Energy Drink Promotions Trap

The Promotions Trap in the Beverage Industry, especially Energy Drinks


Here is one of the most frequent mistakes made by new age beverages, especially Energy Drinks… Spending money in promotions without getting something in return, like sales!

This is one of the most common mistakes made in many industries, not just the energy drink business or new age beverages. Thinking you need bar promotions to launch your beverages. YOU DON”T.

I’m not saying you don’t need promotion, I’m saying you should have some sort of distribution before you launch your promotion. Without distribution your promotion will go nowhere. Some people even do promotion in bars or discos that don’t even carry their product after they leave.

Make sure you have some distribution before you spend any money in promotion. The other next best thing is to use your promotion as leverage to get distribution. This is a trick I used many times to land distributors, bars and retail stores.

To do this you organize a promotion a few months ahead, you then talk to bars in that city, stores and distributors and invite them to the event. You make every retail store around the promotion knows about it and commits to carrying the product during and after the event. After the event you then tell all the retailers how great the event was and how much publicity the product got. You must also make sure that you tell all the attendees of the event that they can find the beverage in the stores surrounding the event. If you can do another promotion like coupons or incentives even better.

There are other important points to consider in bar promotions, we’ll go over them over time.

The one thing you have to remember is that you have to use promotions to land accounts or drive sales. You don’t need to do it for branding, your not Red Bull, Rock Star of Monster energy.

Thanks,


Jorge