Gerry’s Insights: Marketing Lessons From an Electoral Insurgency

Politically, it’s been treated as more than just local news: an upset victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary by the relative political neophyte Zohran Mamdani has been covered nationally as potentially carrying useful lessons for a national Democratic Party that’s searching for ways to better connect with voters. Or, conversely, maybe it’s a way to send even more swing voters scurrying to the Republican camp, considering that he’s a Muslim socialist who wants to make the buses free and raise taxes on the rich and is inevitably being demonized by the far right as a communist terrorist.

Either way, in absorbing the post-mortems on how an underfunded three-term state assemblyman, just 33, could have demolished the lavishly backed Andrew Cuomo campaign, among other established rivals, in the city’s first ranked-choice primary, it occurred to me that they’re pointing to the same dynamics that bev nerds like us understand to explain the success of insurgent beverage brands.

It’s one of the enduring glories of this industry that brands lacking the experience, connections and resources of big-company rivals are able to succeed, and they’re mirrored in the mechanisms that Mamdami employs. So drawing the parallels strikes me as kind of interesting.

One such mechanism is visual storytelling, harnessed to an authentic story. The son of a lauded filmmaker (his mom is Mira Nair, who directed movies like Mississippi Masala), Mamdani seems to have a gift for visual media and has brilliantly harnessed social media to amplify his messaging, hitting viral pay dirt with posts of him taking the polar-bear plunge into the frigid Atlantic, dressed in his suit no less, or walking the length of Manhattan chatting up the folks he met. “The more Mr. Mamdani posted, the more people posted about him, and soon, whether or not you were following the New York City mayoral race, there were Mamdani videos in your feed,” as The New York Times characterized the effort. (That does seem to be how social media works.) Those videos “explained his plans for a rent freeze and free bus service and childcare in simple terms, propelling him swiftly from relative obscurity as a state lawmaker to a household name.” Tsk-tsking by rivals like incumbent mayor Eric Adams, who’s running on an independent line, seemed to miss the point. “Let’s be clear: They have a record of tweets,” Adams harrumphed, not deigning to mention his young rival by name. “I have a record on the streets.”

Then there’s the entertainment-driven effort to build a cult of personality where even outrageous, seemingly counterproductive, statements and stunts serve to dominate the discourse and generate waves of social media attention. Trump, of course, is a master of that, to the point where adherence to his personal brand trumps absurdities like his campaign promises to end inflation and the Ukraine war on day one of his new administration. As an incumbent elected state official Mamdani surely knows that decisions like free daycare won’t be his to unilaterally make as mayor. But niceties like that can be dealt with later; for now, the priority is to make his sympathies with working New Yorkers clear in as emphatic a way as possible.

Another is navigating the hidden channels that the big guys don’t reach and may not even know about. While Cuomo spent millions running attack ads but little time doing “retail” politics in the streets and meeting halls, Mamdani attached himself to the city’s halal carts and bodegas to pop up in ways that resonated as far more authentic. While in these urban interstices, he seemed to genuinely listen to what people had to say about what was troubling them about the city.

It all amounts to a kind of asymmetric warfare where the challenger brands turn the advantages of the giants against them. Those of us with a longer perspective will recall that, going back to the earliest days of so-called “new age” beverages, new brands with little in the way of commercial armor have been able to turn the tables on the beverage giants. After all, Snapple was created by a pair of New York window washers and their friend who operated a health food store, who harnessed such then-insurgent media as The Howard Stern Show to get the word out. In their early days, some of the general-market coconut water brands worked channels like yoga studios that were terra incognita to the big beverage players, even as FitAid incubated in cross fit boxes. (I will also argue that the independent DSD channel, as frustrating and inconsistent as it can be, is another such semi-hidden channel.) As brands like Red Bull and more recently Liquid Death and Poppi have shown, you can get pretty far riding our new entertainment economy where the medium really is the message rather than brand pitches that focus on product attributes and promotional pricing. And while bigger brands may think they’re listening to their consumers, they rarely are able to pivot as quickly in response to what they hear.

As for forging a cult of personality, nobody did it better than Jack Owoc in building Bang Energy, posing on social media in gangsta-like bling and calling out by name his business rivals at brands like Monster (who would end up having the last laugh when they acquired the brand out of bankruptcy). It may not be a coincidence that Owoc was a major contributor to Trump. And like Trump, when things seemed to be unraveling, he rarely betrayed any chinks in his self-confidence. Only the outcome proved to be different.

There does seem to be one key difference. I found the right’s lurid attacks on Mamdani to be very disappointing: after all, his stances would seem to provide plenty of fodder for conservatives without their having to make up stuff. By contrast, it’s heartening that those kinds of false accusations don’t actually seem to have a corollary in beverages, where the strategics may use their market clout to blunt the inroads of challenger brands but generally don’t trash-talk them or whisper conspiracy theories behind their backs. (There are occasional exceptions, as when Anheuser-Busch in the 1990s orchestrated a Dateline report to try to derail Sam Adams and the craft beer movement by highlighting how the “microbrewed” beer actually was produced within immense Stroh tanks.)

Finally, a last word about those social signifiers that loom so large in defining who is a genuine New Yorker. Years ago, Mayor David Dinkins surely lost some votes when he showed up at the Guinness tent at the massive Caribbean Day parade and helped himself to the brand’s pallid lager extension. While some of the other candidates try to avoid such purity tests, Mamdani happily wades in to take his chances. Take the time he was strolling in lower Manhattan with an influencer who had adopted the theme “How New York is Zohran?” “Just a little if-you’re-a-real-New-Yorker test,” she warned him. “AriZona or Snapple?” “It’s got to be AriZona,” he replied, choosing the family-run Long Island bodega staple over the now-corporate brand based in Frisco, Texas. Hey! Maybe I’ll vote for this guy after all.

Longtime beverage-watcher Gerry Khermouch is executive editor of Beverage Business Insights, a twice-weekly e-newsletter covering the nonalcoholic beverage sector.