Whisky, like every industry I know, has no shortage of what I refer to as “weather reporters”.

Their reports run more or less like this: Exports are down, costs are up, drinkers are cautious, premiumisation has lost its shine, tariffs are making some markets harder, and younger consumers are drinking differently, drinking less, or refusing to inherit old habits.

Then come the common comfort words assuring us that whisky sales are cyclical. We’ve been here before, they say. It will come back, they argue.

Most of that is true, and some of it certainly is. Lumped together as a diagnosis, though, it’s a dangerous place to stop thinking. And it feels commercially lazy.

For sure, cycles can reward patience, but structural shifts can (and will) punish it. Often, the hard part is knowing which one you are sitting in, especially when the industry hands you a verbal comfort blanket the moment you ask.

Sure, whisky has survived war, tax, fashion, prohibition, recession, and some packaging only the late 1980s could explain, so the urge to lean on endurance is understandable. But let’s not let these notions of endurance become an excuse.

Edinburgh neat

Let’s look at where whisky can win. One place is Edinburgh (other Scottish cities are available!)

Visitors land there, eat there, drink there, buy there, take their photographs there, and often leave Scotland without going near Speyside, Islay, Campbeltown, or anywhere else with a working still in it. They still care about whisky, and they’re neither accidental nor casual. Think of them as the audience the industry misplaced.

We see them everywhere. It’s someone who spends three days in Edinburgh and loves every minute. They pay for a proper tasting, ask good questions, buy a bottle, post the moment to their followers, and by Monday morning they’re back in New York, or Paris, or Berlin, or Sydney, or Singapore, with the receipt still in their wallet. they’re mobile, affluent, curious, and trackable, and worth more than the industry tends to assume.

And then they’re gone.

That looks like a solution dressed up as a problem. Scotland creates interest in whisky better than almost anywhere on earth, but it struggles to bottle what happens next.

One of whisky’s problems, then, if you’ll pardon the marketing jargon, is a conversion problem.

Let’s break it down.

The industry treats distilleries as the centre of whisky tourism, which makes a certain sense, because they’re the places of origin and the copper, the cask, the smoke, and the story all sit there. For those who make the journey out, a distillery visit can deepen affection.

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But most visitors will never make that journey, because they lack the time, the transport, the plan, or the existing devotion. What they have instead is a few days, a hotel in the capital, a dinner booking at one of the brilliant restaurants in town, a spare afternoon, a shop window, a bar recommendation, and a tasting booked because someone told them it was very Scottish.

But are we fishing where the fish are?

For a lot of international visitors, Edinburgh is where Scotch whisky first becomes legible, the beautiful moment when the category stops being a wall of labels and becomes a set of choices. Peat, sherry, age, region, independent bottler, blended malt. The language can open the door, or it can make people feel they’ve arrived too late to understand the rules.

Pour, then ignore

Other industries learned this lesson the hard way, and started to win only when they stopped waiting for the old buyer to return and got busy recruiting new ones.

Music did it when albums stopped being the centre of the business. Luxury fashion did it when stores became media. Coffee did it when the café became the brand’s front door. Sport did it when matchday became a content and membership engine.

Whisky has its own version of that move sitting in plain sight, in the shape of the visitor who discovers the category in Edinburgh and then flies home.

The industry has the pieces already, between the tastings, shops, bars, experts, stories, festivals, hospitality, and a global appetite for anything Scottish. It has visitors who arrive with curiosity and leave with memory, and a city that can concentrate attention at scale.

What it lacks is continuity. A tasting ends, a bottle is bought, a receipt is printed, a photograph is posted to the socials, and the visitor leaves. Right at the point of greatest passion, the relationship fades into the airport queue. Please tell me that’s a very fixable failure.

A modern whisky recruitment model would treat Edinburgh as the beginning of a longer journey. The story could look like this: A visitor tastes four drams, and their preferences are captured with marketing consent. They learn that they like coastal smoke, or soft sherry casks, or waxy textures…you get the idea. Then, once they get home, they receive something genuinely useful: where to buy, what to try next, which distilleries match their taste, which bars in their city pour the “right” bottles, which events are coming, and what to read before they spend £80 badly.

That, in the end, is the difference between an experience and a relationship.

It also changes the economics. A distillery visitor is already motivated enough to travel, while an Edinburgh visitor may be earlier in the journey, and earlier can be commercially interesting. They haven’t yet chosen a tribe, and they may be open to small producers, overlooked regions, independent bottlers, modern blends, new serves, and routes into the category that don’t require them to pretend they were born knowing the difference between a refill bourbon cask and a first-fill oloroso.

I guess what I’m saying is that the next generation of Scotch whisky drinkers may not arrive through the old front door. They may arrive through a cocktail in a hotel bar, a guided tasting in a pub off the Royal Mile, a conversation with a retailer, a dinner pairing, a festival event, a video they watch later, or a bottle they bought because it reminded them of a weekend when Edinburgh looked especially good in the rain.

The point is not to turn every visitor into a collector, which would be foolish. The point is to stop wasting moments of live attention.

Last call

Industries under pressure often discover the old customer journey was never as fixed as it looked, and that it was simply the journey they had grown used to measuring. Whisky has measured its production beautifully, measured its exports obsessively, and measured age, cask, price, allocation, and awards in painstaking detail. It has been less good at measuring the fragile moment when curiosity actually forms.

That is where Edinburgh should play a larger role. Call it Scotland’s whisky conversion layer, if you can stomach the phrase.

The wording is clinical for a category so fond of mist and memory, but the commercial point is plain: Edinburgh is where vast numbers of potential drinkers can be reached before brand loyalty hardens, before category intimidation sets in, and before the visitor returns home to a market where whisky becomes just another expensive shelf among many.

A serious response would connect tourism, retail, hospitality, data, and follow-up. It would give visitors a way to continue the journey in their own country, help producers learn which stories and styles recruit best, and help smaller distilleries reach people who may never board a ferry or hire a car. Most of all, it would help the industry stop treating the tasting glass as the end of the funnel.

Of course, through all of this, I’m generalising a little, though not as much as you might think. There are pockets of marketing magic, but nothing that comes close to what is possible.

The negative cycle may turn, as it has before, but (yes, there’s nearly always a ‘but’) industries that wait for the turn usually find the customer has moved on by the time it arrives. Whisky doesn’t lack heritage, craft, or romance, and it ladles all three on with a heavy hand most days. It lacks a modern recruitment machine.

The next lifelong whisky drinker may already be in Scotland, sitting in an Edinburgh bar tonight, holding a glass and asking why one whisky smells like a bonfire and another like Christmas cake.

Tomorrow they fly home. The question is whether anyone in the industry knows who they are by then.

(This article also appeared on LinkedIn.)

#whisky #scotch #scotland

Whisky is now standing in front of that decision.

The category has invested heavily in distillery tourism. That investment is, in most cases, justified. Distilleries deliver some of the most powerful brand experiences anywhere in consumer goods. The commercial value of those experiences is clear.

The risk appears when distillery tourism is treated as a primary recruitment engine rather than one part of a broader discovery system.

The economic model comparison

Think of it this way. Distilleries function like music concerts. Cities function like music streaming platforms.

Concerts generate emotional intensity, premium spend and deep brand loyalty. Streaming generates scale, recruitment and behavioural familiarity. Music needed both to grow. Whisky almost certainly does too.

Most of us don’t become music fans by travelling to concerts first. We become fans through casual listening, repeated exposure and low-risk discovery. Once emotional attachment forms, we are more likely to begin travelling for live experiences and premium engagement.

Whisky discovery often attempts to reverse that sequence.

Most people don’t become whisky drinkers through pilgrimage distillery journeys. They become whisky drinkers through accessible discovery moments that allow gradual familiarity with flavour, style and confidence. Pilgrimage tends to follow attachment, not create it.

Music learned this through disruption. The industry initially tried to protect album sales while listeners moved toward album unbundling and streaming access. New journalism experienced a similar moment when publishers tried to defend print distribution while readers migrated online. Both industries eventually followed behaviour rather than trying to redirect it. I lived these shifts as the editorial director at Billboard, the “bible” of the music industry, and as a journalist in various parts of the planet. They’re real shifts that were (and for journalism, still are) painful and filled with lessons learned.

Whisky still has the advantage of designing discovery infrastructure deliberately rather than reactively. It shouldn’t be playing the “let’s wait for the dust to settle” game as an excuse for delayed action.

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Distinct and complementary economic roles

Distillery tourism remains commercially critical. Its value should be understood clearly and protected deliberately.

Distilleries perform (at least) four powerful economic functions.

They deliver premium conversion by transforming curiosity into high-value purchase behaviour.

They create emotional brand bonding through immersive heritage, storytelling and sensory engagement.

They generate high-spend visitor experiences that combine retail, hospitality and collectability.

They act as advocacy catalysts by turning visitors into brand champions and collectors.

That is all to say, distilleries convert enthusiasts.

Now comes the part that isn’t getting enough attention. Cities perform a different but equally important role. Urban discovery environments create scale recruitment and behavioural confidence. They introduce consumers to flavour diversity, reduce intimidation and encourage experimentation across styles and producers.

Cities have a different job: they recruit future enthusiasts.

These roles don’t directly compete with each other. They operate as sequential growth drivers within a single consumer journey.

The behavioural sequence that drives category expansion

Across multiple industries, consumer engagement tends to follow a consistent progression.

• Accessible discovery builds familiarity.

• Familiarity builds confidence.

• Confidence builds emotional attachment.

• Attachment motivates pilgrimage and premium spend.

Music, hospitality, luxury retail and subscription entertainment all demonstrate variations of this pattern. Categories that rely primarily on pilgrimage-style recruitment tend to grow through niche enthusiasm rather than mainstream expansion.

Whisky’s current infrastructure still leans heavily toward premium conversion environments. Urban discovery remains fragmented, often brand-led and rarely coordinated across the category. Worse, when people are lured in for a tasting, they too often are allowed to leave without leaving behind a digital footprint that can be revisited.

It feels more like a “catch-and-release” programme where visitors to the hubs of Edinburgh and Glasgow do a whisky tasting, and leave, never to be heard from again.

The strategic opportunity whisky still holds

Whisky possesses advantages that most categories lack. Maturation creates natural scarcity. Provenance protects identity. Tourism delivers immersive storytelling environments. Collectability encourages repeat engagement.

These strengths increase the commercial return of recruitment if discovery systems extend beyond the first experience.

The opportunity is to surround the distillery experience with urban discovery ecosystems that widen participation and guide consumers toward those destinations over time. Let’s be clear here: most visitors to Scotland don’t leave the cities for distillery tours. This is especially so in the colder months.

Physical geography, travel time, and tourism behaviour impose natural limits on how quickly whisky pilgrimage travel can scale, even at its lowest levels.

Distilleries should remain aspirational environments. Cities should become year-round recruitment engines.

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The growth question the industry now faces

Growth in whisky can’t depend on increasing distillery visits and hoping big markets such as India will be the panacea to wobbly numbers.

True growth – category penetration – will depend on whether the industry builds discovery systems that help more consumers develop curiosity, confidence and emotional attachment before they ever consider travelling to a distillery. As obvious as it may sound, growth can only come from selling more stuff to more people more often than the competition. My many years of producing thought leadership work for the FMCG industry prove this rule to be a rule for a reason.

Music expanded as streaming services organically broadened reach, while concerts deepened loyalty. News journalism struggled when distribution shifted without an equivalent monetisation structure. Whisky sits between those outcomes with the advantage of category equity still intact.

The category’s next phase will be shaped by how deliberately it connects urban discovery with destination experience. The warehouses hold inventory. Distilleries hold emotional loyalty. Cities hold the scale required to sustain both.

With the right amount of rigour and speed, it feels like the Scotch Whisky Association, cultural festival organisers, distillers and bottlers, tourism organisations, and regulators have a chance to come together on this.

Note: This article also appeared on LinkedIn.

Alcohol by volume (ABV) has turned into the kind of number people look at twice in whisky, carrying more of the world with it than it once did.

The number sits there awkwardly, shrugging and looking guilty, though most of what it’s carrying didn’t come from the whisky at all.

Drinking has slowed, not in a sackcloth-and-ashes kind of way, but enough for even the least observant pub regular to clock it. Cost has had its say. So have booze taxes. Then there’s the low-level fatigue that settles in when a world keeps feeling inflationary long after the headlines declare the job done.

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Add in the sprawl of GLP-1 drugs, flattening appetite and dulling desire across large parts of the population, and the nights begin to thin out. Fewer occasions. Or shorter ones. Less patience for standing at the bar trying to work out what a number on a label is asking of you.

Against that backdrop, it’s worth saying something plainly, without dressing it up. Single malt whisky is often strong. Sometimes very strong.

A numbers game

Many core releases now sit comfortably at 46%. Single casks and cask-strength bottlings drift into the low and high 50s as a matter of course, with the occasional bottle stretching to the mid 60s by volume. For seasoned drinkers, that strength reads as honesty and integrity. For people arriving newer to the category, or arriving carefully, it can feel like whisky clearing its throat a little too loudly.

But I don’t think strength itself is the real sticking point. Whisky has always been concentrated alcohol. That’s part of the deal. What feels different now is how much tolerance people have for speed.

A pint takes its time. Wine does too, lingering politely and rarely raising its voice. Whisky, especially at higher strength, tends to get straight to the point. The alcohol arrives early, before the mood has settled and before the drinker has quite decided how the evening is meant to unfold.

This is usually the moment when the word “burn” gets aired. For those who grew up with whisky, or who have spent enough time worshipping at distillery altars, that initial heat can feel reassuring, like a familiar blessing. For people arriving later, or arriving from other drinks, it can feel like being ushered into a conversation they didn’t quite agree to have.

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What often gets overlooked is that the alcohol itself isn’t behaving especially badly.

A quiet pint

A UK pint of beer is 568ml. At 5% ABV, which counts as a fairly ordinary strong pint, that glass contains around 28ml of pure alcohol. A standard dram of whisky is 25ml. Even at 58% ABV, that pour contains roughly 14.5ml of pure alcohol. Stretch it to a generous 35ml dram, and you’re still around 20ml. More often than not, the pint delivers more alcohol overall. It just takes its time about it, without making a scene.

This is where things tend to go wrong, not in the liquid but in what gets left unsaid around it.

A cask-strength whisky doesn’t insist on being taken neat. It doesn’t bristle at a splash of water. It won’t sulk if you add ice. It will even sit quietly in the glass and behave itself if you give it time. None of this is revolutionary, but it’s often treated as insider knowledge, as though explaining it might cheapen the experience rather than open it up.

Younger drinkers feel this most sharply, though they didn’t create the shift. Gen Z drinks less, starts later, and carries fewer inherited ideas about what alcohol is supposed to do for them. They’re comfortable opting out without apology and just as comfortable asking what something is for before committing to it. Presented clumsily, a 60% single malt can look less like a choice and more like a dare.

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Money sharpens all of this. When budgets tighten, people don’t necessarily stop buying premium things, but they lose patience with confusion. A bottle has to make sense quickly because mystery wears thin. Macho signalling wears thinner still.

This is where the industry occasionally trips over its own cleverness. Strength gets worn like a badge, with higher numbers doing the shouting and lower ones sounding faintly apologetic. That pecking order belongs to a different time, one with longer nights and fewer consequences waiting the next morning.

A calmer comparison tends to do more work. Beer spreads alcohol out over time. Whisky concentrates it, then allows it to be diluted, slowed, and shaped to taste.

Make no mistake, whisky has always understood scarcity on the supply side. Why? Because patience sits inside the liquid itself. That patience comes from years spent in the dark, doing the slow, stubborn work of becoming what it is.

What the industry is still learning is scarcity on the demand side, where buying moments are fewer, expectations are sharper, and nobody wants to feel as though they’re being dared into anything.

What needs to change? Get your Rosetta Stone ready, whisky people. High ABV needs translating.

When strength is treated like a test, people edge away. When it’s offered as choice, they lean in. That small shift may matter more than the number on the label.

This piece was also published on LinkedIn.

Premium whisky sales are low frequency by design, but it feels like that’s sometimes forgotten.

This mismatch opens the door to a conversation that looks like a business version of ping pong as the same ideas are batted back and forth. In many ways, the game is set up to fail because when a product sales cycle is structurally low frequency, the wrong metrics and expectations distort decision-making. Classic conversations around loyalty programmes, cadence-based engagement, and short-term volume targets assume regular replenishment. But premium whisky doesn’t replenish that way, and neither do its buyers. So why are we surprised?

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Price of patience

The latest consumer data from Europanel puts this into sharp relief across European FMCG markets. Three out of four brand buyers purchase only once a year, even for the biggest brands. Market leaders still see 58% of their buyers make a single annual purchase, rising to 72% for smaller brands.

Pushing the numbers further, in frequently purchased categories, one-time buyers fall to around four in ten. In infrequently purchased categories, they rise to two-thirds or more. So what I’m saying is this: light buying isn’t a failure of brand performance; it’s inevitable, a structural outcome of how often people buy.

Whisky is almost the poster child for this kind of behaviour. In a low-frequency, high-price category, the pool of non-buyers is vast, the pool of one-time buyers is large, and the pool of regular buyers is small by definition. Trying to squeeze more from existing customers in that context risks fighting the physics of the category. Growth comes from reaching more people, not squeezing more from existing customers.

People power

This is where the challenge for whisky becomes explicit. If most buyers purchase once a year or less, growth can’t depend solely on tightening the relationship loop. No matter how many times the “equals” button is pushed on the boardroom calculators, it won’t compute. Because it can’t.

So, what to do during these inevitably long periods of buying silence? We first need to recognise the real competitive set isn’t other whiskies; it’s everything else that might fill that rare buying moment, including wine, non-alcoholic alternatives, luxury goods, or nothing at all.

Growth comes from being the obvious choice at the point of decision. If we can’t sell more whisky to the same people, we must find more people and recruit them to the category.

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That brings an accessibility problem to the front of the room. Drinkers, young and old, have long described whisky as a tough choice compared to other brown and white spirits. It feels daunting, has a reputation for being expensive, and is a drink they struggle to see themselves as part of.

New views

That reframes the strategic task. The question stops being how to make people buy whisky more often and becomes how to remain the obvious choice when they do decide to buy. That’s a different discipline, and one that (importantly) privileges clarity over complexity.

It also explains why premiumisation has been both a strength and a constraint. Trading up works well in low-frequency categories because each purchase carries weight. But it also narrows the margin for error. When people buy less often, they tolerate less confusion, less friction, and less justification. The bottle (or dram, or cocktail) has to earn its place quickly.

The industry often treats light buyers as a conversion problem. I’d argue the data suggests they are the category, and that in a business built on patience, the one-time buyer isn’t so much a failure of loyalty as the economic baseline.

As the saying goes, hope isn’t a strategy. A new conversation is needed because the pressures facing whisky now all compound low-frequency behaviours. Moderation trends reduce occasions. Cost pressures lengthen replacement cycles. Tariffs and pricing shifts raise the stakes of each decision. None of these forces argues for chasing frequency. It would be madness to expect that to be successful.

Premium whisky already understands scarcity in production, but the next phase is likely to be understanding it in demand. The brands that adapt will stop fighting the nature of the category and organise around it.

This piece was also published on LinkedIn.