Branded Cocktails: How to Bring Your Brand to Life at an Event
When you’re planning a brand activation, product launch or corporate event, one question matters more than ever:
How do you make people remember your brand?
Logos, signage and beautifully designed event spaces all have their place, but some of the most memorable brand experiences are the ones guests can actually interact with.
And even better — taste.
At Ace Bar Events, we love taking a brand, product or campaign and turning it into a completely bespoke cocktail experience. From branded garnishes and unusual ingredients to theatrical serves and molecular mixology, a cocktail can become much more than a drink.
It can become part of the story you’re telling.
What are branded cocktails?
Branded cocktails are bespoke drinks created specifically around a company, product, campaign or event.
Rather than simply adding a logo to a standard cocktail, we can take elements of the brand itself and incorporate them into the drink.
That might mean:
- Using a company’s own products or ingredients
- Creating cocktails in brand colours
- Designing bespoke garnishes
- Adding branded citrus peels
- Using edible logos
- Creating foams, vapour bubbles or edible clouds
- Developing theatrical presentation and serves
- Naming cocktails around products, campaigns or brand messaging
For corporate events and brand activations, this gives guests another way to experience the brand — and creates something they’ll want to photograph and share too.
Lee Kum Kee at London Fashion Week: turning ingredients into cocktails
One of our favourite recent examples was working with Lee Kum Kee during London Fashion Week.
We love working with repeat clients, and Lee Kum Kee gives our mixologists something particularly exciting to work with: the opportunity to take ingredients that people wouldn’t necessarily associate with cocktails and completely rethink them.
For this event, we created three bespoke cocktails using Lee Kum Kee ingredients, developing each drink so that the products became an integral part of the flavour rather than simply a decorative addition.
And yes — that meant bringing sauces and condiments into the world of cocktails.
The challenge was to make the drinks delicious first and foremost, while still ensuring there was an unmistakable connection to the Lee Kum Kee brand.
It’s not just what’s in the glass
Once we’d developed the flavours, we looked at how we could make each cocktail visually memorable too.
We incorporated details including edible clouds, foams and branded citrus peels, turning each serve into a miniature brand experience.
These details are exactly where branded cocktails can become so effective.
A guest might forget the banner they walked past on their way into an event. They’re far less likely to forget being handed a beautifully presented cocktail featuring an unexpected ingredient, branded garnish or edible cloud.
And when that cocktail ends up being photographed for Instagram, LinkedIn or event coverage, the brand experience travels beyond the room too.
Why branded cocktails work so well at corporate events
The best experiential events encourage guests to interact with a brand rather than simply look at it.
Cocktails naturally lend themselves to this.
They can reflect a brand’s colours, personality, products, campaign messaging and even its heritage. They can be sophisticated, playful, theatrical, minimalist or completely unexpected.
For food and drink brands in particular, incorporating the actual product into the cocktail can be incredibly powerful.
But you don’t have to be a food brand.
We’ve created bespoke drinks and bar experiences around everything from colour palettes and themes to product launches and corporate identities.
The starting point is always the same:
What do you want your guests to remember?
From there, we work backwards to create the experience.
Your bar can become part of the branding too
The cocktails are only one part of it.
For a fully integrated event experience, the mobile bar itself can be branded or designed around the event.
Bespoke bar fascias, vinyl branding, back bars, colour schemes, glassware, menus and styling can all work together so that the bar doesn’t feel like something that’s simply been placed into the event.
It becomes part of the activation.
Add skilled bartenders, flair, cocktail theatre or molecular mixology and suddenly the bar becomes somewhere guests actively want to gather.
For exhibitions and trade shows in particular, that can also help create a natural reason for people to stop at your stand.
From cocktail to content
There’s another advantage to creating something visually distinctive: content.
A beautifully designed branded cocktail gives your guests, photographers and social media teams something worth capturing.
Branded garnishes, dramatic smoke, edible clouds, unusual glassware and colourful cocktails can all create those small visual moments that work brilliantly across social media.
Instead of branding being something in the background of a photograph, it becomes part of the experience being photographed.
Looking for branded cocktails for your next event?
Whether you’re planning a brand activation, corporate event, product launch, exhibition, fashion event or experiential marketing campaign, Ace Bar Events can create a bespoke cocktail and bar experience around your brand.
We can develop everything from the drinks themselves through to branded garnishes, specialist cocktail techniques, flair bartenders and completely bespoke mobile bars.
Give us the brand, the product or the brief and let us get creative.
Looking for branded cocktails or a bespoke bar experience for your next event? Get in touch with Ace Bar Events and let’s create something your guests won’t forget.