How to Build a Brand in a Category Nobody Knows They Need Yet
- Deevo Tindall
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
From The Brand Lab with Deevo | Featuring Milan Martin, Founder & CEO of Free Spirits Company
Most brand builders work within categories that already exist. They compete for shelf space, fight over positioning territory, and try to carve out a reason to choose them over the next option. What Milan Martin did was different, he built a brand in a category that most consumers didn't know they wanted, and he did it without a roadmap, a playbook, or the safety net of a proven market.
Milan is the founder and CEO of Free Spirits Company, a non-alcoholic spirits brand offering bourbon, gin, tequila, and ready-to-drink cocktails for people who love the ritual of drinking, not necessarily the alcohol. After more than two decades running advertising agencies and building campaigns for globally recognized brands, he walked away to solve a problem he'd experienced himself: how do you stay in the room, enjoy great cocktails, and still control how much alcohol you consume?
Our conversation on The Brand Lab covers the real mechanics of building a challenger brand, what consumer psychology actually tells us about purchasing decisions, and the costly lessons that come with introducing something nobody's asked for yet.
The Misconception That Almost Defined the Brand
The first problem Free Spirits ran into was the perception of the brand. When people heard 'non-alcoholic spirits,' the immediate assumption was that the product was for sober people, for people in recovery, for people who couldn't drink.
That assumption was wrong, and it was also the central obstacle the brand had to overcome.
"This is for people that drink cocktails. Non-alcoholic spirits are a way for people that love cocktails to drink more of them without the downsides of too much alcohol." — Milan Martin
The positioning shift was fundamental. Free Spirits is a choice brand, it exists for the drinker who's had two cocktails and wants a third without the regret, for the professional who wants something sophisticated at a client lunch when meetings start in an hour, for the group of friends who always end the night having had too many and want a way to pace without switching to sparkling water.
The product didn't change. The story around it had to.
Brand Positioning Starts With What You Refuse to Be
One of the most useful brand strategy principles Milan shared is what he calls 'and not or.' Free Spirits isn't anti-alcohol. It doesn't wag a finger at the industry that Milan himself spent two decades working inside. It doesn't moralize about drinking culture or position sobriety as a virtue.
Instead, the brand stands for optionality. Alcohol can be part of the picture, or it doesn't have to be. That's the whole point.
This matters strategically because the moment a challenger brand takes a moral stance against an entrenched industry, it narrows its audience to the already-converted. Free Spirits wanted the people who weren't converts. It wanted the cocktail drinkers. And to reach them, the brand had to feel like it belonged on the same shelf, at the same bar, and in the same hand as the product they were already buying.
The tagline 'Drink Like You Mean It' is a direct expression of that. It's not about drinking less. It's about drinking with intention. That message works for someone on a health kick, for someone who drove to the party, and for someone who simply wants to be sharp for an early meeting the next morning. The brand earns its place in all three scenarios without needing to be preachy in any of them.
Identity Is What Actually Drives Purchase Decisions
I ended up pressing Milan about something that had me curious from the moment I learnt about his brand: why do people actually buy? Education alone doesn't change behavior. People don't buy a product because they've been informed it's a good idea. They buy because they see themselves in the story being told.
Milan's answer came through a simple example. He's a Philadelphia Eagles fan. The Eagles don't play in the same venue they did when he grew up. They don't have the same uniforms, the same players, or the same coaches. By any logical measure, it's a completely different team. But he's still a fan, just as committed as he was in the 1970s.
"What we're trying to do is build a community of people around this idea that life is too great to live any other way other than the way you want to do it." — Milan Martin
What he's loyal to is the community, it's the shared identity, it's the act of calling a friend when a touchdown is scored and knowing they experienced the same thing.
Free Spirits is applying that same logic to beverages. The product is secondary to the idea. The idea is that you get to choose how you live, how you drink, and how you show up. The brand is built around people who believe that, people who go their own way in large acts and small ones.
For brand builders, the implication is significant. If people can't see themselves in your story, they won't buy. That's a positioning problem, and it can't be fixed with a bigger ad budget.
What Entrepreneurship Actually Looks Like in Year One
Milan's entrepreneurial journey offers a useful correction to the mythology of the big leap. He didn't quit his job and bet everything on day one. He took baby steps into the ocean, testing the idea, building out the product, figuring out the supply chain, and only walking away from a full salary about a year into the process.
The near-catastrophic moment came during his first Dry January, when thousands of bottles shipped via UPS exploded in transit. The non-alcoholic liquid froze overnight in unheated trucks, expanded, and arrived at customers' doors as shattered, wet cardboard. With limited inventory and no packaging solution ready, the team had to improvise fast.
The solution came from researching iguana shipping. It turns out that if you need to keep a cold-blooded animal alive during a multi-day cross-country shipment, you use long-lasting chemical heat packs available through exotic pet supply stores. Milan bought them by the thousands and it worked.
The anecdote is funny in retrospect, but the lesson underneath it is serious. Early-stage consumer brands face operational complexity that has nothing to do with branding or marketing. Getting comfortable with that discomfort, what Milan calls embracing the suck, is the only way through it.
The Long Game: Building Brand While Driving Acquisition
One of the sharper observations in the conversation is how Free Spirits approaches the tension between customer acquisition marketing and brand building. Most small businesses treat these as competing priorities, spending tactically to drive sales and separately (and often insufficiently) to build long-term brand equity.
Free Spirits collapsed the distinction by making its acquisition marketing feel like brand marketing. Even when running a promotion, the execution is done with humor, with provocation, with the personality of the brand intact. The result is that every dollar spent acquiring a customer also does something to build how people feel about the company.
When we go out and do customer acquisition marketing, we do it in a way that's true to our brand. Tongue in cheek, funny, provocative. So you're getting double bang for your buck." — Milan Martin
The provocateur campaign is the clearest example. After online critics started saying that drinking non-alcoholic spirits was 'like hiring someone for a hug,' Free Spirits hired a professional to give free hugs to strangers in San Francisco and filmed the whole thing. It was absurd, funny, and completely on-brand. It answered the haters without dignifying their criticism, and it gave the internet something worth sharing.
That's the creative challenge for any challenger brand: find the moves that generate conversation, stay true to the idea behind the brand, and don't require a million-dollar media budget to work.
The One Piece of Advice That Applies to Every Brand Builder
When I asked Milan for his single best piece of advice for entrepreneurs trying to build something new, the answer was disarmingly simple.
"Start with a blank piece of paper. Embrace the fear, embrace the discomfort. Push it forward a little every day. You're not jumping off a cliff. You're building the thing to where it's not nothing." — Milan Martin
Compounding progress is the throughline of the Free Spirits story. Twenty years in advertising built the brand instincts. Baby steps into product development built the company. Daily improvements to the product, each batch of non-alcoholic bourbon slightly more nuanced than the last, are building the category. None of it happened all at once.
For anyone trying to build a brand in a crowded space, or a space that barely exists yet, that's the framework. Start. Improve. Repeat. Close the gap between where you are and where you want to be in small, sustainable steps.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE
Hear the full conversation with Milan Martin on The Brand Lab.
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ph/podcast/drink-like-you-mean-it-building-a-category-defining/id1755004578?i=1000768754256
Connect with Free Spirits: drinkfreespirits.com | @drinkfreespirits
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