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I watched a guy hide from a customer once. Grown adult. First week on the sales floor. A customer walked through the door, and he ducked behind a fixture like she was a velociraptor and he’d wandered into Jurassic Park. I’m not dressing this up for the newsletter. He genuinely hid. I think about that guy more than I’d like to admit, because Ron Thurston is convinced that corner, the one that guy was crouched in, is exactly where great leaders get made.
What the spirits industry figured out about brand marketing and owning the moment.
I went into this episode expecting to talk about spirits and cocktails. I came out of it rethinking how I judge every brand I cover.
That last sentence sounds dramatic. I promise it tracks.
This week on The Retail Razor Show Casey and I sat down with Allison Varone, who runs marketing for Campari America. If you don’t know the name, you absolutely know the portfolio. Aperol. Campari. Wild Turkey. Grand Marnier. Espolòn. She’s spent more than 20 years in wine and spirits, and she has the receipts on how people actually drink right now, not how the trend pieces say they do.
And the trend pieces, it turns out, have been wrong about the big one.
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Gen Z did not quit drinking. They got selective.
Every other headline for the last two years has told you Gen Z is sober and the spirits industry is doomed. Allison looked at that narrative and basically said, nice story, the data disagrees.
What’s actually happening has a great name: zebra striping. People bounce between alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks across a single night depending on their mood, the occasion, and how they want to feel the next morning. They did not opt out of drinking culture. They are just being choosier about when they want the real thing and when they want something that looks and feels premium without the alcohol, and tastes great.
That distinction matters, because one of those stories tells a brand to panic and the other tells a brand to build. Campari is building.
The idea I cannot stop repeating: lead with the occasion, not the category.
Here is the line from Allison that I have already quoted to three people who do not work in spirits.
When she advises brand strategists, she tells them to stop leading with the category and start leading with the occasion. Don’t open with what your product is. Open with where people are gathering and what moment your brand belongs in. Then work backward.
That’s why Aperol turned up at Coachella with the whole festival crowd in orange. That’s why Negroni Week takes over entire neighborhoods every September. The drink is almost the supporting actor. The moment is the product.
I think this is the single most useful brand lesson we’ve aired this season, and it has nothing to do with alcohol. Swap in software, swap in a retail concept, swap in whatever you sell.
The teams winning in 2026 are the ones who know exactly which moment in your day they were built for.
A 60-year-old Italian drink as a brand-new US launch.
My favorite example of this thinking is Crodino. It’s a non-alcoholic spritz that Italian herbalists created back in 1965, and Campari just brought it to the United States. On paper that’s an odd move. Why launch something six decades old as if it’s new?
Allison’s answer was sharp. They waited until spritz culture and Aperol hit real scale here first, so American drinkers already understood the ritual before the non-alcoholic version showed up. The product is old. The timing is brand new. That is patience most companies do not have.
There is a whole section in the episode on how they decide when a new brand is ready for a market, and I’m not going to spoil the framework here. It’s worth the listen.
Premium does not mean expensive. It means worth it.
We got into premiumization, which is usually code for charge more and hope. Allison flipped it. For her, premium equals value, full stop.
If people believe your brand is genuinely worth it, they will pay. If they don’t, no amount of fancy glass bottle saves you.
She used Espolòn as the example, one of the fastest-growing premium tequilas in the country, built to feel high quality and craft-driven while staying accessible enough that regular people actually buy it on a Tuesday. That balance is harder than it sounds, and most brands faceplant on one side or the other.
The part nobody talks about: they run a school.
Here is a thing I didn’t know. Campari has its own academy that has spent years educating bartenders on how to build elevated drink experiences, including ones with no alcohol at all. While the rest of the industry was arguing about whether non-alc was a fad, Campari was quietly training the people who actually hand you the drink.
Casey had the best reaction to this, and I will let you hear it yourself, because her slow realization across this episode that she is the exact customer this category was built for is honestly the most fun arc of the whole conversation.
What I actually think.
I came in thinking spirits was a sleepy, tradition-bound category that ran on heritage and nice packaging. After all, this is a segment where brand loyalty is king - think about the last vodka you bought versus the last time you tried a new brand. I was wrong, and I’m happy to say it.
This is one of the most culturally sharp, consumer-obsessed corners of branding right now, and most of us in retail and tech are not paying attention to it.
We should be.
The brands in this space have figured out something the rest of us keep fumbling:
People do not want more products, they want better moments, and the brand that owns the moment wins the decade.
Go listen to the full episode. Allison’s section on measuring whether all this experiential stuff actually drives ROI is worth the price of admission by itself, and I left that part out of this newsletter on purpose. It is a podcast after all - you’re supposed to listen (or watch).
Listen to the full episode.
The Retail Razor Show, Season 6, Episode 6: Shaken, Not Stirred — and Maybe Non-Alcoholic: The Future of Beverages & Spirits
Listen to the full episode of The Retail Razor Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Goodpods, YouTube, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. Transcripts and guest info at retailrazor.com.
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Until next time… Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!
Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor Show
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