Jägermeister marketer on keeping spirits (and awareness) high as clubbing culture cools

I have a background in political science with a focus on international relations. There were a few spirits consumed on the path to attaining that degree, so perhaps that pointed me in Jägermeister’s direction. I started out with Jägermeister working at the crossroads of the spirits industry, business, and political regulation.

The alcohol industry, especially when it comes to marketing is heavily regulated, for all sorts of good reasons. We don’t want to market to consumers under the age of 18 and we don’t want to condone or promote excessive drinking.

For my first three years I analyzed the state of affairs around the world and helped establish the Jägermeister marketing code, which has since become the guide for everything we do around the world. As part of that, you get to brief the respective marketing teams. When an opportunity presented itself in the western Europe team I went for it.

I started out managing small markets. I think the smallest one initially was Malta. The markets kept increasing in size and soon I was managing Italy and Spain – the biggest markets in the region outside of Germany and the UK.

In most markets Jägermeister works with third-party distributors: we sell Jägermeister to a company and they then sell it on. In these cases, we also invest quite a bit of money to promote the brand. My job was to make sure that not only were commercial targets met, but also that the money was being spent in line with our strategy.

Then one of the most dynamic spirits markets in the world – the UK – had an opening and I found myself moving to London, in the end of 2020 where I now manage the Jägermeister marketing team. So we’re an independent distributor in the UK. Our biggest brand is Jägermeister. We also recently launched Teremana tequila, which is Dwayne Johnson’s (aka ‘The Rock’) spirit. And then we have Gin Sul, a fantastic Mediterranean gin.

Christian unpacks Jägermeister’s approach to marketing

My research suggests that Jägermeister is rolling: 9.2m nine-litre cases were sold in the last year, global sales reached $1bn. There have been particularly positive results achieved in western and eastern Europe, as well as Asia, but sales in the UK were sustained at full capacity and remained stable in Germany. All very impressive. What’s next in terms of growing and maintaining Jägermeister and, indeed, the other brands you mentioned?

We’re hoping that we can sustain that momentum. It’s a dynamic and at times challenging environment out there. A lot of our sales happen in the ‘on trade’: bars, pubs, clubs, and (to a certain degree) restaurants. This sets us apart from most spirits brands who sell the majority of volume in the ‘off-trade’ at supermarkets.

We’re still feeling the aftermath of the pandemic. People have changed how they go out, how often they go out, when they go out, and where they go out. But, and this is important: research has confirmed that there is still an undying desire to go out and enjoy what are often called ‘high energy occasions’ – but they might not necessarily happen as much as they used to very late in the night or indeed, early in the morning.

We know that nightclubs, for instance, are under intense pressure, not just from consumers but also regulation and issues around noise complaints from local residents. In the last three years alone, we have lost about 1/3 of UK nightclubs, which is really, really sad – especially if you like clubbing.

Our research tells us that consumers still demand a moment of release when they’re out with friends, when they’re having a good time. For many of them, having a drink is part of that experience. We have to adapt to that.

We also know that fewer consumers are going out. But when you dig a little bit deeper into the numbers, you learn that those that go out go out more often. So they’re our most valuable customers and we need to cater for them.

When it comes to Teremana, it’s only just been launched a few weeks ago so we are literally starting from zero and we’re hoping to see growth. The first signs are very positive. When I checked this morning, it’s the second most wished-for tequila on Amazon.

The feedback we’re getting from customers and the trade is phenomenal. It’s such a smooth liquid and you can taste the quality in every drop. What sets it apart from other celebrity brands is that Dwayne Johnson, the Teremana founder, is quite the tequila connoisseur so rather than sticking his name on any given liquid he went to great lengths to craft a product of the highest quality. And even people who don’t particularly like Tequila taste it and love it. When it’s summer and the sun is out, what’s better than kicking back and enjoying a margarita?

Jägermeister’s HQ, Wolfenbüttel, Germany

Tell us about your marketing team. How is it organized and structured?

We are a small team and much of our work is focused on building emotional connections with consumers in the trade, in the experiential and digital real: we have a culture marketing team that is very much connected with the movers and shakers in the music industry and in fashion, we obviously have a very skilled trade marketing team to make sure we’re relevant and visible at the point of purchase in bars, pubs, clubs etc, and we invest heavily into festivals and events.

Festivals are always great fun, but people sometimes underestimate how much work has to go on behind the scenes. I always find it absolutely fascinating at festivals to see how a whole town is built on a series of green fields and a few weeks later, it’s back to cows grazing.

On top of that, we’re trying to amplify everything, and most of this work is digital, but we also work across other channels to build ‘top of mind’ awareness. We very much believe in the 60/40 rule when building a brand. You need to strike the right balance between long-term brand-building activities and short-term sales activations and make sure you link the two, so that consumers, once they’re at the point of purchase, can find our drinks and then make their purchase.

Jägermeister’s DJ Academy, one of many initiatives the business has run to support nightclub culture

The Nighttime Industry Association reports in the last 12 months alone, over 100 independent nightclubs were lost. Jägermeister has long been associated with this campaign to try and save nightclubs – how’s it going?

If there was a single solution we would have already done it. If you examine why clubs are closing, you will see that it’s a multi-variable answer. The pandemic certainly accelerated a trend that was there beforehand.

We also need to acknowledge changing consumer behavior. People aren’t as interested in going to a big club as they used to be say 10 years ago. Equally we need to recognize that there is still this desire to do something at night. Society is changing. Nightclubs in the ‘90s were different to clubs in the '70s, which in turn were different to clubs in the ‘50s. Change or evolution is inevitable.

We also cannot ignore increased regulation, especially around noise control. These factors make it extremely difficult for operators run a nightclub. And yet, nightclubs perform a function within society. They are where people go to be with their friends, to find joy and find happiness. There’s nowhere else that compares in this way.

For many, nightclubs are also a safe space. Many people feel that clubs are the only space where they can really be their true selves; where they are completely uninhibited. For some, they find ‘their crowd’ or ‘their tribe’ in nightclubs – and they don’t meet them anywhere else. It goes far beyond merely being a place where you can listen to music and drink.

In the pandemic, we launched an initiative called ‘Save The Night.’ As a business we realized that we had great relationships with bartenders, with DJs and with other performing artists for decades. And they were all troubled.

Having night-time venues close, because of the Covid lockdown, impacted directly on all of these people. We set up a program. It started with people being able to have a drink online with their friends and quickly grew to involving DJs to play at virtual parties that replicated the real experience – and we were able to turn this into a source of income for the entertainers. Similarly, we set up a bartending mixing sessions with bartenders that work with us so that they could earn too.

I met one of those guys, and he was super-grateful – without the ‘Save The Night’ initiative, he would have had to move out as he would have been unable to pay his bills. Fortunately, lockdown is long past, but nightclubs are still under threat of closure. We have kept the program going, and we have a ‘Save The Night’ fund that we give away every year. €100,000 for various projects around the world.

Brand association with music venues is key to Jägermeister’s marketing strategy

Nightclubs are also a place where many artists get their first chance to perform and then hone their craft.

Exactly. Another thing we did under this program is our DJ Academy. We have a great student brand ambassador program, with around 50 student brand ambassadors across the UK who help to promote our brand. We noticed that a considerable number are DJs. Our cultural marketing team had a load of DJ performers in their network. So we set up a program, the Jägermeister DJ Akademie, where aspiring DJs could apply for an intense course, led by Gaia of Girls Don’t Sync. At the end of which they needed to perform on the decks at a massive outdoor rave in Shoreditch. They all did really, really well.

Jägermeister’s presence extends beyond UK festivals to Snowboxx at Avioraz Ski Resort, France

What have you learned in your career journey that enables you to get the best out of your marketing teams?

I think one of the most essential factors when building a successful brand is your team. More so than the money that you may have or the insights. Ideally, your team really knows the consumer and the market.

People assume that because I run the team, I know everything. This couldn’t be further from the truth. For example, we do a lot of festivals and event activations and people often ask me: “Do you know DJ ‘so and so’? Have you heard them play?” I have an amazing team who are responsible for this.

Sometimes, when hiring, you have to trust your instinct. There is an interview process when we need to fill a role, but we really want to understand people really well. If the hiring process takes a bit longer, that’s fine, especially if you ultimately find a good person – because then we have the advantage.

At Jägermeister we don’t usually need to explain who we are and what we do. When we hire, we’re looking for a delicate balance between having your finger on the pulse of what is happening in music, entertainment, all the latest trends and thinking how we can get the Jägermeister brand into that.

But on the flip-side, we’re running a business. So you need Excel spreadsheet skills and the discipline to follow up on things and deliver on time. It’s also super-important that we all enjoy working with each other so I spend time making sure that we do.

After ensuring you have a great team, you need to quantify your results. The job isn’t done when you’ve completed a sale or when you’ve launched a brand or campaign. The campaign is just a means to an end: it needs to have a positive impact on the brand and on visibility. We need to measure how it has performed.

The success of some initiatives is easier to assess than others: you can tell pretty quickly if a social media campaign that drives sales on Amazon is working. But activations and collaborations with events or festivals, for example: sure, you can count the number of people who go in and out of your event space, you can count the number of drinks, you assess the weather – but direct ROI, impact on sales and brand strength can be more difficult to quantify. You have to take a longer-term view and track their impact over time.

Dwayne Johnson’s Teremana Tequila: new from Jägermeister

Do you ever get push-back from the Jägermeister leadership team on your event plans?

The advantage is that I am on the leadership team, but I am lucky by having colleagues who “get it” – potentially more so than in other companies. But yes, they do challenge, and they should. I welcome being challenged. We’re always considering and being presented with opportunities. The difficulty is making sure your decisions are strategic. Having the ability to say no to things. It’s not always black and white. Making important decisions is a mixture of hard facts and also gut feeling you acquire over the years. I also always consult my team – oftentimes they have a much better understanding of what will work and what won't.

When we do festivals, we want to build memory structures. It’s very much a long-term thing. There are some curious examples where a brand connects with entertainment and it doesn’t work, but our job is to connect it all together. We aspire to providing a phenomenal experience.

The festival space is an extremely difficult territory to play in: we might be present at an event and the main stage has the best artists in the world playing one after the other. We won’t be able to replicate that. But what we can do is be different. Let’s say a festival is more rock, pop or electronically led, we might have the only hip-hop stage.

We notice that people have wider tastes than they used to and may catch different genres of music throughout an event. So choosing a specific genre really seems to work. We have to make sure our space is properly branded. This has to be obvious enough to be seen and remembered, but not so extreme that you feel you are walking into one of our adverts.

This way we establish memory structures. And then when people go to a pub or are in Tesco and they see our brand, something positive fires up in their mind, and hopefully they’ll make a purchase.

Jägermeister Platz at Reading Festival 2024

John Hegarty on LinkedIn said that many people think that ‘brand’ is a logo. His definition of brand is a tiny piece of real estate in someone’s mind. And I thought that was a really nice way of summarizing it.

Brand is so much more than a logo. I believe that the more touchpoints that you have for your customers, the more senses you activate with a positive response, the bigger your chance of succeeding. But obviously, it’s a very intense communications world out there with vast numbers of messages being emitted from brands – and many other things vying for your attention – and all of these messages are being fired at consumers every day. So it’s getting more and more challenging to cut through.

You mentioned Binet and Field’s 60/40 rule and that you do your best to adhere to that. I’d like to talk about how you balance your marketing between ‘the 60 percent’ (longer term brand work) and ‘the 40’ (sales activation marketing).

As Les Binet said himself: ‘the 60/40 rule is a guideline’. It’s not set in stone and the split varies on the industry. The 60/40 ratio is an ideal. The situation in the market might require a shift. We can at times be 40/60 or closer to 50/50. The numbers are more an indication.

At Jägermeister, we’ve proven that there is a good argument for long-term brand building – work where you might not see an immediate effect. The Jägermeister organization gets this: it is ingrained in our system.

Jägermeister is now present in over 150 markets around the world, and the brand is a hugely important part of our offer. A lot of brand building happens in the on trade. There we combine the short and the long. If you activate short-term sales by driving a direct purchase in the on-trade, and that experience is connected with a great night in a nightclub, for example, then you automatically tick both boxes: brand building and a sale. Our approach around the world is to start with the on-trade, and then we expand from there.

Connecting Jägermeister’s ice cold suggested serving and festival tickets

A drive for financial results from performance marketing pushed some marketers away from more strategic thinking (based on research and hypothesis and validation). We are now seeing a return to more considered marketing. What advice might you have for marketers tempted to leapfrog research and strategy?

Research and insights definitely have a place. And I think any good strategy starts with an insight that comes from the consumer. Ideally, this leads to a response from your own brand: creating something that the consumer wants, and then you give it to them.

An important question is: how did you come to that insight? Research isn’t just data: numbers, bar charts and statistics. As a marketer you need to get out there. You need to meet the consumer. I think a lot of people are afraid of meeting the consumer. Some marketers speak about the consumer all the time but the only time they meet him or her is as part of a research report, or as part of a PowerPoint presentation.

We take the opposite approach. We’re based in the middle of London. There are at least 10 pubs within a five-minute walk of our offices. We can walk out of our font door and meet customers in these venues.

But all industries should think like this. In B2B, or if you sell windows, blinds, radiators... you should spend time in the field and ask your customers: what do you think about our brand? What can we do better? What do you think of your competitors?

I go to the venues that sell our drinks, I spend time with our sales team in the field. I talk to our customers who work behind the bar. It’s amazing how quickly you get insights. This sort of research is invaluable. You also need a brand tracking system: having a rough idea of your brand awareness and perception is key.

A lot of this can be done pretty quickly. We track our brand equity both with Kantar, considered by many to be the gold standard, and we also use a local tool called ProQuo AI which gives you different type of reading.

We monitor this because we need to understand – as best we can – what’s driving the increase in our brand equity. It’s not like there’s a marketing textbook where on page 412, you are told exactly what to do next. We take these readings, and also stay as close as we can to our customers and really understand them.

Above all, as marketers we have to be humble. Sometimes we’ll get carried away by idolizing a consumer: we paint a mental picture of an individual who is sitting there, waiting for us to solve their problems with our product or brand activation. In reality: consumers don’t care. And they shouldn’t. It’s not their job to wait for a brand to descend from the heavens and solve their issues. We just have to be there, when there is a desire for a product like ours.

And that moment for us – it’s people who are having a good time with their friends, and they’re looking for a delicious drink. That’s when we need to show up. Obviously, there’s a lot of other brands who have a similar offering, and that’s where we need to best understand how we can be the one that they choose at that moment.

What is your take on the synthetic approach – asking AI-generated customers about your products?

Absolutely. It’s something that we’re considering. We have seen stuff from different agencies specializing in that space and it was phenomenally accurate. What is interesting is that if everyone goes down the synthetic route, does that mean in time there will no longer be primary research with real humans?

Let’s whizz forward to 2034, and all data is synthetic. Would we be basing our decisions based on data from 2024 – the last time that real humans were consulted?

I think synthetic data definitely will have a role to play going forward because of its affordability and its speed. We wouldn’t use synthetic customers to test the important stuff – like packaging – but if we’re putting out a post, that we plan to promote on Instagram, then commissioning expensive research makes no sense here. This is where a synthetic test for a few pounds would be super useful.

I don’t believe that interrogating real humans will disappear any time soon. I am a massive fan of focus groups – talking to six people. Everything in your system is telling you that this small group can’t be representative, surely it is too small a sample size to draw any conclusions…

And yet when you listen in to the second focus group, they say exactly the same thing as the first and reinforce your findings. You should obviously validate any hypothesis properly but I am often surprised at how insightful focus groups are, based on such a relatively small number of opinions. It comes down to the human element that I think won’t go away.

Jägermeister’s activations at Boomtown Festival involve big builds with subtle use of brand codes

I’m wondering what advice you might have for a younger version of you. Imagine you're speaking to yourself years ago, as you start your career heading towards marketing and your role today. What advice might you give a younger Chris? What should he do more of? And what might he avoid?

Trust your instincts – especially when you start out your career. You don’t have a lot of experience. I think you learn fast what works and what doesn’t. Try things out. In terms of what not to do: don’t ask for permission; ask for forgiveness. If you really believe in something and that it might work, even if you don’t have any data just do it. See what happens. Nelson Mandela said: “You never lose. You either learn, or you win.”

A story Steven Bartlett told at a recent conference: he was involved with two very similar online fashion brands at the same time. And one of the big differences was that one of them had a former marketer as a CEO, who understood the need to be agile and move fast. And the other didn’t. At the time he joined, they were level-pegging in terms of sales. Within a year, one had just completely overtaken the other. In his opinion, this was down to the fact that the one business got immediate approval to try things and the other had less appetite for risk and more tiers of approval. And sure, the bolder more agile business made loads of mistakes. The first six initiatives didn’t work. But number seven was hugely successful. Where are you on the spectrum of risk?

One of our company values is that we want to be bold, and that's something that we tie back to the man who invented Jägermeister, around 80 years ago, Curt Mast. He was bold. His original business was as a wine and vinegar wholesaler. He pivoted and went into spirits. Initially, there was a range of between 10 to 20 different brands and sub-brands.

Then he said: “No, we’re just going to focus on Jägermeister because that’s the one that’s winning.” That was a very bold decision. And it worked. I would have loved to be in the room when that decision was made.

When you take a risk and it works - everyone’s happy. If it doesn’t work, you just have to hold yourself and your organization accountable. If you ask your team to take risks, you have to be ready to succeed and also be prepared for failure.

More importantly, after trying something new, the question should be: what have you learned? It is the same in any experiment. Karen Pulaski said that “no experiment is a failure, that even a mistake advances the evolution of understanding” and I think there’s a lot of truth in that. You’ve failed, but you’ve learned. Not ideal, but you’re smarter than before. In this way, failure can be interpreted as a positive.

I think there is also a difference in approach to marketing. Some companies are led by people who really ‘are the brand.’ And there are people in senior roles who simply see their work ‘as a job’ and no more. I think these different approaches impact on the brand over time – for better and for worse.

Jägermeister’s founder Curt Mast

If there’s one thing you’ve learned about marketing, it is?

Stay close to the consumer. I think we’ve touched on that a few times during this interview. It all starts with the consumer and ends with the consumer. So don’t get carried away by the communications piece. If you love a campaign, but nobody else does, you’ve not done your job.

Something I always say is: it’s not about me. I’m not the target market. So how do we reach someone out there? And ultimately, all of our marketing activities have to be financially quantifiable. Our goal as a business is to have a strong brand and sales. A mundane sentiment perhaps, but fortunately, the journey there can be really, really interesting and creative. And that’s the fun part.

You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.

Little Grey Cells is Tim Healey, founder and curator of Little Grey Cells Club, the UK’s premier Senior Marketer meet up.