So when somebody would come in and say, what’s your best-tasting vodka, they said Grey Goose.” “We made big, beautiful ads that listed Grey Goose as the best-tasting vodka in the world, and indoctrinated the distributors and over 20,000 bartenders. Including a daily ad in the Wall Street Journal. Frank took it all and put it into advertising. The machine was on and early adopters were hooked.Īnd the market responded. Frank made sure to give the bars and clubs big, 1.75-liter bottles, to grab attention and to catch the eye. Frank found them and gave them the best product with the most convincing story they ever heard.
The trend setters and arbiters who like to tell their friends what to buy. He found the hottest nights in the hottest clubs of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles and would put bottles in the hands of the hottest people. This was quite a challenge since rational and even the image-driven consumers don’t usually give away twice the amounts unless they can somehow be persuaded that it’s worth the money. Knowing this, Frank choose to create a vodka brand that would be almost twice as expensive – and twice as profitable – as anything else on the market including Absolut, the Swedish premium-blend that had taken the US by storm in the 1980s. In the distilled-spirits business vodka dominates with 26.5 percent, while rum has 13 and gin 7. About 60% of what goes into the vodka bottle is water yet can be sold for eye-popping amounts. If you leave it as is you can call it vodka. If you add juniper berries or other so-called botanicals spices you get what the world knows as gin. You can make vodka out of grain or potatoes, or any other organic material that will ferment to produce an alcoholic brew, which can be then concentrated through a simple distillation. No one realized at the time that Sidney Frank had single-handedly invented guerrilla marketing.įrank knew that vodka is the worlds nearest thing to an organic money machine. They got lost, so he figured his importer didn’t know the territory and that’s how Frank got the whole country in 1973. Next year however the owner of Jäger flew to Florida and asked his West Coast importer to take him to Disneyland. “We already have commitments for most of the country, but we still have Maryland to Florida left.” President said, “I’ll take it.” “I’d like to have Jägermeister for the States.” Frank said. He sent a telegram to the president of Jägermeister in Germany and asked if he would meet him.Īnd so they went for dinner. Why or how he never explained it but he decided to take Jägermeister from elderly blue-collar German immigrants and transform it into a hot student brand. However in a moment of epiphany Frank saw another niche: the hard-partying college kids. But it was an interesting product and there were a lot of Germans in the country. It tasted like licorice, root beer and cough syrup. During a late night ride he saw German immigrants downing an odd-tasting herb liqueur from the Fatherland. One of the things Frank has learned was to not build a distillery until there was enough money to do it properly and enough production to put in it, so he began looking for anything that had a niche to import.ĭuring the tough times, he would stroll around New York neighborhoods to see who was drinking what in the bars. Jägermeister: Gorilla and Guerrilla Marketing Frank was forced to sell off personal assets to keep the company running and started out by supplying Gekkeikan Sake to sushi restaurants. “It was just me, my brother, and a secretary.” But it was no overnight success. Frank eventually rose to the company presidency but butted heads with his father-in-law, and finally started his own company in 1972.
One of the “Big Four” including Seagram, National Distillers and Hiram Walker. Frank became a star and Schenley eventually became one of the largest liquor companies in the United States. At the time the cost was a $1 per gallon and they sold it in States for $5. So he increased distilling from 1 to 3,6 million bottles per year.