Bad Men
Jay
January 31, 2010, 2:13 pm

Considering that we live in the age of the internet, I don't think it would be too strange to say that I'm a member on a few online forums. It would also be fairly accurate to characterize the intelligence and knowledge of the average forumgoer as "severely wanting". However, these forums are generally representative of certain segments (or in marketing lingo, demographics) of society at large.

And what I've learned from these exercises in self-flagellation is that people are extremely impressionable. So impressionable that you can literally bend and distort common knowledge for your own devious purposes. I present to you a quote (completely authentic) that demonstrates that malleability:

"by the way, johnnie is scotch, not whiskey"

The original poster was talking about Johnnie Walker, which is a very famous brand of blended Scotch whiskey. Apparently that person never learned that Scotch whiskey, commonly referred to as "Scotch", is actually a type of whiskey. But nobody ever says "Scotch whiskey". They always refer to it as "Scotch". It would be completely understandable for the uninitiated to make that kind of mistake. But while we're here, let's go off on a tangent and talk about another brand: Grey Goose.

Grey Goose is a brand of vodka. It is distilled in Cognac, France and is very expensive. The base of the bottle has the text "Distilled and bottled in France." Below that is the tri-colored flag of red, white, and blue. Below that is the word "IMPORTED" in all caps, just in case you didn't get the message the first two times around.



Most young Americans are very familiar with this brand. It is seen as the "it" vodka; the best of the best. Well worth the exorbitant expense, people "in the know" will say. It's very fashionable. The commercials on tv try to hammer this point home. A party with sophisticated looking people on top of a building in a city, a couple sailing in a yacht eating oysters and drinking Goose, the marketers behind Grey Goose clearly knew what they were doing. The implicit message could not have been more blunt: "Look at all these fancy and rich people living life and drinking Grey Goose. If you drink Grey Goose, you'll be like them." The success of Grey Goose is phenomenal.



I have to give Sidney Frank, the creator of Grey Goose (and Jaegermeister, too), some credit. The man knows what drinking Americans want. Why did he consciously choose the price point of Grey Goose significantly above well established vodkas like Absolut and Smirnoff? Because people generally go by the heuristic "you get what you pay for". That higher price created an image of quality. Why did he choose to distill and bottle Grey Goose in France, a place with no significant historical ties to vodka? Because French wine and brandy are world renowned. He was hoping that brand power would rub off onto his vodka.

He was building his brand on the "French" brand, essentially freeloading off centuries of emerging culture. That's why the French flag is on the bottle. That's why the text "IMPORTED" is there. It cultivates an aura of sophistication, of savvy, of something that Americans can't "do" very well. But, as you might have guessed, it was all a hoax.

From a purely traditional standpoint, there is no such thing as "premium vodka". Vodka was originally produced in Eastern Europe, where the poor serfs of imperial Russia would use the leftover grain and potatoes from the harvest and create hard liquor from it. That hard liquor would be known as vodka. It is actually very similar in origin to colonial whiskey production, where Colonial/early American farmers would use the surplus from their harvests to produce a cheap whiskey from a crop that would otherwise go spoiled. That's why the official American alcohol is whiskey. True story.

But back to my point. Vodka wasn't meant to be expensive. It's supposed to be a cheap form of booze. You might say at this point, "who cares about tradition?" But the creation of vodka is far from the romantic imagery conjured up by phrases like "winter wheat" and "alpine waters". The vast majority of vodka producers source their ethanol (read: drinking alcohol) from industrial producers. They then run that alcohol through their own filters (the distillation process) just to say they did it, bottle it, and shill it out to the susceptible public. Vodka is very cheap to make and takes no time to produce at all.

For something like a fine vintage wine or a premium single malt Scotch, it can take over a decade or two before it gets to the market. At least for those kinds of liquors you can say "oh the time is what makes them great; you're paying for the aging". But for vodka...you don't really have a leg to stand on. You're paying solely for the brand. Next time, just buy some off brand vodka for 10 dollars a gallon and fill it in an empty Grey Goose bottle.

To wit, "premium vodka" could be the greatest marketing coup in advertising history. Don Draper would be proud.