For brands in industries like wine and spirits, CPG, and wellness, the path from story to sale runs through distributors, retailers, and a web of legal rules that most PR playbooks never account for. Alison Seibert, founder of The James Collective, makes the case that effective communications for these brands starts with understanding how they're actually bought and what they're legally allowed to say. Here, she shares the questions her team asks when building strategies that deliver both immediate results and lasting brand equity. 

In PR—especially PR and communications for brands with something to sell—we’re all about telling stories and driving visibility that delivers sales, heads in beds, traction… whatever the metric may be for the client. While PR has never had a truly linear way to measure getting from point A to point B, when working with companies that have complex distribution networks or are more regulated, things get even more complicated. 

How do we know? The James Collective partners with luxury, craft, and challenger consumer brands--many of whom exist in industries like CPG food, wine & spirits, wellness, and the like. As communications professionals, we truly need to understand the complexities of these industries to build and execute strategies. You cannot always click, buy, and have it land on someone's doorstep two days later, so the PR strategy needs to deeply understand the legal and sales system that the client is operating in to deliver the most strategic work for both short term results and long term brand equity.

Take wine and spirits: the industry operates within both intense legal scrutiny and a three-tier sales system, meaning that often times product needs to pass through many hands (producer - distributor - retailer), before getting to the customer. Even if the brand has a DTC presence, they probably cannot legally ship to every state. Legally, there are also additional promotional rules (under what’s called Tied-house laws), which can hamstring marketing efforts. CPG and food have their own versions of this, from labeling rules to ensuring that content is not making undue health claims to multi-tiered distribution networks that brands need to work through before ending up on shelf. 

Why does this matter for PR and communications teams? PR and communications cannot exist in a vacuum, and understanding how a client can legally be promoted and shared, coupled with a true depth of knowledge on how the client’s sales process actually works is vital to building a successful PR strategy.

A few things we consider when building strategic plans for clients in these industries:

• Where is the product sold, and how can consumers buy it?
• Do we need to not just market to consumers, but also to those in the middle--distributors, brokers, buyers, restaurateurs, etc?
• Should the strategy and messaging change based on where someone may buy it? I.e. buying off the shelf is a much different experience
• Are we prioritizing driving purchase to DTC, and if so, should we change our marketing and collaborations for that channel? Consider affiliate PR?
• Does this promotional effort fit in the legal framework of the client’s industry? For example, you can’t give away free product in wine & spirits; you need to consider claims in food or wellness, etc.

This is exactly why we specialize in these industries--because you can’t always just click to buy, these companies need agency partners who have deep knowledge on how they actually work. Similarly, we're not just checking if we believe in a brand, we’re also looking under the hood of the business to ensure that we can build strategies and campaigns that drive real results.