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OK... you also pay for how good the water is + how cool the bottle looks.
LMAO! I didn't see your post, and you said the exact same thing.
Vodka is ing crap. I refuse to drink it in anything.
I wonder how well I would do in a blind tequila tasting. My favorites are Don Julio, El Conquistador, and Herradurra, with 1800 a distant fourth. My least favorites are Patron and regular Cuervo. I wonder how many of us are pissing our money away on premium liquors that we'd never be able to tell apart if we didn't see the label.
It was such a good special too. All those yuppy bags talked about which vodka's were their favorites and what the differences are between all of them.........then..........bam, Smirnoff wins.
OK... you also pay for how good the water is + how cool the bottle looks.
Yes, filtering does make a difference, I agree. But if Vodka drinking bags that swear Grey Goose is so much better wouldn't get to look at that neat bottle that they pay double to triple the price for.
I should rephrase my post, I don't mean people that drink Vodka are bags, I just mean that people that think they can tell the difference between vodka's are bags, especially when they are sure to buy the "good" stuff instead.
See Manny, KEDA, BeerisGood, CuckingFunt, Fillmoe, Melmart1, The Sone, and Obiwan Ginobli.
I openly admitted that two of my vodka choices (level and Skyy90) were based on bottle coolness.
isn't an ideal vodka supposed to be tasteless? grain alcohol and water. i would like to try one of the ones from iceland or greenland where they use some of their "high quality" glacier spring water,
I guess bag isn't really a fair term. I aplogize for calling everyone bags.
Old No. 7
The following is part of a longer article about Sidney Frank, founder of Grey Goose. This guy was a smart son of a , he just died recently, but don't worry, you gullable folks that keep ordering Grey Goose are paying for his great grandchildrens college tuition. The rest of the article can be found here, http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news...816/index.html
To the business at hand. The year is now 1996, and, flush with Jager’s success, you’re ready to invent a new vodka from scratch. Why? Because the microbrewed-beer craze is giving way to a new age of sophisticated tails. Dot-com dollars are begging to be spent ostentatiously, at expensive nightclubs. Herein lies opportunity.
We’re out flogging Corazón at a club on the Bowery. The scene is clearly rife with Influencers. On my way in, I brush past Ethan Hawke.
As you lean back in your golf cart, watching another perfect chip shot bounce up onto the green, you ponder the fact that the premium vodka right now (in 1996) is a brand called Absolut. When it was first introduced, Absolut’s high price was considered outrageous. But it’s had great success (with its iconic, artsy ad campaign), and it now sells for the steep, steep price of about $17 a bottle.
So, to steal away Absolut’s market share, your unborn new vodka should undercut this price, correct? No, you think, chomping your cigar as you watch a 30-foot putt roll straight into the cup. Why don’t I price my vodka extravagantly higher than Absolut, at wildly more profitable margins . . . and steal Absolut’s market share that way? This was the great insight of Sidney Frank (and not only him: The makers of Ketel One vodka had the same basic idea). Frank could see that there was a product missing from the shelves. Here were all these vodkas, in the $15-to-$17 range, vying to be the premium brand (with Absolut mostly winning). Frank just sidestepped the fray altogether and charged an unheard-of $30 a bottle. The markup amount was pure profit. “He was the first person to see,” says an executive at rival Bacardi, “that there was a superpremium category above Absolut, if you had a good product story.”
In this story, the name came first—as it so often does when image is the paramount concern. Frank recalled he’d once sold a Liebfraumilch named Grey Goose back in the seventies. These were German white wines that were briefly hip but faded into oblivion. “I remember there was always something in the name that had magic with the consumer,” says Frank. (It may also be that Frank liked the name because he already owned the worldwide rights to it.) Frank gathered his lieutenants at the company’s New Roc e headquarters. “Go to France and come back with a vodka,” he said. So they met with cognac distillers, whose business had slowed. The stills were switched to vodka, and at last there was an actual product.
But why France? Doesn’t vodka come from Russia, or perhaps, in a pinch, Scandinavia? “People are always looking for something new,” says Frank. It’s all about brand differentiation. If you’re going to charge twice as much for a vodka, you need to give people a reason.
“Nietzsche explains that human beings are looking for the ‘why’ in their lives,” says Wright. “Here at Liquid Intelligence, we refer to this ‘why’ as ‘the Great Story.’ The Great Story must be enticing, memorable, easily repeatable, and about what you want your brand to be about.”
For Grey Goose, the brand was about unrivaled quality. Grey Goose’s Great Story hinged on the following key points: It comes from France, where all the best luxury products come from. It’s not another rough-hewn Russian vodka—it’s a masterpiece crafted by French vodka artisans.
It uses water from pristine French springs, filtered through Champagne limestone.
It’s got a distinctive, carefully designed bottle, with smoked glass and a silhouette of flying geese. It looks fantastic up behind the bar, the way it catches the light (and Frank made sure to give the bars big, 1.75-liter bottles, to grab attention). It sure looks expensive.
It was shipped in wood crates, like a fine wine, not in cardboard boxes like Joe Schmo’s vodka. This catches the bartender’s eye and reinforces the aura of quality. Never forget the influence of the bartender.
It was named the best-tasting vodka in the world by the Beverage Testing Ins ute in 1998. (Granted, this pronouncement can and will be doubted. But it was nonetheless touted relentlessly in a series of Wall Street Journal ads.)
And now the most important piece of the story—the twist that brings it all together: Grey Goose costs way more than other vodkas. Waaaaaaay more. So it must be the best.
Pause for a reality assessment: Certainly, Grey Goose is a very good vodka. But is it really “the best”? Pace the Beverage Testing Ins ute, I’d venture that the answer is, ehhhhh, maybe. Of course, when I suggest to an SFIC vice-president that vodka is by definition odorless and tasteless, and thus one vodka couldn’t be much better than the next, his face goes tight. “That is a dinosaur statement,” he says, speaking slowly, then lectures me on water- filtration processes and Champagne limestone and special grains and such.
“Yes, some people may taste a difference,” says Wright of Liquid Intelligence. “But you’re talking about a grain-neutral spirit. The FDA definition is pretty narrow. At an elemental level, there is no difference. And anyway, you can’t possibly taste it when it’s in a Cosmopolitan. Grey Goose is about quality because Sidney Frank said it was about quality.”
And said it to the right people. Those ads were placed in the Wall Street Journal, not Newsday. Even more important to the campaign was event marketing—getting Grey Goose into the hottest clubs on the hottest nights, in the hands of the hottest people. “You need to influence the influencers,” says Wright. These are the obsessive arbiters of taste who like to tell their friends what to buy. When they have a Great Story to tell, they’ll tell it convincingly and often. In the classic flowchart, Influencers talk to Early Adopters (“Want to be cool but don’t have the time,” as Wright describes them), who talk to the Early Majority (“Suburbs”), who talk to the Late Majority (“Middle America”), who talk to the Laggards (“Just now buying a CD player”).
As the Influencers peddled the Grey Goose tale far and wide and people began to call for it in bars, a great thing happened—the characters on Sex and the City pointedly called for Grey Goose Cosmos. In the battle for vodka supremacy, this was the atom bomb. The war was over. Grey Goose had won.
You can most CERTAINLY tell Ciroc from other vodkas. It has a grape undertone to it and no other vodka that I am aware of has. If you did a blind taste test with Smirnoff and Ciroc and couldn't tell the difference between the two, I bet you wouldn't be able to tell paint thinner from Kool Aid either.
And in the end... IT'S MY GOTDAMNED MONEY!!! I don't know what business it is of yours if I want to spend extra on Ciroc or Grey Goose. I am sure your boss is paying you 2-3x what you are worth, but I bet you aren't giving HIM a hard time about how he spends his money, now are you? So back off, you judgemental ass.
Not anymore, now it's Sidney Frank's grandkids money.
Plus that's just ridiculous, Paint thinner and Kool Aid have a clearly different taste. Unless you don't put enough of the powder in the Kool Aid, then it can be pretty bad.
Wow, I've never had grey goose.... now I probably never will.
I'll stick with JD.
i would like you to quote where in my post i said i could tell the difference in vodka? i simply answered the question of which liquor i prefer.........
kill yourself for being a dumb .... and no im not gonna rephrase that
How about you read that article and then come back and tell me if you still like Grey Goose the best.
Furthermore, what have I done to be labeled a "dumb ". If anything, you are a dumb for being fooled by nothing more then a marketing scheme. You are wasting the money your parents give you on the weekends by blowing it on outrageosly overpriced liquor.
never seen so much ignorance in one post..... how come you havent killed yourself yet?
how bout you stop putting words in my mouth? DUMB !
You're clearly an idiot. I replied to you saying that you didn't say you could choose one over the other, however you were just stating which you like best, by saying myself, go back and read the article and tell me if you still feel this way.
So then you reply by calling me ignorant.........very good Fillmoe. Are you just pissed because you are trying to add up all the money you could have saved had you not been fooled by an 80 year old man?
Honestly Fillmoe, do you think your parents will get mad at you when they find out that the allowance they've been giving you has gone to the expensive waste of money vodka instead of the cheap stuff that your mother drank when she was pregnant with you?
yes thats it...... son i got money stacks BIGGER THAN YOU!
Ok son.
People that talk about how much money they have via an internet chat board are ALWAYS lying.
To everyone else, seriously, I apologize, I shouldn't have called anyone a bag, I forget that information such as the marketing scheme regarding grey goose isn't common knowledge.
To Fillmoe, you are an idiot and deserve to be suckered by every ploy imaginable.
aight playa... just leave my name outta next time and if you gonna use my name HAVE SOME ING FACTS!!!!!!!!
Agreed. But seriously, did you read that article? If not, read it, it will both piss you off for having spent money on it, then afterwards you'll sit around and marvel about how ing smart that guy was.
Damn...I've seen hard liquor make guys want to fight, but this is the first time I've seen guys get in a fight just TALKING about liquor...
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