Innovation that is truly breaking new ground also carries risk. Brands often see great success in their category from line extensions or tweaks to existing products, but long-term growth requires imagination and a little bit of risk. Particularly for brands in established, mature categories, brands must be prepared to push into genuinely new spaces to grow.

Scotch whisky is one category that carries a great deal of passion. It’s a premium category where a great deal of care and craft goes into the product, with brands that often have decades of heritage.

Consumers familiar with the category are often very knowledgeable and have particular rituals around how they drink whisky; for example, neat on the rocks to close an evening or in an Old Fashioned cocktail at a favourite bar. While the appeal of whisky has become broader in recent years, the category still skews male and older.

While reaffirming existing category entry points is essential for any brand, true growth will come in establishing new ones. For whisky, pushing into new occasions and, indeed, attracting new consumers is vital for the continued success of the category.

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That’s what Chivas Regal, a Scotch brand owned by spirits business Pernod Ricard, is attempting to do as it launches its new product today (30 September). Chivas Regal Crystalgold. The clear spirit drink is the first of its kind in the category, and a product that Chivas Regal global marketing director Nick Blacknell describes as a “genuine breakthrough”.

Marketing Week was invited to an event launching the product, details of which the brand had kept tight-lipped about. As the reporter who covers food and drink, I was dispatched to cover the event, during which the expertise and passion that surrounds the whisky category was on display. Most of the media and other invitees to the event were extremely knowledgeable about the category, with many specialising in spirits or whisky itself.

At the central London cocktail bar venue, we were asked to sit at a table and put on blindfolds before tasting the mysterious new product. To my untrained palate, the product tasted like, well, whisky, but my fellow attendees were able to offer plenty more detail, detecting notes, including chocolate, caramel and citrus.

The real shock for the table came when we were permitted to take our blindfolds off, to reveal a bottle filled with clear liquid rather than the darker shade that Scotch typically is.

A ‘Holy Grail’ for the category

There was genuine surprise in the room at this reveal that Chivas Regal had managed to produce a clear spirit drink product that resembles a whisky in taste, even to the trained palates of those present. Due to strict legal classifications, the new product cannot be called whisky, and instead is classified as a “spirit drink”.

However, as explained by global marketing director Blacknell and master blender Sandy Hyslop at the event, the process of producing the spirit followed many of the same principles of producing whisky. The liquid is created through a bespoke filtration process that extracts the colour from golden, oak-aged spirit. It was created through what the brand says was “extensive experimentation”.

The process of developing Chivas Regal Crystalgold took several years, with Hyslop noting that the brand would have “walked away” from the product had the flavour not been good enough.

“[The process] was very difficult, and it was potentially high risk from a brand reputational standpoint,” Blacknell says, emphasising the importance of getting the liquid right.

It’s almost like the Holy Grail, if you could bring together the best of both worlds […] it’s like alchemy, you’ve cracked the age-old problem.

Nick Blacknell, Chivas Regal

For someone not well acquainted with the whisky category (like this reporter), the full significance of creating this clear spirit drink is not immediately obvious. So, on sitting down with the brand’s global marketing director, one of the first questions I asked him was why this “very difficult” process had been worth pursuing for the brand.

Blacknell has been at Pernod Ricard for over 20 years. At the business, he has worked across other spirits categories, including rum and gin, before moving to Chivas Brothers to lead marketing at Chivas Regal in 2020.

Broadly, the total spirits category can be divided into white and dark spirits, Blacknell tells me. Dark spirits, including whisky, are seen as being “sophisticated” and carrying lots of heritage, he notes, adding that this often gives them the ability to command a significant premium. However, they are not very mixable for cocktails, due to their colour (with a dark spirit discolouring a light drink) and perceptions that these are heavy spirits (despite typically being around the same percentage as a vodka or similar white spirit).

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White spirits, on the other hand, are seen as very mixable; however, may not carry the same perceptions of sophistication and, therefore, may find it more difficult to command a premium.

Crystalgold takes “all the benefits of a dark spirit: taste profile, complexity, heritage, full aging”, which drive a premium and combines it with the mixability of a white spirit, says Blacknell.

“It’s almost like the Holy Grail, if you could bring together the best of both worlds […] it’s like alchemy, you’ve cracked the age-old problem,” he says.

Unignorable trends

Drinking habits have shifted post-Covid, notes Blacknell. In particular, changed habits have birthed an earlier evening or late afternoon occasion, with fewer late night occasions that serve the “short sharp” cocktails that whisky is traditionally served as part of.

“With people drinking earlier in the day, they’re looking for lighter spirits, they’re looking for lighter drinks,” Blacknell says. “The rise of the spritz, the rise of the tequila style, citrus-driven drink – it’s something in the industry as dark spirit producers we can’t ignore.”

At the event, attendees were served a Hugo Spritz cocktail, which traditionally blends gin with elderflower, soda water, prosecco and mint, but was served with Crystalgold as the spirit component. There was also an agave drink, which tasted close to a margarita, displaying Chivas Regal’s ambition to be in citrus-based serves with its new innovation.

As well as being good for cocktails, the idea with Crystalgold is that consumers can buy one bottle for lots of different jobs, meaning a consumer could take it to a party; someone could have it in a cocktail, someone could have it neat, and someone could have it with water.

I would love to feel completely sure it’s going to work, and I am really excited about it, but the proof is going to be in the pudding.

Nick Blacknell, Chivas Regal

At £51 per bottle, Crystalgold maintains the premium price point, putting it at a similar level to premium spirits like Patrón tequila.

Cocktails are often seen as a recruitment tool for bringing new consumers into the category, but the Crystalgold product could also expand occasions and drive frequency for existing drinkers, Blacknell says. He is agnostic about whether the innovation will be used as a recruitment or frequency driver.

“It does occupy my mind; who exactly is it for? The truth is, when I’ve looked at that question, it’s often it’s difficult to answer, because […] Scotch is truly global, the trends and movement in Scotch are very complex,” he says.

For example, in Brazil, the team may use it to refresh the image of Scotch among an existing audience, while in some Asian markets, Gen Z young adults are being successfully recruited to the category, and Crystalgold may be used as a tool to continue that.

“It’s more like having an additional string to your bow that a market can use, to have something innovative that can create new news, drive recruitment and freshen up as they tactically need at a local level, it’s just a useful thing in the toolbox,” he says.

‘Proof is in the pudding’

Crystalgold is something new that, in Chivas Regal’s view, takes the best qualities from one category and combines them with the best from another.

Blacknell calls the product “genuine innovation”. He recognises the challenges that this can bring. Unlike creating a new blend of whisky, where most people in the category inherently understand what it is, there’s a level of discovery and explanation needed with the Crystalgold “spirit drink”.

“People may either go, ‘actually, I’m happy with my existing choices, I don’t need anything brand new’, or it can be difficult to break through, because you’ve got to explain it,” Blacknell says.

While obviously the company has done plenty of research into the new product and its launch strategy, Blacknell says that with something innovative like this, it’s difficult to know until it hits the real world.

A brand like Chivas is extremely well known, but like any mega brand, there’s a real danger you become wallpaper.

Nick Blacknell, Chivas Regal

“I would love to feel completely sure it’s going to work, and I am really excited about it, but the proof is going to be in the pudding,” he says.

While Chivas Regal is extremely excited about the launch, there is an acknowledgement that Crystalgold may not take off, despite the years of work that have gone into its development.

It’s a risk that Chivas Regal, and indeed the wider Pernod Ricard business, thinks is worth taking, both on a company and brand level.

“I think what’s important to us is what it says about Pernod Ricard as a business, that we were prepared to spend the time, the money, to push boundaries in the spirits category,” Blacknell says. “Part of it is a desire to show the world that as a business we can push boundaries.”

While earlier he emphasised the damage that a clear spirit could do to Chivas Regal, a brand with an over 100-year history, if it had not been up to standard, Blacknell is also a believer that it must pursue genuine innovation to grow.

“A brand like Chivas is extremely well known, but like any mega brand, there’s a real danger you become wallpaper,” he says.

“With so many new brands coming onto the market and so many new categories, it’s surprisingly easy to lose relevance. So, I think it was also important to say that Chivas could be innovative while still respecting all that history and heritage.”