Grey Goose Premium Strategy
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A story about how the founder of Grey Goose created a premium vodka brand through clever marketing and positioning.
"The guy who started Grey Goose started it when he was in his seventies. Before that, he had brought Jagermeister to the US and made it popular. After succeeding with Jagermeister, he decided to start a vodka company.
He did two things differently. First, when they needed to source vodka, everyone assumed they'd go to Russia. He said 'No, we're not doing Russian vodka. Go to France and find me vodka.' They said 'There's no vodka in France.' He responded 'Go to France to find me vodka because if I tell you this is French vodka, it makes that dirty Russian vodka look like crap.'
Second, he had his team buy the most expensive vodka available at the time, which was Absolut. He decided Grey Goose would be 30% more expensive than whatever the most expensive one was. For the bottle, he commissioned someone to make a tall frosted glass bottle. It was so tall it wouldn't even fit on the middle shelves, so it had to be placed on the top shelf - making it literally a 'top shelf' vodka by default.
The strategy worked - he created Grey Goose off this very simple concept: French vodka in an expensive tall frosted glass bottle that forced placement on the top shelf."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.