What Traditional Drinks Brands Get Wrong (And Why It's Costing Them Millions)
We've spent a lot of time studying what drinks brands do on Instagram. And honestly? Most of them are playing it painfully safe. Scroll through Hendrick's, Tanqueray, or Bombay Sapphire's Instagram feeds and you'll see a pattern:
Hendrick’s
Victorian-era aesthetic. Beautifully illustrated vintage graphics. Cucumber garnishes artfully arranged. Perfect cocktail photography with museum-quality lighting.
Bombay Sapphire
Glossy, polished lifestyle imagery. Professional bartenders in bow ties. Cocktail creation videos shot like perfume commercials. Artist collaborations with carefully curated brand partnerships.
Tanqueray
1920s-30s throwback aesthetic. Snoop Dogg partnership (yes, really). Slick, professional content that screams "we spent £50K on this photoshoot."
These brands have built strong visual identities and their feeds look gorgeous. Everything is *on brand*. If you're looking for aesthetic inspiration or cocktail photography masterclasses, follow them. But here's what they're missing. All of this polish creates a fundamental problem: Nobody believes it's real.
When you see a perfectly lit cocktail on a marble bar with a professional garnish and dramatic shadows, you think: "That looks amazing. I could never make that. This isn't for me.”. When celebrity partnerships feel forced, audiences tune out. When every post looks like it went through three rounds of approvals and a focus group, it loses authenticity.
The numbers tell the story:
Hendrick's: 189,792 Instagram followers
Bombay Sapphire: ~58,000 followers
Tanqueray: ~60,000 followers
These are global brands with massive marketing budgets and decades of heritage. And they're struggling to break 200K followers.
The core issue is that traditional brands treat Instagram as a broadcast channel. They're pushing content ‘at’ people, not creating conversations ‘with’ them. They're asking: "How do we make our product look premium and aspirational?"
They should be asking: "How do we make people feel like they're part of something interesting?"
