| Wer hat's erfunden? Sidney Frank! |  |
[https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/bizfinance/biz/features/10816/]
"Grey Goose vodka, invented from thin air that summer morning, had as yet no distillery, no bottle, and—perhaps the most pressing order of business—no vodka. Yet this past June, almost exactly eight years after Sidney Frank gave name to this nonexistent liquor, Grey Goose was sold to Bacardi for more than $2 billion. Cash. (To understand how much that is, consider that IBM’s personal-computer business, nurtured, honed, and advertised since 1981, recently sold for $1.75 billion.)"
"So, to steal away Absolut’s market share, your unborn new vodka should undercut this price, correct? No, you think, chomping your cigar as you watch a 30-foot putt roll straight into the cup. Why don’t I price my vodka extravagantly higher than Absolut, at wildly more profitable margins … and steal Absolut’s market share that way? This was the great insight of Sidney Frank (and not only him: The makers of Ketel One vodka had the same basic idea). Frank could see that there was a product missing from the shelves. Here were all these vodkas, in the $15-to-$17 range, vying to be the premium brand (with Absolut mostly winning). Frank just sidestepped the fray altogether and charged an unheard-of $30 a bottle. The markup amount was pure profit. “He was the first person to see,” says an executive at rival Bacardi, “that there was a superpremium category above Absolut, if you had a good product story.”"
Was steckt drin:
"In this story, the name came first—as it so often does when image is the paramount concern. Frank recalled he’d once sold a Liebfraumilch named Grey Goose back in the seventies. These were German white wines that were briefly hip but faded into oblivion. “I remember there was always something in the name that had magic with the consumer,” says Frank. (It may also be that Frank liked the name because he already owned the worldwide rights to it.) Frank gathered his lieutenants at the company’s New Rochelle headquarters. “Go to France and come back with a vodka,” he said. So they met with cognac distillers, whose business had slowed. The stills were switched to vodka, and at last there was an actual product.
But why France? Doesn’t vodka come from Russia, or perhaps, in a pinch, Scandinavia? “People are always looking for something new,” says Frank. It’s all about brand differentiation. If you’re going to charge twice as much for a vodka, you need to give people a reason."
PS: Behindert als Herabwürdigung in 2021...nicht cool.