Adventures in Alcohol | Playing with your brand

Whisky distillers face a conundrum – how can they cash in on the current whisky trend with new products that don’t imply their old product is inferior?

It’s not like saying your soap is new and improved because the old soap formula has been taken off the market already. If you say your new whisky is better than your standard one, will consumers now think the standard one is rubbish?

To date distillers have been quite clever at getting round this. Glenmorangie has its different cask finishes that distinguish each expression, implying each is different to the other but not better or worse. Age labels have the same function for many another distiller.

Johnnie Walker red label remains the world’s best selling blended Scotch despite the rainbow of other Johnnie Walker labels confronting potential buyers. That label has since the 1990s been joined by black, green, platinum and blue labels. Other powerful branding tools include the company’s iconic Striding Man, which is one of the world’s best known logos.

Why then has a company that has kept its logo since 1908 and bottle design since 1920 decided to play around with its most recognisable, most marketable characteristics?

The company recently launched a limited edition of 8,888 individually numbered decanters, not bottles, of a premium whisky worldwide. The whisky – and it’s a very good one in our humble opinion – is blended from 29 casks from the master blender Jim Beveridge’s private reserve.

According to the company, “Jim has turned to his private reserves of rare stocks that have taken great skill and time to create – laid down over the years, these are extremely small batches of malt and grain whiskies that have been blended and set aside in casks to allow the characters to mellow and mingle, creating new depths of flavour”