I Love New York

Over the past few days I have mentioned about how we are going about advertising and distributing Mendis coconut brandy, so I view it a natural progression that today I cover with you our launch state- New York and why we chose it. As mentioned yesterday, we will only grow Mendis at a rate whereby we can provide substantial marketing support to the Mendis brand within our distribution reach at any one point in time.

For our launch state we have decided to select New York as the very first state to have access to Mendis coconut brandy for a number of reasons.

1) Manhattan acts as a "captured market", as a large percentage of the population for New York City and surrounding areas pass through Manhattan. Therefore, New York City can be covered by concentrating marketing in Manhattan.

2) The NYC area is the top metropolitan area for distilled spirits.

3) Most of our team were either born or raised in New York (except for me being from Sydney, Australia) so it makes sense not only to have our launch but our HQ's here as well, .

4) Plus we agree with the age old saying about New York "if you can make here, you can make it anywhere".

From what we have found in the U.S. alcohol industry is that new alcohol companies will generally launch a new product in Florida or California. The main reasoning behind this is that these two states are two of only a handle of states that allow large liquor chains (i.e. Bevmo in CA). What large liquor chains enable is easy large scale retail store presence through one outlet. Instead of having to try to get your product in several hundred different stores separately and doing marketing to make those stores aware of your presence, large liquor chains in Florida and California offer one point of contact into several hundred stores. These large retail chains also tend to have an online store front and they try to keep an up-to-date inventory of all the new and best selling alcohol products, so these retailers are open to taking on new products.

In many other states however, it is a different story. Stores are usually small, overstocked and the owners of these typically family-owned liquor stores don’t have the room to stock every single new alcohol product that comes to market. They just want to have brands that people know and will buy. In light of understanding how the retail chains are operated in such states and how the owners view new alcohol products, we tailored a great deal of our marketing campaign towards them.

Our marketing campaign is very street based (Guerilla marketing), whereby we are active in the streets near our retailer stores through our Mendis promotion vans. In addition, we will be holding promotions in store to help create brand awareness for Mendis and drive sales for the retailer. This way we will be in touch with our customers and retailers. Another common form of promotions for launching a product is holding special VIP launch parties in bars. While, these events are fun for everyone attending, we feel that at this stage it is not the right form of marketing for Mendis.

This said, we will eventually be holding bar promotion nights. We have always said we are in this venture to provide a unique product for consumers out there and we want to stay in touch with them. Considering this, our bar nights are for our customers, you are our celebrities, not Paris Hilton. You won’t see us touting pictures of celebrities on our website, like a great majority of new alcohol companies do. But you will see pictures of everyday people having fun at our events.

I like to think that Mendis is not just a unique new alcohol product, but as a company we are changing the way how an alcohol company does business, how it relates with its customers and business partners, for this is what defines us and our product at the end of the day.

Advertising Where?

Today I would like to provide some insight into how we are going about marketing Mendis coconut brandy. The general strategy of big beverage companies in launching and marketing a new alcohol product is to launch the product, then provide advertising support, generally in the form of print and digital media, such as magazines and T.V. respectively. However, over the past 5 years there has been a dramatic shift in the consensus of how best to get your product message across to consumers.

We view that the most cost effective form of advertising comes from the Internet, mobile advertising and in-store promotions. We view certain forms of print media as dying out for the alcohol industry. It is very hard to translate print media into actual sales, it is more for brand name recognition. The act of reading an article in a magazine then remembering what you read or imagery you saw up to the point of making a purchase is very low. As more and more people go online, the web offers a low-cost medium to get your message across to potential consumers. While the act of reading something online and making the consumer remember it until they make a purchase in a store is just as low as print media, it is a lot cheaper for getting the same effective brand recognition.

Mobile advertising is considered a very effective form of advertising, effective in relation to potential consumers viewing the advert and remembering it until they go to make a purchase. Mobile advertising is live in the streets, close to the store where consumers go to make their purchase. One of the negatives we view with mobile advertising though is the high cost associated with running a long-term mobile campaign. Renting several trucks and drivers and then getting the print advertising prepared and installed is very costly. We view a very effective way to get around this is to buy your own fleet of vans, this way we are not giving money away to some mobile advertising company for a 3-6 month mobile campaign, that at the end we have nothing tangible to show for it. For around the same cost as a 3-month campaign in Manhattan running several trucks, we can purchase 3 vans and have them detailed out in advertising. At the end of the 3 months running them around town, we own them outright and have free mobile advertising for the next several years. This is our reasoning behind why we are buying our own vans that we have been talking about.

Lastly, the most effective form of advertising around for the alcohol industry is in-store promotions - the last point of contact with the purchaser prior to making a purchase. Irrespective of all the print media and other forms of advertising the purchaser has been exposed to, in store promotions can compel a consumer to buy a product on promotion in store over their preferred product of choice. Combining the three mediums of advertising; In-store promotions, Internet and street mobile advertising offers a very effective and cost efficient promotional campaign. Even though we are dedicated to our 3-tier marketing campaign approach for building out the Mendis brand name, we will always be open to print media if we find a print medium that is in direct contact with out target market, such as the Rolls Royce Magazine. In the great words encapsulated in the James bond movie, "Never Say Never...".