The art of promotion.....

One of the servers came up to the service bar last night, and ordered a drink called “Sex on the beach.” I hadn’t had anyone order one of those in years, couldn’t remember exactly what went in it, looked in the drink recipe book that was behind the bar, it wasn’t in there….and then the server said she would look it up on her phone….something I would not have thought to do. I think it had a vague resemblance to what little I could remember about it….but my point is, at the time this drink was invented, I believe people ordered it more for the name, than anything else.


The same can be said if you order a “Between the Sheets. ” People are out to have fun, so they order a “fun drink..” The problem with these drinks is, when you move from one geographical area to the next, the recipe will be different. It’s kind of like the old telephone game, you know, where one person tells someone something, they repeat it to the person next to them, and so on and so on, and by the time the message gets to the last person in line, it seldom resembles the original message. This is what happens to these “fad” drink recipes, and it doesn’t seem to matter.

The promotional genius behind this drink, isn’t that it’s the best tasting drink in the world, it’s the name. The same holds true for the martini fad. A Chocolate Martini sounds a little classy and enticing, the same would not hold true if someone had decided to call it a “Coco Puff.”

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about the best promotional tool any bartender can have in their arsenal.