Breaking Through the Noise: Marketing Irish Whiskey Across the Ocean

Transcript lightly edited for spelling and punctuation. The conversation is unabridged.

Mark Evans: I usually talk to B2B marketers and entrepreneurs on the podcast because they provide great insight, and they're my target audience. But on this episode of Marketing Spark, we're doing something different. I'm excited to welcome Jarlath Watson, the principal at the Echlinville Distillery located on the picturesque Ards Peninsula in Northern Ireland. It's one of the few independent distilleries in the country. Under Jarlath's leadership, the distillery is renowned for its high quality and award-winning products. It produces a range of spirits, including gin, pot gin, and vodka, but its flagship product is Irish whiskey. A friend of mine, Jason Nikore, has been working with Jarlath to bring Echlinville's products to Canada, and I was curious about how our product jumps across the ocean to attract new customers. Welcome to the podcast.

Jarlath Watson: Hey, Mark. Morning. Thanks for having me.

Mark Evans: Let's start by providing some background into the distillery's history, where its products are sold, and talk about your role. As we were talking before the podcast, you're not only the chief financial officer, but you're the person responsible for blending and mixing the whiskeys. That's an interesting role.

Jarlath Watson: It keeps you busy. Keeps you busy. You have two day jobs. Excellent. Gotta have to condense 20 years history into a two-minute bite here. So we're based on the Ards Peninsula in the north of Ireland, about 25 miles south of Belfast. We're on the most easterly point of Ireland. We're a field-to-glass distillery, and what that means is we're built on a farm. We're built on an old farm estate dating back to the 1740s, the Echlinville Estate. We're quite unique in that we, from plowing the fields, growing the barley, floor malting the barley, mash, ferment, distill, mature, and bottle. We do everything on-site, and we're probably the only guys in Ireland that have that approach. So we take provenance to the nth degree in that everything is done within one fifty-acre farm and within one eighteen-acre site within the distillery. We've been in whiskey since 2005, 2004. We built our new distillery in 2013. And like you say, we're working with Jason in Ontario, trying to bring Dunville's and other Echlinville products into the market.

Mark Evans: Where is the whiskey sold, and what's been your expansion program over the last few years as the distillery has gained momentum and become more popular?

Jarlath Watson: Yeah. So we're probably been sold now in, I think, 27 countries worldwide, and that will range from a lot of Europe, most of Western and Central Europe, obviously, and the UK first. Then you went to Western and Central Europe, a bit of Eastern Europe. We're now moving into Africa. We've signed up great partners in South Africa, and we're looking at Kenya and different countries in Africa. We're also heading into Australasia, currently Australia, looking at New Zealand, different markets. We're in three provinces in Canada. Currently, let us say, with GSN and Cork Wines & Whiskies in Ontario. That was the first connection with Canada. And as of last week, we have signed a really big deal for us. We've just signed up to be distributed by Sazerac, by 375 Spirits in USA. So one of the largest companies in the world have taken Dunville's on in the largest Irish whiskey market in the world, which is the US, your near neighbors. I guess it's a funny one, Mark, with whiskey. You have to build a reputation. You have to build a name for yourself and get gravitas, but you want sales. So there's two ways of doing that. First thing is we all make white spirits because white spirits get to market quicker than whiskey that has to age. But on your whiskey side, you tend to, I guess, you tend to in the early days, you tend to go into market with whatever options you have. And then as your brand grows over the years, you tend to reposition your product and you tend then to go out and look for that tier one, tier two national distributor in the largest markets. And I guess that's where we are currently. We're trying to reposition our brands within the markets, and we're going from regional distributors to tier one, tier two national distributors, i.e., 375 Spirits in the States. You can't do that in the early days, but whenever you build a brand to a level that it has recognition, then you can do that. And that is the next step in our progression.

Mark Evans: In my world, where there are dozens, if not hundreds of companies selling the same types of software, I spend a lot of time on brand positioning and helping companies differentiate themselves in some way from the competition. If you don't stand out, then you get lost in the crowd, and that's a very dangerous place to be if you're selling a product that looks and feels like everybody else's. And I know this is a difficult question when it comes to taste and products like whiskey. But how do you differentiate your product from all the other Irish whiskeys out there, let alone other types of whiskeys so that you stand out and that people know you for something. Now it may be the company's Irish heritage. It may be your history. It may be the brand that you've built over the last 20 years, but talk about differentiation and how you make that happen.

Jarlath Watson: There's two aspects to that for us within Dunville's and within Echlinville. The first aspect is differentiating your liquid, differentiating your whiskey. That comes quite naturally to us. That comes quite easy. We acquired an old brand called Dunville's Irish Whiskey. Dunville's Irish Whiskey was the largest Belfast brand dating back to 1808. In the 1800s, whenever Irish whiskey was the king of spirits worldwide, 70% of all brown spirits sold in the world was Irish whiskey. Canadian, Scotch, and Bourbon were fighting for the other 30%, and Irish was 70%. Dunville's was the largest brand in the world. The largest distillery in the world was based in Belfast, Dunville's Irish Whiskey. Masters of marketing back in the 1800s, 56 markets worldwide, 27 offices throughout the world. Dunville's artifacts, mirrors, etcetera, will still adorn all the best whiskey pubs around the world. We acquired this old brand, and we were fairly aware that we could have stood accused of taking an old brand and trying to milk it. So we overcompensated by making extremely good whiskey. I guess we make whiskey without compromise. So differentiating our liquids differentiate themselves by the sheer quality of a liquid. We do very, very long cask maturation in old-world European casks, sherries, ports, fortified wines. We also use rum cask from the Caribbean. Those casks that would have been about in the 1850s, 1860s, whenever Irish whiskey was the largest spirit in the world. So we make exceptionally high-end single malt and blends, finished for long times with very, very good sherry casks. We took the best whiskey we can get or we make, we put it in the best cask in the world, and we leave it for as long as it takes. We win hordes of awards. Last year at the Irish Whiskey Awards, I think there was 11 whiskey categories. We won five of them, including winning the best overall whiskey in Ireland. Now for a young distillery at Echlinville, which is still family owned, that's a massive achievement. If I can get my whiskey onto your lips, you will buy my whiskey. As was proven yesterday at the Spirit of Toronto show, we've done a master class before it started with 60 people. They tasted the whiskey. They came out in a master class, told their mates, and our stand was the busiest stand at the show. For a small brand at Echlinville, we were the busiest stand at the show. That's how we can differentiate our spirit quite easily. Differentiating your brand takes a lot more work. And if it didn't, you guys wouldn't have jobs. So differentiating your brand is a lot harder. And we are experts in making whiskey, building brands maybe not so much yet. So, we build on the whiskey heritage of Ireland and of Ulster. So we resurrect old Irish whiskey brands, initially, Dunville's, which makes single malt and blends. We then brought back Old Comber. Old Comber was a distillery 12 miles from our distillery that closed down in 1957. That was our rural distillery, and so we brought that brand back, that was an Irish pot still, a different type of whiskey. We try and take those old brands, we rely very heavily on the traditional heritage of what those brands were, and then we try to slowly bring that into a modern era. So we will be very sympathetic to the old labels, to the old brand, and to the old brand values and messages, the core values of the company. And we will slowly add a modern contemporary twist to that.

Mark Evans: I think that's a very interesting strategy because as a small operation with limited marketing and sales dollars, you need to be as savvy and as creative as possible. So the fact that you're taking products with brand equity that have a history, that have recognition is a very interesting move, and I think it's very savvy on your part. The question that I have is that there are many companies in my world have very good products, and they spend a lot of time listening to customers and enhancing the products so that they deliver a lot of value. The challenge is making sure that you can, what I call, pollinate that message to the world, so that people can actually become aware of the products that you make. Because if you make great product and no one knows about it, then you don't have a business. You have, yeah, a hobby for the most part. I know you're not a marketer. I know that you're chief bottle washer and the guy who counts the dollars and cents. But what type of marketing does the distillery do, and what's the vision right now? When you look at the marketing landscape and the fact that you wanna get your message out? Are you gonna do your own marketing? Are you gonna rely on distributors to make it happen for you? What's that mix look like?

Jarlath Watson: Yeah. So I guess for us, we are a small family-owned distillery. Our budget is probably one-thousandth of what the multinationals might have, and our network is a lot smaller, albeit that is building. So, again, I guess we have to rely to a certain extent on the marketing expertise and the presence that our distributors have in market. And that's the really important thing about moving to those tier one, tier two distributors who are in market. They have people on the ground. They have the connections with the best on-trade and off-trade accounts in the country, and they know how to sell booze in their country. For us, obviously, online marketing is a huge reach. We can maximize that or we can try to maximize that. We try and build brand advocates. Whiskey pulls from the heartstrings, you know, and that ties back to brands with heritage and tradition. People who drink whiskey tend to appreciate heritage, tradition, history, craft, and they want to buy into your brand. They want to feel a connection with a brand, you know, so that brand loyalty is there for you if you want to embrace it. So we try and build brand advocates throughout a whole network of different people from bloggers to influencers to marketers to, you know, to writers to whoever. And if we can tell our story to them, they would go and tell our story for us. They will have influence and they will have reach that possibly we don't have. And, again, that ties back to having credibility, to having a story, and to having really good liquid because people will then want to go out and advocate your brand. So we're not a company that can throw a lot of dollars around with big campaigns. Smaller companies rely a lot on what we would call guerrilla marketing, you know, and I guess we're slowly moving away from that smaller guerrilla marketing into the larger campaigns, but it's gonna be a while yet.

Mark Evans: I'm glad that you talked about influencer marketing because from the outside looking in, it's a very sexy, compelling concept. The idea of finding people who have large followings, who are influential, who have credibility and thought leadership in the marketplace is very attractive, and you want to associate your product with their brands and their track records. But one of the challenges is that there's a lot of competition for influencers. Lots of people wanna be associated with them. And the other thing is being able to identify the influencers that are relevant to your product and, as important, are gonna do a good job of being evangelists and advocates as opposed to simply taking your product and you simply being part of their overall influencer mix. Can you talk a little bit about Echlinville's strategy when it comes to influencer marketing? How do you identify the people that matter to you, and how do you nurture and monitor that relationship so that it's a win-win proposition?

Jarlath Watson: I guess for us, that started off in our home market. That started off in Ireland and in the UK. The whiskey community tends to be quite small in its core and quite tight-knit, but very active. And like I say, it's an industry that people want to feel a part of and want to know everything about. They want to know everything about you. The people that become influencers in your home market, you tend to identify quite quickly. You tend to know them as friends because you're meeting them at tastings. You're meeting them at whiskey shows. You know, you're online talking about the same stuff. So that's easier. Like I say, the key bit to that is once they taste your product and hear your story, they're very quick at calling out the bullshit from the real deal. Do you know? And if you're not the real deal, they will call it out very quickly, and they will not have time for you. I guess, whenever you try to identify, whenever you try to go to far-off markets, that becomes a lot more difficult. Again, we have more visibility in the US as to who's doing what. We have a better visibility in Canada as to who's doing what once you get into maybe Central Europe, maybe into regions with different languages, and that becomes a lot harder. So you do rely then on the networks of people you know who know people, and you do rely on those introductions. And, again, what you find is that people are not willing to make those introductions unless they have faith in you, but it's then their reputation, you know. So I guess, at that point, we are relying on people we know and further out networks. And, again, going back to our distributor base and fitting into our distributors who are in market and who do know the lie of the land in that area.

Mark Evans: One of the things you mentioned is the fact that, well, a lot of companies depend on digital marketing. Face-to-face marketing is really important. And before we jumped on this recording, you talked about the fact that you're on a multi-city tour throughout North America. And I think that one of the challenges for many companies is that there's so much digital marketing being thrown at them. We're inundated with social media and content marketing and videos, and it's hard sometimes to break through. And I think a lot of brands are looking at a return to real-world marketing, going to conferences, going to events, hosting dinners, or master classes like you did in Toronto yesterday. Curious about your approach and your company's approach to physical marketing in which you're making relationships and you're meeting people and you're building your network and you're building word-of-mouth and actually getting people to experience the product and tell stories about the product. Is that a key part of your marketing thrust?

Jarlath Watson: It's the very core of it in that, like you say, the online is a very noisy place. You're being constantly bombarded with messages from a hundred different brands in any one day in any one field. It's human nature, we tend to just learn to block that out, you know. I mean, it becomes, you know, you don't it doesn't register with you. You can have online marketing thrown at you all day, every day, and very little of it will actually register with you. You have to make that register with people. You have to make them aware of Dunville's before and make them aware of something about Dunville's, and then the online marketing starts to register with them. We find the best way to do that is just to get into market, to get into bars, to get into whiskey shows, to get into consumer events. Whiskey is a different industry, Mark. Whiskey is, at its very essence and its very heart, Whiskey is about me pouring you a glass. We sit down, we share a story. Whiskey is not about pouring neat whiskeys and getting whatever. That lends itself very well to consumer events. I can sit and pour people three or four whiskeys. I can tell them a story of our distillery. I can ask them what they like, why they like it, you know, what resonates and doesn't resonate with them, and form those connections. Once you do that, the rest of the marketing starts to resonate with them. It gets through their filters, and registers with them. The job of the consumer events, of the face-to-face tastings, of having a chat over a whiskey, it's to break down the filters so that the rest of your message gets through to them.

Mark Evans: That makes sense. In my world, it's hard to taste software, but you can experience software and you can be shown how it works and why it's relevant to you. The other major thing is, as you mentioned, storytelling. Because if you wanna get somebody into your world, if you want to show that you're empathetic to what they think and feel and do and that you've got something that differentiates you from everybody else, storytelling is an awesome way to make that happen. I wanna shift gears a little bit and talk about moving into new markets. Obviously, Jason has helped you penetrate the Ontario market. And for those who aren't familiar, the LCBO, Liquor Control Board of Ontario, was the biggest purchaser of alcohol in the world. So to break into Ontario, to break through with the LCBO is a major accomplishment. Can you talk about your growth strategy when it comes to international markets? How do you identify the markets that you wanna move into? And what kind of research do you do to make sure that there's demand for the product that you're selling?

Jarlath Watson: I guess our growth has to be very controlled. We're not like the software business. You can create as many copies of your software as there are people to buy it. We have to make whiskey. We have to lay down whiskey for our youngest whiskey is five, six years old. Our oldest whiskey is 22 years old currently, and it will get older. If I want to sell you a bottle of 22-year-old whiskey, I have to make that 22 years ago. So I've only a certain amount of that to sell. I can't take that to 55 new markets this year, or I'm going to leave 53 of them very disappointed and with empty shelves. Even our youngest product at five years old relies on what was made five years ago. We work with limited stocks. So it's a matter of identifying the markets you want to be in, and then you identify how much product that you can allocate in any given year. And you make sure that that works because the last thing you want to do is not have supply chains that are not fulfilled. But, you know, you're better off not in market than having unfulfilled supply chains. So I guess we sat down. We actually work very closely with Invest NI and bodies like that, Bord Bia and bodies like that who will have all the necessary data on consumers, on what price points and what SKUs are being sold in those markets. So we're identifying markets that we are not a bargain-basement whiskey brand. We're a premium, ultra-premium whiskey brand. You know, we range from seven-year-old single malts up to 22-year-old or seven-year-old blends up to 22-year-old single malts. So we're not fighting, you know, in a different price point area. We're in that upmarket liquor store, upmarket, the best bar accounts in the cities, etcetera, etcetera. We identify that, and then we work, it's more of what stock we have to allocate and then what growth we want in what regions. And it really is done on a case-by-case basis and trust. And again, it's essential if we cannot identify that correct distributor for that market at that time, we'll bypass that market until we can identify the distributor that is a long-term solution to us.

Mark Evans: One of the realities of different types of markets is that consumers respond in different ways. They have different tastes. There's different types of marketing that you have to use to get to them to build brand awareness, to share that experience of the product, and, of course, the story that you wanna tell. How do you approach marketing when it comes to a specific market like Ontario or Canada for that matter, is the marketing mix the same, or do you have research that shows you that if we do this type of marketing rather than that type of marketing, then we'll be more successful?

Jarlath Watson: Yeah. So Canada is probably Ontario and controlled states are different in their approach to non-controlled states. You have one importer, the LCBO. They're government-owned. They are the largest single purchaser of alcohol in the world. They're the gatekeepers to this market, and they do that very well in truth. We have a good relationship with them. I believe they see the value in Dunville's. It's a market that once you get into Ontario, consolidation is the first thing. You want to make sure you're still in market next year. If you're not successful in the LCBO, you'll not be there long. You have a hard job getting back in. So consolidation and then growth, I guess. I've been talking to Jason about this yesterday, and Jason said that we have to change our marketing strategy in Ontario. We have to be in market more. We have to be in market more. We have to put the face of Dunville's out there more in market on the key accounts. I guess, at the start, we rely a lot on winning lots of awards and telling the story through that quality, and that gets you so far and then a lot of online marketing, a lot of POS. We're now at the point where we have a bit of brand recognition. In Ontario, it's not about getting people on the ground. At some point in the development of a whiskey in a market, there's nothing else. It's just getting feet on the ground, getting your brand ambassadors out there and spending six to eight weeks in market, covering all the key accounts, talking to the right people, building friendships with the main bars and the key accounts. So the alcohol industry is still a lot like that, you know. You're relying on a barman. If you walk into a bar and ask for an Irish whiskey or ask for a whiskey, he probably has 50 whiskeys behind the bar, and he can pour any of those 50 whiskeys. So we have to empower that barman. We have to empower that person to be off-license. We have to empower that person to offer a Dunville's, to pour a Dunville's, and to tell the consumer why they're pouring your Dunville's. If they don't have the knowledge of your brand, if they don't understand your distillery, if they don't know the story, they'll not be empowered to recommend your brand. So it's really important that you get the key people in the industry, the bartenders, the bar owners, the guy behind the counter, the off-license to educate them on your story so they can recommend my product to you and justify why they're recommending it. And at some point, you just have to get feet on the ground and do that also.

Mark Evans: The key message here, I mean, there's lots of messages that you've delivered, and I think we've had a great conversation. The key message here, and this applies to B2B software companies as well, is that relationships matter. Is that meeting people, building out your network, telling the story about your brand and your product are more important than ever because I think the digital marketing landscape is too noisy. It's too busy. It's increasingly difficult to break through. I think with AI and ChatGPT, there's gonna be more content than ever. So standing out from the crowd using digital marketing is gonna be increasingly challenging. So the effectiveness of meeting people and shaking hands and putting a face to a name is gonna be really important.

Jarlath Watson: Empowering them to sell your product because they know and understand the brand story and know the quality of the liquid.

Mark Evans: Yeah. And I think those lessons apply to all types of different companies. A final question, and this may be unfair because you're not a marketer, but how do you tell if your marketing is working aside from bottles being pulled off the shelves in people's liquor cabinets or at bars and restaurants? How do you quantify marketing success?

Jarlath Watson: Do you know what? For me, that's an easy one because if you're not doing it right, your distributor isn't long telling you you're not doing it right. You know? Whenever you visit in market, at some point during your two to three or four-day visit to your Ontario, Jason is going to pull you to one side and say, look. Here's what's working, and here's what's not working. You know? So if you can't recognize those traits yourself and we do set targets for every SKU, we will monitor those. We will monitor sales and monitor feed-through and monitor pull-through and monitor how many stores or how many bars we're in and why we're in the right bars and everything else. But we're not in market. We're not in Ontario. Jason is. And Jason, he's the guy that's out there, you know, every day. And if it's not working, Jason will know. If it's not working, Jason will at some point during this weekend, he will pull me aside and tell me exactly what is and what is not working, you know. So you do rely very heavily on the very first thing I said to you was getting the right people, the right distributor in the right market. And that is so key to the success of your product for so many reasons. But also having a distributor that's honest with you, having a distributor that is not afraid to have those hard conversations because they benefit us both. We can have 27 different KPIs set up to monitor what we think is happening in that market, but the person in that market is going to tell you more than those 27 KPIs ever will. The KPIs are one thing. Interpreting the KPIs is something different entirely, and somebody local can interpret those better.

Mark Evans: Yeah. Great point. Two points that I just wanna wrap up. One is that if you're using distributors, having people who are advocates and know your product inside out and can give you the honest truth about how your marketing and sales are doing is really important. And the other thing you mentioned, there's lots of KPIs. And data is great, but you have to pull insight from the data to make it matter. Final question, if people are interested in learning more about the distillery, where do they go?

Jarlath Watson: Yeah. So they will go to the social media. Echlinville.com is our website, and then you'll find Dunville's Irish Whiskey across the usual social media channels. But your first port of call will be echlinville.com. That's echlinville.com.

Mark Evans: Well, thanks, Jarlath, for the great conversation. It was a different type of conversation. I hope people got value from getting perspective about how a different type of product works, but I think there's some important marketing and sales lessons to be learned from the approach that you're taking towards influencer marketing, in-person marketing, and using distributors as a key to get into markets. I wanna thank everybody for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you're a B2B SaaS company looking for more sales and leads but struggling to do marketing that makes an impact, we should talk. I use a three-part methodology to diagnose, fix, and optimize your marketing strategically and tactically. Reach out to me via email, mark@markevans.ca, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.