Everyone wants to be relevant. That’s the problem.

Drinks is a category obsessed with what’s next.

The next big occasion. The next cultural shift. The next audience. The next flavour, format, partnership or platform.

And for good reason. Drinking habits change. What people want from brands changes. The things that make a brand feel current today can look pretty dated a few years later.

But there’s a danger in constantly looking for what’s next.

When every brand is watching the same trends and responding to the same cultural signals, they can start to look remarkably similar.

The question for drinks brands is how to keep moving without losing what makes people choose you in the first place.

Pay attention to what’s changing

The best brands have a good sense of what’s happening beyond their own category.

Health and moderation have changed drinking occasions. Premiumisation has changed expectations around quality and experience. Ritual, identity and status all play a role in when, where and why people drink.

The job is to understand what those changes mean.

Aperol and the wider Campari Group is a good example. The brand owner has built something much bigger than a drink by understanding the social role of aperitivo and making that occasion its own. It recognised a behaviour in their home market and helped turn it into something scalable and relevant across different territories. 

Guinness has obviously done similar over decades. The world around the brand has changed, but its association with community, generosity and shared experiences gives it a strong foundation to keep showing up in new and innovative ways.

That takes a decent understanding of culture. It also takes knowing where your brand fits within it.

Know what you stand for

There are endless cultural signals a drinks brand could respond to.

You could chase all of them, but you probably shouldn’t.

Brands need a point of view. Something that helps them decide where they belong, who they’re for and which opportunities are worth pursuing.

I saw this first-hand working at BrewDog. Whilst I was there, there was a very clear sense of what we stood for as a brand and who we wanted to be. We had an attitude. We had a point of view. And, importantly, everyone was comfortable with the fact we weren’t for everyone. In fact, we revelled in it. 

That gave the brand somewhere to go.

When a brand tries to appeal to everyone, every decision becomes a compromise. The edges get softer. The personality gets harder to recognise. Eventually, you can end up with a brand that is perfectly acceptable to everyone and particularly interesting to nobody. Just look at BrewDog in recent years. 

You can’t own every conversation. Choose the ones that make sense for you.

Build meaning through repetition

A big campaign can put a brand back on people’s radar.

A clever collaboration can create a moment.

Neither will carry a brand on their own.

People experience brands through hundreds of small signals. The way they show up in culture. The occasions they associate themselves with. The partnerships they choose. The way they talk. The way they behave at the bar, on the shelf and online.

Over time, those things add up.

The challenge for drinks brands is that different parts of the business can easily pull in different directions. Sales wants one thing. Marketing another. A local market sees a different opportunity and often executes against this without oversight. A new partnership arrives with its own agenda.

Individually, those decisions can make perfect sense. Collectively, they can leave consumers wondering what the brand is actually about.

If you give people a consistent idea to come back to, you can change the execution without losing what makes your brand recognisable. It should show up in the choices you consistently make, not just the assets you produce.

Give people confidence to make decisions

This is where a strong brand earns its keep.

Your people need to know what the brand stands for, where it has permission to play and how it should behave when something unexpected comes along.

Because something unexpected will always come along.

A new cultural conversation. A competitor ramping up investment. A small change in drinking behaviour. A partnership opportunity that looks interesting on paper.

When everyone understands the brand, you can make those calls quickly.

You can say yes with confidence. You can say no without having to start the whole conversation again.

And you can move with culture without being pulled around by it.

That matters in drinks. If you stay close to consumers and make good decisions quickly, you have a serious advantage.

So, what does it take to stay relevant?

It starts with curiosity.

Look beyond the category. Understand what is changing in people’s lives and in the occasions where your brand has a role to play.

Then make some choices.

Know what your brand has the right to say, do and own. Give it a point of view. Accept that some things will be right for you and others won’t.

Then stick with it.

Keep showing up in ways that reinforce what people know and like about you, while finding new ways to make that meaning matter.

And give your teams enough confidence to make decisions without waiting for permission every time.

There will always be another trend to chase.

The trick is to know which one you should chase, when to leave it alone, and how to make it your own when you do.