Hi Caroline, you’re spot on that compliance is one of the biggest challenges for many alcohol companies. It’s why so many of the biggest players in regulated industries like alcohol trust my team to help them with compliance. Feel free to reach me at zak@apexdrop.com and I can personally show you why ApexDrop is the safest option in the industry.

I agree, Robert, and thanks for the thoughtful reply. Market cap isn’t the best way to measure the backlash of the recent boycott. Some of this is certainly hype, but it will be interesting to see their earnings report on May 3rd and how this affects the brand long-term.

I definitely don’t think brands should go against their values for financial gain, and if I wrote something that came across that way, I certainly didn’t intend that. This is very important to me as the owner of an authentic influencer marketing firm who talks daily about the ethics of sustainable influencer marketing.

I appreciate the dialogue here because I’m hoping to open up a conversation with experts around some of the discoveries my team has made when engaging influencer relationships as customers first, and not the typical”pay-to-play” model.

It’s rather strange that it’s acceptable for a brand to pay an influencer who is not already a customer, to pretend to like them publicly. This makes sense and is expected with celebrities. But with smaller influencers, it has a potential negative side effect on the brand and the paid influencer because the posts can come across as inauthentic to the audience. An easy way to lose the trust of a fanbase is to get caught deceiving them.

Ultimately, I believe a small portion of the backlash over this marketing effort was due to the lack of authenticity in the posts and the message. I’ve found there are ways to inspire authentic influential customers to post about a brand authentically … without paying them, and without the “partnership”. The truth is people don’t need to be paid to share things they truly love with their friends. Why pay celebrities to pretend when there are more honest ways that work better long-term with micro influencers?

Caroline, thanks for your note and around the issue of compliance. That is truly a challenge and I think Zak has some experience with several regulated wine and spirits brands to understand the issues. As always, thanks for reading my blogs and my guest blogs. Most of all, thanks for being a helpful friend. Cheers – Jeff