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| Jack Daniel's brand family (2025) |
If you can't penetrate the Herald-Leader's paywall, here is the report itself. Like I said, it's public.
I'm not so much interested in the news as I am the picture. That's where Kremlinology* comes in.
If I talked to someone in Jack Daniel's PR (I didn't), they'd probably say don't read too much into it.
I'm about to read too much into it.
The photo, supplied to the media by Brown-Forman's PR department, is of the Jack Daniel's brand family. We know because that's the file name, minus the apostrophe.
It's a lineup but unlike a shelf set, the facing is staggered. Naturally, Old No. 7 is front and center. It has been the flagship since forever. I am old enough to remember when the brand family was Old No. 7 black label and Old No. 7 green label. The green-labeled stepchild was generally considered a slightly less mature whiskey but otherwise the same as black. During some of its history it was lower proof. In recent years, a whole mythology about it has evolved, which is why it's still made although distribution is limited.
Black label Old No. 7 is the flagship and there are seven products in the family. Coincidence? There are no coincidences at Jack Daniel's.
In the current family grouping, the flavored expressions are to the left, everything else is to the right. You can read that as flavored whiskey products make up 43 percent of the line. Immediately flanking the flagship, a little further back, are Tennessee Honey on the left and Jack Daniel's Rye on the right.
Honey seems to have pride-of-place as granddaddy of the flavored expressions. The parallel high status of JD Rye, however, is a surprise. Rye was just about extinct when the bourbon boom began. Tennessee distilleries didn't make rye whiskey. Corn was their thing. Even though Jack uses rye as its flavor grain, it's barely there, much lower than virtually all rye-recipe bourbons.
Jack Daniel's started to distill rye whiskey in 2012. They even released some rye white dog to take advantage of the short-lived white whiskey craze. The mature version arrived in 2017. It's interesting that the company regards it more highly than Gentleman Jack or Single Barrel Select. Their bottles are set back even further.
The corresponding bottles on the flavored side are Tennessee Fire and Tennessee Apple.
The bottles on each end, Tennessee Apple and Single Barrel Select, are set back a little behind their nearest neighbors. The difference is almost imperceptible, though not to a person with too much time on his hands. So, it's stair stepped like an arrow pointed at your heart.
Sometimes the term "brand family" will include every product in circulation that bears that brand name. That would be impossible for Jack Daniel's. The Jack Daniel's logo appears on literally hundreds of products. Setting aside things like mustard, barbeque sauce, and hooded sweatshirts, it's notable what's not considered a core offering. Jack Daniel's American Single Malt was introduced in 2023. It's not here. The quarterly report touts the recent introduction of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Blackberry as a boost for the brand, but it is not yet part of the family photograph.
Ready-to-Drink spirits products (RTDs) are the hottest trend in an otherwise dismal beverage alcohol marketplace, and Jack has a bunch of them, most notably a tie-in with Coca-Cola. Southern Comfort may have trademarked "The Grand Old Drink of the South," but the real grand old drink of the South is Jack and Coke.
But at family gatherings, it sits at the kid's table. Legal drinking age kids, of course. It doesn't rate a place in the family portrait.
The prominence of the flavors and JD Rye may have strategic implications. A bottle of Old No. 7 is about $23. The flavors are similarly popular priced. So is the rye. Gentleman Jack and Single Barrel Select are more expensive, especially Select which can range from $45 up to $800 a bottle. By comparison, Gentleman Jack is only a slight upcharge, at $30.
Jack Daniel's has gotten deep into the limited edition and other collectible bottles game. Those products are very profitable but low volume. It's conventional wisdom that you use market dips to build share, which you do with volume products, not high-priced novelties. Gentleman Jack and everything to the left of it are less profitable but with unlimited volume potential. The flavors are especially good because they contain so little aged whiskey, so their volume potential is not constrained by the aging cycle. They can be cranked out as needed.
Consumers struggling with inflation tend to trade down, buying less expensive products or their usual products in smaller sizes. Optimistically, Jack Daniel's is the first whiskey brand to release a newly legal three-liter bottle. Of course it's Old No. 7.
As a very mature product, Old No. 7 probably has peaked in the U.S. market. It's still mammoth and the brand family will continue to battle Jim Beam's brand family for category leadership, but if the Daniel's brand has any potential for growth in the USA, it's in the products that flank Old No. 7 in the photograph. Otherwise, Old No. 7's future is international, progress currently stymied by Trump's trade war, much to the delight of archrival Johnnie Walker, although Diageo has its own problems.
In conclusion, here's the brand family from 2017.
* Kremlinology: During the Cold War, lack of reliable information about the Soviet Union forced Western analysts to "read between the lines" and use the tiniest titbits, such as the removal of portraits, rearranging of chairs, positions at the reviewing stand for parades in Red Square, the arrangement of articles on the pages of the party newspaper Pravda, and other indirect signs to try to understand what was happening in internal Soviet politics. A classic instance was Myron Rush, at the time an analyst for the RAND Corporation, making a key deduction from the choice of capital or small initial letters in the Soviet press in phrases such as "First Secretary." (from Wikipedia)
