The art of persuasion.

(From Off Licence News)

The Drinks Retailing Awards is a wonderful event. As you might imagine, it isn' so much the food, drink and spectacle of it that I like (but of course, that helps) and although the event wouldn' happen without substantial patronage from the big boys, that isn' what excites me either. No, it's the independent players getting their recognition that really makes me happy.

The year we won the gong for Best Independent Beer Retailer (2003 - can it really be five years already?) was something of a watershed for us. I thought it would be relatively easy to whip up a storm of free publicity on the back of the accolade and, to a certain ext ent, I was right. Press releases were issued, news articles written, and a certain amount of traffic generated. But the big difference it made was in the way that I thought about the business. We're a small shop, with an Aawful lot of good beer and a steady trickle of customers. Satisfaction How to get them interested in what we want to sell them? As a specialist beer retailer, I've spent a lot of time gently persuading ordinary people to trade up from cans of generic fizzy yellow to something a bit more interesting or, at the very least, perhaps something bottled. People looking for beer to go with a curry are an easy target - they already want to buy a bottled beer (Cobra or Singha, usually) and so have the idea that bottled beer and food go together. Once that seed is planted, it's a slow coax to get them to (for example) Budvar, to perhaps some pale hoppy English ale, and then gradually persuade them that a modest investment of time and money will eventually reward them with more pleasure and ...