Jeremy HildrethWhen selling a brand is selling a place
One of my first projects as a Saffron Brand Consultants was for Jura whisky, owned by Whyte & Mackay distillers of Glasgow, Scotland.
I headed out to Jura with a client-appointed independent marketeer/barman called Simon Baker (who went on to work full time for the brand, I heard later). Jura is in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland, and getting there from London is a bit of a mission. You have to fly to the Isle of Islay…
…where you rent a car and put it on this ferry to Jura.
At the other side of the island, you find a one-hotel, one-distillery (and probably one-horse) town.
The island is famed for its seclusion — George Orwell came here to pen a little classic called 1984 — and its ruggedness (the Paps of Jura are a hiker’s delight).
After 24 hours on the island, it was pretty clear that the way forward was to sell the island, not the whisky, especially since there is no other whisky from Jura to compete with. We put it in a presentation to the client:
“In the accepted sense, a single malt is a distillation of the place it’s made (the natural materials and so on contributing to the taste)
Therefore, the character of Jura and the taste of its only malt can be directly associated.”
The idea was to position and market Jura almost — almost — like the whisky version of a Caribbean rum. The Jura island where the whisky originates, and which the whisky conjures, is about white sandy beaches and crystalline water; forested mountains; ponies, motorbikes and yachts; a hunting and fishing refuge for rich grandees; and a remote bolthole for a literary genius.
In other words:
“Jura is the whisky from the Isle of Jura.”
Can you imagine my delight, then, when I saw this special Jura packaging in the window of the Nicolas liquor store on Westbourne Grove in Notting Hill (in July 2009)?
Five years on, the brand is doing exactly what we advised: selling not a product, but the story of a place (although, personally, I think the copywriting could be sharper).
