is a gamble, and one on which you, the

knowledgeable local rep, should be able to call the odds. Have the owners

opened other successful bars? Run successful bars? Bartended in successful

bars? What’s their business plan*? Marketing plan3? How’s their financing?

If all the signs are good, you might be able to negotiate your brand a bar-

gain: a listing at the new hot-spot for far less than it would cost if you tried

30

Chapter 4: A Word To The Reps

3 * No, not just what they say it is—ask to see the paper copies of these. Often, they will onlyexist in the prospective entrepreneur’s head.




to get listed after they opened and became

the new hot-spot. On the other hand, the

whole thing might crash and burn. My

advice is, if it seems like a good investment,

pay out monthly, and pay the first install-

ment the day after the bar opens. This may

sound unduly harsh towards fledgling bar

owners, but a bar that has to depend on an

upfront listing fee just to get the doors open

is on very shaky ground anyway, and—even

if it is a fine bar—may well not make it.

The Fake Listing

It happens occasionally that a rep will

come by and drop off a free bottle

because that night or the next night

they are coming by with some guests,

either their bosses or brand-owners

or perhaps some out-of-town bar-

tenders or owners. They want to give

the impression that your bar stocks

that brand. This may seem like a

no-brainer, but as someone who was

a bar owner and is a consultant to

distributors and brand owners, I have

mixed feelings.

31


Fakery is everywhere!




At least a dozen times a year on foreign trips I am taken around bars by the

local reps, and while it’s nice to be able to drink your brand, it’s just as

important to be able to scope out the bars that don’t stock it, and perhaps

work out why they don’t. At the very least, you want to get a feel for the

happening bars in that city or country. Once, on a business trip to Tokyo,

the local rep took us to a huge, beautiful nightclub, the only one on the

Ginza at the time. We were met at the door by the manager, who showed us

some amazing eye-catching displays of our bottles behind all the bars, pol-

ished to a shine so high I saw myself reflected (it wasn’t a pretty sight). But

here’s the thing. The club was empty, at midnight on a Saturday. I’d rather

have been in at least one bar where I could see people ordering and drink-

ing, even if it wasn’t my brand, than in an over-branded bar which doesn’ t

reflect that city’s real drinking culture. If we’re going to visit six bars, I want

at least one or two of them to be good bars that don’t stock my brand.

From the point of view of the owner, it’s always nice to get a free bottle, and a

paying group of guests is a paying group of guests—but bear in mind that the

rep is getting a free benefit. He is giving the impression your bar stocks Brand

X—without paying a penny in listing fees or other incentives. This blows a bit,

especially if you have worked hard and risked money to make your bar a suc-

cess; you are letting that rep benefit from your bar’s “brand” for dollars zero.

My advice is only to cooperate with this fake-listing when 3 criteria are satisfied:

1. When a rep is a good, regular guest, who also brings business to your bar.

2. When a rep has helped you in the recent past with other brands/ budgets.

3. When it is a brand you would consider stocking anyway.

...and then only once. The rep should return the favour at some stage inthe near future.

32





Branding StrategiesIn each category of spirits you need to have a house brand (good quality,

good purchase price, good selling price), one or more upsell brands (better

quality, higher purchase price, even higher selling price) and one or more

premium options (outstanding quality, high purchase price, high selling

price). Typically, as quality and prices increase, the profit percentage will

decrease: this is fine, because you bank money, not percentages. Your house

brands will have the biggest impact on your Gross Profit (GP) percentage:

if you’re shooting for an overall liquor GP of 75%, then your house brands

should deliver at least 80% margins.

You can choose one of three options for your house-brand choices:

1. Scare Tactics

2. Every Day Good Quality

3. High Roller

Scare Tactics

The nastiest house brands you can find: brands you’ve never heard of in

plastic squeezy-bottles with labels that look like Charles Manson’s

CAT-scan, that are little more than low-grade neutral spirits carelessly

cold-compounded with cheap essences by drunken, balding apes in wind-

swept warehouses in Hell. The idea is to scare guests into ordering the

upsell brands. Not a bad tactic as it goes, but it can leave—literally and fig-

uratively—a bad taste in your guests’ mouths.

33

Chapter 4: Branding Strategies




Every Day Good Quality

Good quality brands, usually well-known, for an attractive price. Using

brands like this—the Absoluts, Johnnie Walker Reds, Tanquerays, Bacardis

and Jim Beams of this world—will nudge guests to order the house brands,

so you can charge a slightly higher price with these sorts of house brands

compared to nasty ones. A downside is that guests may be less likely to

trade up if the house spirits are already quite decent.

High Roller

This is where you, like, totally pimp your speedrail, dude, stuffing it with

ultrapremium spirits and charging a higher price; your Kauffman, your

G’Vine, your Old Grand-Dad 114, your Zacapa 23. This all but discourages

trading up, and works best in high-service outlets suited to conspicuous

consumption where there is little dialogue, i.e., clubs. But, just to hit that

75% GP, you’ll have to charge a fortune for a entry-level drink and will

almost certainly scare people off who might otherwise have had a drink and

possibly even traded up.

Managing The Relationship

It is worthwhile to see your relationship with a sales rep as a long-term one.

The drinks industry is a fast-moving one, brands switch from distributor to

distributor all the time, advertising & promotional budgets are reviewed and

renewed annually, and all this means that even if a rep can’t do much for you

now, chances are he will be able to soon. Be proactive in your dealings: when

you have an idea for a promotion or a training or an event, write a one-page

proposal, send it to him and then meet to discuss it. If you wait for him to

come to you, he will come with the same promotional ideas being used all

over town. Be a partner to the sales reps, and they will be partners to you.

34

Chapter 4: Branding Strategies




“A wicked messenger falleth into mischief: but a faithful

ambassador is health.”

-- Proverbs 13:17

Working With Brand Ambassadors

37

Chapter 5: Working With Brand Ambassadors

Who Are They?

Ah, a topic close to my heart. There are

too many boxing matches, beautiful

women and tempting, lively bars in this

world for me to be bothered doing too

much research, but I’ve always felt

Champagne Charlie to be the ur-Brand

Ambassador. I’m excluding all paid-for

celebrities who, ahem, endorse a brand:

that’s just advertising. Charlie, that is,

Charles Heidsieck, had a devious way to

promote sales of his family’s eponymous

champagne in 1800s America: he would

drink it himself in bars, buy champagne

for people, have an enormously good

time, then toddle on down to the next

bar and repeat the process. Ah, for those happy carefree days! Let’s take

Charlie as an example.

1. He embodied the brand. Not only was he French and promoting a

French-to-the-core brand, it was also his family’s company, and name.

2. He was showing people how to drink it – people who perhaps hadn’t

drunk that much champagne before. At the very least, he was encoura-

ging them to drink it.

3. He was, by all accounts, a good-looking chap, charming and a gentle-

man, centre of attention and generously buying (his brand of) cham-

pagne for people he saw as potential champagne-drinkers.

This image has nothing whatsoever to dowith Charles Heidsieck or, indeed, brandambassadorship. I was bored.




Because what, after all, is an ambassador? Ambassadors from one country

to another fulfill three basic functions:

1. Represent that country.

2. Create, maintain or repair diplomatic communication.

3. Promote trade.

And that’s exactly what brand ambassa-

dors should do. They don’t sell directly,

any more than you can order an Apple

laptop from the US ambassador to

Spain, but they do all they can to make

it happen, soothing the oft-troubled

relationship between bartender and

local distributor, and creating demand

from the bar owners and managers that

will be fulfilled by the sales rep.

For a long time, brand ambassadors were, like Charlie, members of the

family whose name was the brand. With the rise of single-malt whisky in

the 1970s, Master Distillers were rolled out to be experts on the product

and the brand. They gave tastings and trainings and visited bars, but cru-

cially they weren’t sales reps, and they were employees, not family mem-

bers. Indeed, I know several master distillers whose ambassadorial role has

expanded so much that I struggle to see where they get the time to super-

vise distillation any more.

38

Chapter 5: Working With Brand Ambassadors




The Nature of Brand AmbassadorshipBecause consumers are becoming ever-more marketing-savvy, being “an

ambassador for a brand” is a much-bandied-about term in the hallways of

marketing departments and advertising agencies. The thinking goes that

everyone who works for a brand should be an evangelist for that brand,

from the receptionist to the fork-lift truck driver, from the guy in account-

ing with the lazy eye to that enormously hot bird in HR. It is much the

same principle as that of being a Scientologist.

There is an interesting twist

in the world of alcohol mar-

keting, though. It would be

nothing less than normal

and reasonable for all

employees of, say, Unilever

to use one of that noble mul-

tinational’s soap brands.

Everyone needs soap, and

the range of brands mar-

keted by Unilever can surely

cover all the various needs

and preferences of just about

anyone. But you can’t very

well expect anyone who

works for you to drink

liquor, let alone your brand.

39

Chapter 5: The Nature of Brand Ambassadorship

In some fairytales, drinking isn’t just allowed on the job,it is the job…




Increasingly, drinking any alcohol at all, or even talking about it at work, is

seen as a bit suspect; certainly talking about drinking, outside the cheerfully

exuberant I-got-so-drunk-I-vomited-my-eyeballs-right-out-of-my-skull

bastions of such witty discourse as the UK and Australia, is a no-no. This,

plus the (righteous) ban on alcohol in the workplace and the rise in legisla-

tion protecting employees

from discrimination and

unfair dismissal, leads to a

situation where liquor

firm employees are under

no pressure at all to be

ambassadors for their

brands, save perhaps at

work-related events.

Another element to this is

geography. As we men-

tioned earlier, the rise in

cheap and efficient logis-

tics coupled with true

mass-media low-cost

communication means

that just about every

brand now has global

ambitions. But the stuff

has to be made some-

where. For brands based at

40


Distillery-based brands often hire locals…

…while basing brands in a city allows every employee to be an

effective ambassador for the brand.




or near the distillery, this means they are usually way, way removed from

the bright lights and the big cities, distilleries of any size being forced to

locate a long way from where people live and socialize.

Because no-one likes to commute very far to work, that means hiring local

people to work for the brand, people who very likely have no idea what’s

going on in the cutting-edge bars on the other side of the world, the very

bars where the brand would like to be popular. And because they’re in the

countryside, there’s no local cutting-edge bars for employees to go to so

they can learn. Even if they wanted to be, the employees cannot be effective

ambassadors for the brands they make, because there are only other coun-

tryside people around to influence. Smart brands hire city-based ambassa-

dors; really smart brands move the head office to a city so everyone who

works there can absorb the drinks culture osmotically, leading to a large

improvement in the quality of both creative input and constructive criti-

cism. Most evenings after work in a city-based office, staff will go to good

bars in that city and have a drink (which wasn’t possible when they were

based in the sticks, because everyone had to drive home, there being little

good public transport in the sticks, and strict drink-driving laws), ordering

“their” brand and being good little ambassadors.

41


ACID PHOSPHATEEXTINCT

1½ oz G'Vine Nouaison½ oz Lillet BlancDash of BittersEgg White

DAWNS BREAK COCKTAIL

Stir and strain with ice thenadd 3 drops Acid Phosphate.

“Rediscovering Lost Ingredients”




http://www.artofdrink.com/shop/US/acid-phosphate.php

The Modern Brand AmbassadorAnd so we come to the Ambassador. Like a Master Distiller, he is an

employee, and for the purpose of this paper we will assume that Brand

Ambassador is his actual as well as effective job description, and that he has

no other responsibilities. Many smaller brands have brand managers or

marketing directors who themselves act as brand ambassadors, travelling

constantly and promoting their brand through tastings, trainings and being

the coolest person in the bar; Audrey Fort (G’Vine gin), Philippe Rochez

(Chartreuse) and Crystal “de Canton” Fanale (Domaine de Canton

liqueur) are three well-known examples.

For more than a decade, the vertical rise in the popularity of cocktails has

meant brand ambassadors are often hired from the ranks of well-known

bartenders/managers/owners. They are hired for their fame, credibility and

contacts among other bartenders/managers/owners, as well as for their

skills in training bars, developing signature cocktails and organizing parties

and events. Not to mention the good looks and charm that (presumably)

helped them become successful bartenders. That said, there are several

well-known and successful brand ambassadors who have never bartended

professionally, but have bolted drink-, cocktail-, and bar-knowledge onto

an existing skill set of sales and marketing to become very good at their job.

There is a window of opportunity after becoming a brand ambassador. If a

top bartender at the famous Bar X becomes a brand ambassador, he can

profit from having been part of the Bar X success story for perhaps five

years after leaving to become an ambassador. Just on the strength of that,

people will come to his trainings, he’ll be asked to speak at bar shows, and

42

Chapter 5: The Modern Brand Ambassador




people will want to meet and have a drink with him. After a few years, a lot

of the younger bartenders coming up through the ranks either don’t know

about Bar X (because it’s since closed) or they know the current startenders

at Bar X and don’t know he ever worked there—or care. An ambassador

must not rest on his laurels after becoming an ambassador.

He must catch up. If he is not up to speed with the office side of things,

such as all the programs of Microsoft Office, he should follow courses.

Read a book on brand marketing. Follow a course on public speaking. And

one on business writing. Subscribe to at least two foreign bar magazines.

Or, he may be a quite normal bartender who gets the job of ambassador for a

brand and is subsequently promoted by that brand as a star mixologist; this

happens a lot when the brand is based outside the big towns or important

international cities, often when it’s based at the actual distillery. They’d rather

hire a local they know than a big-city bartender they do not. The advice to

such a bartender in that case is the same as for a hot-shot bartender, plus—if

he isn’t already up to speed—to get up to speed on hot-shot big-city

bartending. Visit the cities and bars and bar shows: befriend other ambassa-

dors, go to their events, see how they roll and who the big dogs are.

Or, he might not be a bartender at all—maybe he’s moved sideways from

being a sales rep, or this is his entry into that world, the lucky sausage. He

may well have the office skills, but need the bar moves. First, he should fol-

low all the advice above. Then buy a copy of the Diffordsguide and invest

about 200 in booze and bar tools. He should spend one hour per day for a

week reading recipes and practising drinkmaking techniques while he

makes and tastes cocktails, and then make at least one cocktail every eve-

43





ning for three months, holding a small cocktail party every two weeks to get

feedback from friends. He should befriend a bar owner and ask if he may

intern one night a week for a month to learn the rhythm of the bar. Follow

good courses like B.A.R. (US) and WSET (UK). Go to all the bar shows,

follow all the seminars, and read all the magazines1.

In either case, a brand ambassador must use that initial window of oppor-

tunity to get up to speed on his new profession, keep re-inventing himself,

learning new skills, creating new drinks, building a media profile, conduct-

ing new research, and generally maintaining and extending his position as a

mover and shaker in the bar business.

The job of ambassador makes keeping up to date easy: if he keeps his eyes

and ears open while working for a brand he can learn everything useful about

creating, distilling, packaging and distributing liquor, as well as creating,

building and maintaining

brands, plus his job entails

reading all the magazines,

travelling to all the countries,

meeting all the bartenders

and brand managers and

going to all the bars and bar

shows, all over the world. It’s

practically a self-perpetuat-

ing job—if he keeps himself

at the cutting edge.

44


This photo contains four brand ambassadors, a trainer, twobar owners and three bar managers. Can you tell who’s who?

1 Email me if you’d like a copy of the reading & visiting list I recommend for all trainers,ambassadors, brand managers and serious bartenders: [email protected]




The Life of the Ambassador

The best brand ambassadors are schizophrenic, but in a good way: able to

party until the small hours with hordes of bartenders and party animals

(yet remain in control enough to pay the tab, tip, and thank the staff), then

turn up in the office at 0830h, showered, suited and booted, able to sit in

high-level meetings all day with bosses and brand owners, contribute in a

timely and useful way, then write reports, proposals and evaluations in

clear English and presentable formats. It is rare—very, very rare—to find

someone who has both skill-sets. An ambassador should spend (at the very,

very least) sixteen hours a week drinking in bars or at events. It is not possi-

ble to be a good brand ambassador and work 9-5.

What Brand Ambassadors Do

1. Personifying the brand.

Brand ambassadors typically only represent one or two brands, unlike sales

reps, who will have dozens. They are thus ideally placed to be “the guy

from......”. This is important, because in my opinion, seeing someone from

a brand drinking regularly in my bar has a large effect on whether I list their

brand or not, quite apart from listing fees or other considerations. Increas-

ingly, sales reps are being stretched thin, and you may see a brand ambassa-

dor more regularly than a rep, especially if the ambassador lives in your

city. Brand ambassadors who work directly for a brand’s HQ often find

themselves being sent to places that the regional or global brand manager

has little time or incentive to visit, just to keep that country’s local brand

manager happy that they get a visit from somebody from HQ.

45

Chapter 5: The Life of the Ambassador




The larger the brand, the more this happens, because it takes longer for a

chap to become a brand manager for a larger brand, by which time he has

2.5 children, a Volvo in the suburbs and little desire to travel more than is

absolutely necessary. Often, a brand ambassador’s ethnic origin, interesting

facial hair, language skills, visible tattoos or other personal attributes will

contribute to him being hired, if those attributes are seen as being harmo-

nious with the target market or brand’s marketing emphasis.

2. Being the “Yeah, but...”guy.

You may like a brand ambassador but not his brand; for example “Yeah,

brand X sucks diseased warthog ass, but Dave is a cool guy”. This is the pur-

pose of classic ambassadorship; using personal charm, diplomacy and friend-

liness to smooth over underlying clashes. If things ever change and you

happen to need Brand X, you already know it’s ambassador. In some cases,

brand ambassadors maintain a brand’s popularity and credibility among the

on-trade in situations where sales reps or distributors have somehow pissed

them off; while switching distributors, for instance. In the simplest sense, a

brand ambassador should be the coolest guest in the room, a focal point, not

a wallflower, loved by fellow guests and bartenders alike, attractive, funny and

charming—and drinking his brand, if the bar stocks it.

3. Knowing everything about the brand – and everyone.

There is no reason why “brand ambassador” should not be a job title as

respected as “master distiller”. A good brand ambassador knows almost as

much about how how the product is made as a master distiller, plus every-

thing about how it is marketed, all around the world.

46

Chapter 5: What Brand Ambassadors Do




A brand ambassador can be partly judged on the size and quality of his net-

work. At the top of his profession, a global brand ambassador should know

every single significant bartender, everywhere in the world, certainly in the

key markets for his brand, plus an awful lot of up-and-coming bartenders,

truck-loads of writers, bloggers, TV producers, event managers and mar-

keting agencies. Like in any profession, it takes time to build up a quality

network, so all other things being equal, brand ambassadors get better at

their job the longer they do it.

4. Increasing The Fame of The Brand To Sell More Bottles

Brand ambassadors do a lot of things—teaching seminars, organising par-

ties, giving interviews to the media—but it all comes back to making the

brand better-known and better-liked so that more bottles will be sold.

Everything a brand ambassador does should contribute to this goal. Brand

ambassadors may very well teach seminars about cocktail history or

mixology or whatever, but it is all for naught if it does not make the brand

better-known and better-loved. The job is not to be a teacher or a historian;

these are paths to take, not destinations. I have noticed this to be a short-

coming of many well-known bartenders who recently become brand

ambassadors: they shy away from this essential, honourable commercial

duty because they think it is somehow shameful or being a “sell-out” to be

honest about wanting to make the brand look better and sell more. Or, they

do it but with a knowing wink and make it clear that their heart is not really

in it, which I think is just a shame.

47





Private & Public

All the same etiquette that applies to sales reps applies to brand ambassa-

dors, of course. It is always a good idea for the brand ambassador to team

up with local sales reps when visiting bars: this works well for both the

brand ambassador (who can get introduced to the reps’ accounts) and the

reps (if the brand ambassador knows significant bartenders in accounts

that they do not yet service).

Brand ambassadors typically conduct a lot of trainings for bartenders,

liquor store staff, and sales and marketing team; the training might consist

of brand information, marketing policy, company history, production

technique, tastings and cocktails. Of course, these trainings are effectively

paid for by the brand, but a good ambassador will only include enough

“branded” information to get his point across, using the “bait” of objective,

useful information to draw listeners in. An over-branded presentation is

both tiresome to listen to and tiring to give.

Managing The Relationship

Brand ambassadors, like reps, get better, more knowledgeable, better-con-

nected and more influential the longer they do it, and as we mentioned

before, an ambassador should be an even more perfect guest than a rep.

Ambassadors that work directly with global marketing can sometimes

arrange deals and events that bypass local distributors; although this might

piss said distributor off, it can be great news for you, the bar owner. That

said, the key to a good relationship with an ambassador is to have a good

relationship with the rep of the firm which distributes the brand.

48





“Consultants have credibility because they are not dumb enough to

work at your company.”

-- Scott “Dilbert’ Adams.

Working With Brand Consultants

The best consultants are experienced super-bartenders and managers with

specialist knowledge who run their own consulting firm, selling their repu-

tation and skills to brands and bars. For the purpose of this paper, we will

assume ‘consultant’ refers both to someone who is hired by, and working

for, you directly.

There are only two good reasons for hiring consultants:

1. Your organisation is missing specific manpower or expertise which the

consultant has: sales promotion, bar management, cost minimising,

molecular mixology, whatever.

2. You want to “use” a consultant’s name to attract media attention or

confer credibility on your bar.

51

Chapter 6: Working With Brand Consultants




Hiring Consultants

It’s key to hire someone who has experience of doing whatever it is you’re

asking him for, otherwise he’s learning on your dollar. Visit bars where this

chap has worked, both as a bartender and as a consultant. Are the programs

still running? Still working? Especially look for situations comparable to

yours: it’s all very well to run an award-winning cocktail program when

your bar is attached to a Michelin-starred fine-dining restaurant, but how

useful is that experience going to be in your raucous rock ‘n’ roll bar?

If you are hiring a consultant to help you open a bar, for instance—and

pardon me if this seems blindingly obvious—find out if he has run a bar

opening before. Not “been part of an opening team” or “been there since it

opened”, but actually ran the whole trajectory of developing the program,

writing the manual, buying the goods, recruiting and training the staff,

coordinating the opening, etc. Anyone who hasn’t—even if they are far

cheaper than consultants who have—will be learning on your dollar.

If you are hiring a consultant for business goals—sales up, gross profit up,

costs down, etc.—is this someone who has done this kind of turnaround

successfully before? Or was he just a manager in an already-successful bar,

where the main job was not screwing up? Or just a bartender?

If you are hiring a consultant for his fame, you need to be realistic about

what you will get out of it. Really well-known bartenders hop from one

consulting gig to the next, and the media follow them. If you hire a consul-

52





tant for a one-time gig, you will not get the full benefit of that consultant’s

focus on your bar, and the cumulative effect of the media; all the press will

come to your bar once and then hop off, following your consultant to his

next job. This is most often what happens when a consultant is hired to

write a one-off cocktail list. Commissioning a cocktail list is a quick and

cheap way to use that consultant’s name, get media attention and impress

your staff. It is also a missed opportunity to coach your staff to create the

list themselves. Inexperienced or lazy consultants will write cocktail lists

that jar with the essential ethos of the client bar, exceed the skill-set of the

current bartenders, or that do not appeal to the target markets of the client

bar—only to the consultant’s ego.

And they are well within their rights to do so: it is the consultant’s responsi-

bility as a businessman to make money, and yours as a client to ensure you

get value for money. Buyer beware.

If you are satisfied he can do what he says he can, it’s time to develop a

clearly-defined brief. A good consultant will take as much time, gratis, as is

needed to sit down with you and work out what it is that you need. Not just

what you want (which may be unrealistic), or even what the consultant

wants, but what is best for your bar. It is the mark of a good consultant that

he will take time work this out, and not shy away from telling you truths

you may rather not hear. Here’s a cautionary tale:

53





Average Bar hires Hot Shot Bar Consultant from Star Bar to install a

cutting-edge mixology program in Average Bar, just like in Star Bar.

Unfortunately, the lack of a mixology program in Average Bar is the

least of their worries: there is no staff manual or consistent drink

recipes, the bar is dirty and the bartenders are slow.

Hot Shot Bar Consultant tries to tell this to Average Bar Owner, but

Average Bar Owner keeps saying he wants those walnut Old

Fashioneds and home-made bitters.

Hot Shot Bar Consultant is inexperienced, so he accepts the contract,

which fails spectacularly, because Average Bar frankly needs to be

re-worked from the ground up before it can attempt a high-class

mixology program.

Hot Shot Bartender’s reputation suffers. Average Bar freaks out it’s

regulars, pisses off it’s regular bartenders and has to pay Hot Shot

Bartender’s fee as well.

Everyone loses.

54





Things To Specify In A Contract:

1. Exactly what has to be done, expressed objectively, with a clearly defined

time horizon and transparent criteria. Example: Increase total weekly

sales by 20% within 4 weeks.

2. Who is going to do it. Increasingly, the best guy in a consulting firm will

do the “pitch” to you: once you’ve signed, the project will be run by a

much less impressive chap. Specify in the contract who is working on

your project.

3. How achieving those goals is to be measured, objectively—column

inches, awards, sales, costs, profits.

4. The amount and type of the fee, and the payment schedule. Is it

fixed-rate? No-cure-no-pay? A percentage of increased sales / decreased

costs? A bonus system? And how is it paid: how long are the payment

terms? How much up-front?

5. Communication channels: you should have a single contact person at the

consulting firm, and they should be answerable only to you. Weekly meet-

ings / phone calls work best, with a monthly sit-down review essential.

6. Cancellation terms, and notice periods, in case it doesn’t work out.

Make sure you only pay for work that’s actually been done up to the

moment of cancellation.

7. PR. What rights do you have to use the person/firm’s name and logo?

When will they be present to the public? For media interviews? On-shift?

8. Achieving lasting success. Will the program/changes continue after the

consultant has ended the project? What are the guarantees? What sys-

tems will be left in place? Manuals? Trainers trained?

55





So, in the case of Average Bar, assuming that quality drinks ARE the right

thing for it to be serving, and without completely re-engineering the whole

marketing and concept of Average Bar, the brief might look like this:

1. Design and launch basic bar operations template at Average Bar:

employee-, department- and manager-manuals, spec-sheets and

check-lists, all executed and integrated within a six-week period.

2. Train staff and managers to internalise both knowledge and focus to

consistently make and serve quality drinks (including mise-en-place),

plus working a minimum of 20 full bar shifts spread over 6 weeks.

3. Achieve a 30% sales increase and a 20% gross profit margin increase bythe end of week 6.

4. Review program after 3 months: if standards met, commencePhase 2: Cutting-Edge Mixology.

This brief shows clearly what has to happen, who is involved and in which

timeframe. Accountability should be further specified in the contract. For

instance, “quality standards” could be assessed independently by an external

mystery-guest agency. Success in training staff can be proven by bench-

marking current sales, giving all staff both theoretical and practical exams, con-

ducting the six-week program, benchmarking sales again, giving staff the same

exams again and comparing before-and-after results to determine progress.

Sometimes there may be a potential conflict of interest: a consultant may also

work in some capacity as a brand ambassador, or his company may do a lot

of business with a brand or distributor. There is nothing wrong with this if

the consultant is honest about it from the start and does not favour any one

brand over another while working on your project. It may even turn out to

be positive if he can get your bar a better deal with “his” brand/distributor

56





than you would have been able to get on your own. Remember though, the

ultimate responsibility of ensuring you get the best deal is yours.

Increasingly, a consultant will be an ambassador, hired full-time by a brand

or distributor and sent out to build relations with the trade any way he sees

fit. Many smart ambassadors offer exactly the same services as a consultant,

free, but skewed to present their brands in a good light, perhaps dependent

on your stocking them. This is more common when the bartender works for

a firm with a wide range of brands instead of being a single-brand ambassa-

dor. You may ask yourself why hire a consultant, or pay for a training, when

you can get all that free advice and training from ambassadors? Well.....

1. An ambassador/consultant will always try to present his brand, and the

brands of the local distributor, in a positive light. You will have to filter

out that emphasis to get the full picture.

2. An ambassador/consultant’s trainings tend to repeat themselves, and

thus you get no exclusive information, or advice specific to your bar.

3. An ambassador/consultant will not usually invest a lot of time or effort

in trying to work out what your bar really needs. He will also shy away

from telling you things you do not want to hear. He is there to make you

happy to see him and his brands, after all.

4. You won’t pay the same degree of attention to the advice of the ambas-

sador/consultant because you have the feeling you are getting it for free.

We humans never value the things in life that we acquire easily and for

free as much as we do the things we have had to really earn and pay for.

In a client-consultant relationship, the consultant must offer correct

advice to be a good consultant – but the client must accept and act on

the advice to be a good client. It is hard to be a good client when you

think the advice is free. Talk, as the old saying goes, is cheap.

5. Usually the numbers do not work out. An example:

57





If you stock Brand Y, you get free training sessions with Star Bartender X,

who used to charge 800 per day as a consultant before becoming an

employee of Brand Y. Yay! But wait: under the deal, you get 6 sessions per

year, in groups of 15 attendees per training, in various locations, for 3 hours

per session. So, effectively, you get: 6 sessions x 3 hours = 18 hours per year.

Just over 2 full days, in other words. And not necessarily in your bar and not

exclusively with just your staff. So let’s say the “consulting value” of X is now

just 1.5 days, or 1200. Would you have hired Bartender X for one-and-a-half

days anyway? At any price? Unlikely. Even a reincarnated Jerry Thomas him-

self couldn’t do very much for your bar in one-and-a-half days.

The liquor firms I have seen championing the ambassador-as-free-consul-

tant tend to be the ones with big budgets and common, mainstream

brands. I should know – I’ve been that ambassador/consultant myself many

a time. Another dodge is if your bar gets chosen to be a “test case”, where

the ambassador/consultant really does come in and do some serious con-

sulting and training work that’s then documented and presented to the rest

of the on-trade in your area/country as a jolly good reason to stock Brand

Y. In every test-case I’ve seen/executed, though, they/I chose extremely

mass-market bars with absolutely zero liquor knowledge or interest among

both staff and management, so that the gains documented will appear

extra-impressive, or because the brand has fond dreams of converting

entire swathes of mass-market bars to serve high-class liquor. There really is

no such thing as a free lunch.

58





“I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success

through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for

you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.”

-- Alan Greenspan

Get More from Reps & Ambassadors

First off the bat, no matter what you’re buying - clothes, hand-jobs or bot-

tles of booze - charm is an essential part of any business transaction and

will result in better service, better prices and extras, and a better feeling

when the deal is done. Do not feel you can be surly and charmless just

because you are the customer in a transaction: you will get a worse deal. It

is difficult for reps, ambassadors and consultants to come to you, trying to

sell you something; imagine if you had to cold-call your guests at home

instead of them coming to your bar! Put your visitors at their ease, be

friendly and interested, take time to talk to them, and try to create win-win

situations. Simple friendliness and charm should get you all you need from

consultants you’re employing, but what about reps and ambassadors?

1. Deals

Reps know their portfolio. They know it all, and they have a whole array of

incentives, discounts and rewards at their disposal. They want to (a) sell

stuff and (b) be able to say cool-sounding things back at the office. Give

them the chance to do (b) and they will help you buy stuff. Ask them about

the bargains in their portfolio. What kind of case deals are there? How

about a deal based on annual sales? Or hitting sales targets? What about a

sales contest? H. Joseph Ehrmann of San Francisco’s award-winning Elixir

bar encapsulates it neatly when he says that the relationship with a rep

depends on:

“ ...constant communication. Work it like a true business

partnership to meet each others’ needs, not a combative

relationship where everyone holds their cards close.”

61

Chapter 7: Get More from Reps & Ambassadors




Do your homework before meeting with a rep: find out what brands he

represents, and make sure you know to the penny what you’re paying for

them, and what prices (and deals) are being offered by competing brands

for similar bars in your area. If a rep can’t do a deal at the moment, invite

him back in three months when you’re reviewing your purchasing and

brand options again.

2. Training

Yes, I know you’ve had Diageo reps coming into the bar who didn’t know

their firm owned Dickel or even what Dickel is. I know. But more and

more, drinks firms are investing in training for their reps, and in the

absence of a brand ambassador, your local rep may well know a phenome-

nal amount about certain of his brands. An ambassador certainly should.

Arrange a series of trainings, say every second Monday afternoon, for your

staff, incorporating trainings & tastings on a specific spirit category from a

brand rep, followed by a written test created by the same rep. Feel free to

schedule competing brand’s trainings (e.g. Gin X one week followed by Gin

Y the next) on consecutive sessions. Voila, you have just created a zero-cost

product training program for your staff which will increase premium spirit

sales, with the bonus of making staff feel more motivated (training does

that) while making the rep/ambassador feel more involved with your bar

(not a bad thing at all). Push him: if possible, include category tastings, not

just of his brand, and encourage staff to ask the kind of questions guests

ask: why should I pay extra for this? How old is it really? Is there sugar

added? Good ambassadors in particular live for these sorts of sessions.

62





3. Tailor-Made Promotions

Building on H’s comment about being in constant communication, if you

can come up with an idea for a cool promotion or for brand visibility in your

bar, your rep will likely jump at it AND maybe even make it into a “best prac-

tise” to be copied by other reps and bars. Write a one-page proposal detailing

costs, benefits and time horizon, send it to the rep and schedule a meeting.

The added value to you is that you thought of it and it was run in your bar

first, and you will be positively flooded with out-of-area reps, marketeers

and fellow bar owners dying to see your genius idea in action—and all

those people drink, you see. You might even be asked to do some consult-

ing work for the brand/distributor. An extra benefit is that the promotion

will be unique to your bar, as opposed to the promotional ideas reps bring

to you, which have usually been done all over the city or country.

And—pardon me if this seems obvious—only organise events like promo-

tions on quiet nights, to build trade. Reps and ambassadors may want to do

events on Fridays and Saturdays, to reach more people, but there’s not

much in that for you as a bar owner: presumably you’re already hitting

capacity on those nights, so why not try to build the quieter nights?

4. Guest Bartending

Increasingly—and this is a trend I heartily endorse—ambassadors are getting

behind the bar for a shift or two as they travel around. This is a great deal for

you: as well as lowering your staff cost it will increase your sales, as most

ambassadors have both a good record as hot-shot bartenders and a large net-

work. If the brand gets behind it there might even be local or regional media.

This crowd, plus sales reps and their guests, will make it at the very least an

extremely cool industry night on a night you’d otherwise be quiet.

63





5. Media

Now it’s time to prime the pump. As owner/manager of a successful bar, if

you also have a good media profile, you’ll be regularly asked to contribute

recipes and articles, perhaps write columns and even appear on TV. Why

not share the love? Use the brands of the reps, and a branded bartool you

got from an ambassador. Let them know in advance when the segment is

transmitted or when the article is published: send them a link or a scan.

This kind of thing is like gold to them: it raises their stock around the office

(as well as yours - with their superiors) and that makes it harder for them

to say “no” the next time you’re in a discussion. Do not leave having a good

media profile to chance. Have a one-page press release with profession-

64


Go on, guess which one’s the guest bartender?




ally-photographed pictures of your bar, available in both high- and

low-resolution, on your website. Send out press releases when you have a

menu change, a special party, a guest bartender, when you win an award,

when you almost win an award. Maintain an active list of journalists and

media people; if you run a good bar you’ll be amazed how many of them

drink there regularly.

6. Parties

Also the province of the rep, many ambassadors are required to organise

parties. Hosting that party at your bar is a no-brainer: guaranteed sales, a

room-hire fee and usually a ton of free liquor as well. What’s not to like?

Being pro-active makes all the difference. If you run a mixology bar, sit

down with the rep and/or ambassa-

dor in January and plan out what

unique parties they’re going to

organise in your bar: Black Tot day in

the summer, Repeal Day in Decem-

ber, World Cocktail Day in May, and

so on. Starting early gives you the

chance to pitch the idea to other

reps/ambassadors if the first few

don’t bite. If they DO bite it gives

them time to whip up interest at

head office (see “Media” above),

especially if they need extra budget,

and to make their superiors enthusi-

astic about the parties and your bar.

65


Many ambassadors spend a great deal of timeorganising parties…




Global On-Trade Brand

Marketing Expertise.

New Product Development.

Product, Bar & MixologyTraining for Sales &

Marketing, Distributors &

Bartenders.

Expert copywriting.

Award-winning seminars by

award-winning trainers.

[email protected]

“...better drinks.”


A Special Relationship: Running Your Bar With the Help of Sales Reps,Brand Ambassadors &...

Documents

Transcript of A Special Relationship: Running Your Bar With the Help of Sales Reps,Brand Ambassadors &...