Ep. 2536 Brand Building for Beverage and Wine Companies with Courtney O’Brien | Masterclass US Wine Market

You really converted water into wine. Your experience with Evian, who really is maybe a benchmark for turning a commodity product into a lifestyle brand. Is there, like, one headline takeaway that you could share with the wine industry from what you learned with Water Brand? Yeah. I mean, it's kind of the same thing Liquid Death has just done too. I mean, it was one of the earlier ones, I think, to do so, but there's no shortage of examples. And that's why I love working across types of beverage because there's so many things to be learned from other segments. I was probably still in junior high when this happened. But when Evian entered The US market, you think of the movie where the guy, they're all out drinking too much. You know, this is the eighties. And he goes to the bar and says, I'll have an Evian, please. And that was very purposeful. That signals Evian is not a commodity. It is a viable social alternative to drinking alcohol, which God, back in the 80s, you would have been thought you were crazy if you were at a bar and not drinking alcohol or else an alcoholic who was recovering. And it created permission. Alcoholic who was recovering. And it created permission. It gave that permission structure. So when I was at Avian, we did a ton of product placement in movies, celebrity driveway drops. We were constantly in the press. We earned a lot of our media. We wanted to make it a strong brand. Welcome to MasterClass US Wine Market with me, Barbara Fitzgerald. In this show, we'll break down the complexities of selling wine in The US by discussing the relevant issues of today with experts from around the globe. Each episode serves up three key insights to help elevate your winery's presence in The US market. So grab a pen and paper, and let's pave the way for your success in The US. Hi, everyone. Welcome to MasterClass US Wine Market. Today, I am very excited to welcome Courtney O'Brien to the show. Courtney is the founder of Outlier Initiative, which is a consultancy that focuses on beverage brands, both alcoholic and nonalcoholic. She helps her clients clarify their stories, their positioning, and their go to market strategy. She's worked in the beverage industry for twenty five years in The US, starting with Danone, working with Evian to launch her career, then moving on Coca Cola to launch Coke Zero, and then entered the wine industry about fifteen years ago with Gallo. So, Courtney, thank you so much for being here with us today and bringing all this amazing experiential knowledge to us. Yeah. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. And before we dive into today's conversation, can you tell us a little bit more in your own words about your your background and how you came to work in wine? Sure. So I actually got my master's of business administration, my MBA out in, California. So that's the first time I had ever been to California at the Anderson School at UCLA, and I went to work in brand management afterwards. So in marketing with Evian in The United States. Very small operation and outpost they had in The US at the time, not consolidated with their dairy operations. And I learned an incredible about about marketing and beverage marketing from people that managed to make water a brand and a brand that was desirable among celebrities and even a call brand in bars. So I got teased a lot that if I can learn to market water, I could learn to market anything. So I got a tremendous foundation there. Evian and Coke did a distribution deal back then, and so many of us interviewed for and relocated to the Coca Cola headquarters in Atlanta. I continued to work on Evian and then eventually went to work for Coke and got there right at the time of the launch of Coke Zero, which I was privileged to get to lead. So I led that for three years. It was an incredible trial by fire. The brand was not super successful right out of the gate in the first month or two it was launched. And so did a lot of dialing back, tweaking, and then kind of relaunching in a big way and then growing it to 70,000,000 cases by the time I left a couple years later. But during that time, I had attended some food and wine events, really, from Evian and had discovered that there was a thing called wine marketing. I ran into a wine supplier at one of these events and was given a business card. And I was like, wait a minute. You can do this? You can do what I do, but for wine? And that became my aspiration ever since. So even when I was working at Coke, I was taking my certification exams on the weekend and really aiming to break into the industry, which is easier said than done when you live in Atlanta, which is where I was at the time. But I was really excited about doing so. And then one day, I got the call from Gallo, who was recruiting kind of beverage brand builders from outside the industry to give some, diversity of thought to their marketing teams. And so I joined the wine industry in 2008 and moved moved back out to California to Northern California. And then I did that for fifteen years with so many different experiences at Gallo. Amazing. What a journey. You really converted water into wine. Seriously. Soda in between. Yes. Thank you again so much for being here because I think there is so much value for our industry to be able to hear from people with broader, both kind of CPG experience, but also Fortune 500, you know, company type of experience because, you know, the wine industry, as we know, is a lot of, you know, small, medium enterprises. Yeah. And so being able to have these, like, insights from these companies that have highly curated their strategy and how they're measuring it is so helpful for all of us. Well, I'm glad. I hope I can live up to that. You will. You will. So with that said, our three key takeaways for this episode and what we're really excited to dive into with you, Courtney, are first, the wine industry under invests in brand meaning. So it's kind of over indexed on telling the story of the product like heritage and terroir and kinda under indexed on telling the story of the brand from the emotional identity cultural relevance pieces. Then number two, we're gonna talk about modern consumers and how they connect through values and access and experiences rather than hierarchy. So everyone talks about younger drinkers right now, and they really see wine as a part of a broader lifestyle ecosystem rather than a standalone luxury product. So what does this mean for purchasing behavior? And then number three, we'll talk about the next era of growth, which I would argue will come from clarity and not complexity. So The US wine market is kind of well saturated with some maybe overlapping some brands and even confusing portfolios in some cases. So we'll talk about why really clear disciplined positioning is a competitive advantage. You are speaking my language. Phenomenal takeaways. Alright. Amazing. Amazing. Well, let's dive right into it. So first, kind of going back to that first takeaway of what is brand meaning and and why does it matter to be competitive. So from your perspective, why do so many wine brands still lead with the production and provenance pieces instead of brand identity or purpose? Well, you know, it's funny. It's funny if you think about Coca Cola doing that. So what if in order to sell this, we just talked about the chemistry that went into the brown liquid and the lab we made it in and how big we made the bubbles? I mean, it it's laughable. Right? It would be not a very compelling story to people when they're just thirsty. I think that wine is such an interesting artistic beverage that has a lot more to it and a lot more romance. And sometimes we get carried away with our own stories and our own love of the product and the industry. And we forget that the majority of people that drink wine, even on a once in a while basis, do not necessarily share our passion for this as a lifestyle. And they are thirsty. They're looking to party. They