Use Bronze Medal In Marketing?

[Kurt]

Hi all. Last year we submitted our 5 products to an awards contest and did pretty well. We ended up with some platinum, double golds and even a best of class platinum awards. One of our SKUs though didn't do as well as we had hoped and got a bronze award. One of my partners says we shouldn't mention that in any of the marketing materials or on our website. He feels that if it isn't gold or above that we shouldn't use it.  I'm kind of on the fence. I see where he's coming from, but I also think that many will just see a medal and won't necessarily pay attention to what it is. What is everyones opinion on using a bronze medal in marketing your brand? Thanks!

[Canuckwoods]

How many other spirits were there in the style? if there were only 3-4 I would say no but if there were 100 I would say yes we were 3rd out of 100 of the finest spirits in the US

[captnKB]

take the medal and put it to use. Talk it up. Very few consumers of buyers are aware of how a competition works and that medal regardless of color to most people is a sign that the spirits are good. 

[EZdrinking]

6 hours ago, Canuckwoods said:

How many other spirits were there in the style? if there were only 3-4 I would say no but if there were 100 I would say yes we were 3rd out of 100 of the finest spirits in the US

@Canuckwoods all of the major spirit and wine competitions in the world award medals based on their own internal quality metric which means if a 100 spirits were entered into a category and base on their quality 100 could receive gold medals or none could receive medals. However, the Great American Beer Festival and their subsidiary competitions use a 1-2-3 model so that no matter how many entries in a category they only award 1 gold, 1 silver, and 1 bronze.

[Canuckwoods]

Wow learn something everyday.

[Kurt]

Thanks for all the advice and feedback! I should have specified... this was the SIP Awards. So while not everyone got an awards, most did. And there were many of the same medal handed out for the in the same category, i.e multiple double gold whiskeys for example.

At any rate, our distributor felt that we should use the bottle stickers of the medals. We are just wondering about using it in other sales and marketing materials. I'm still leaning towards using it, but I'm not 100% convinced.

[The Crafty Cask]

On 1/9/2020 at 12:32 PM, Kurt said:

Thanks for all the advice and feedback! I should have specified... this was the SIP Awards. So while not everyone got an awards, most did. And there were many of the same medal handed out for the in the same category, i.e multiple double gold whiskeys for example.

At any rate, our distributor felt that we should use the bottle stickers of the medals. We are just wondering about using it in other sales and marketing materials. I'm still leaning towards using it, but I'm not 100% convinced.

Differentiators are good, they help you stand out from other similar products and give people a reason to believe they might like you more than others (because an award says that others liked yours more than others). So I think you're smart to lean into any award you receive. And remember you can just say award winning and leave it at that with a reference to the organization. People can ask or look up what exact award you received but at the end of the day that spirit is an award winning spirit and beat out others to be able to say that. In terms of proof that this is a good idea, here's an anecdote from my 12 years leading marketing for a few brands at a fortune 500 company. We did a ton of market research over the years on seals of approval and certification logos, etc...  What we found is that even if consumers have no idea what that seal means or who the organization is who gave it out they are more likely to buy the product with an icon or multiple icons than one with none. While this research wasn't in the alcohol category I think the same logic is likely to hold here...especially since everyone understands what medals and awards are, much more so than seals and certifications. Congratulations on even having this dilemma in the first place...it's a good problem to have!