The Surprising Success of Marketing Chicago’s Infamous Malört
This week’s Masters in Marketing is near and dear to my heart, if not my taste buds.
As a naturalized Chicagoan, it is my duty and honor to introduce you to one of the city’s most disgusting — and most beloved — substances.
The herbaceous flavor of Jeppson’s Malört was (in)famously described by comedian John Hodgman as “pencil shavings and heartbreak.”
To find out how CH Distillery markets a liqueur that’s only reliably available to 2.7 million people and tastes like burning rubber, I talked to Anna Sokratov, brand manager at Jeppson’s Malört at CH Distillery in Chicago.
Lesson 1: Build community around shared experiences.
At first sip, Malört does not seem like an exercise in community-building, unless that community is your enemies.
“Whenever you talk about Malört, people always share a crazy story or [give you] the most obscene way to describe the flavor,” she says. “And in a weird way, it creates community.”
Lesson 2: Break the fourth wall.
Since marketing Malört is such a new phenomenon, Sokratov feels a lot of freedom to be funny, to be outlandish, to be experimental.
Lesson 3: One size does not fit all.
“It‘s easy to try and fit this brand into one single category of ‘everybody thinks it just tastes bad,’” Sokratov tells me. “But it’s a lot more complex than that.”
Lingering Questions
Since Anna Sokratov of Malört is the first in this series, a fellow Chicagoan and I came up with a question to kick things off:
Malört is one of Chicago’s mascots. What would Malört’s mascot be, and why?
Sokratov: A 31-gallon galvanized steel trash can with a lid. Both are perceived as being unappealing or gross, and the cans last a long time — similar to the long-lasting flavor of Malört.
Sokratov gave us a question that our next master of marketing will answer in next week’s newsletter, and I promise that you will not want to miss their answer: What unconventional marketing approach would you like to take, and how would you go about doing something you haven’t done before?