There is a folding table outside a distillery on Southeast Belmont with a hand-lettered sign that says BRING YOUR OWN JAR. I walked past it Saturday, on the way to nowhere in particular, because nowhere in particular is the only place any of us is going. Six people stood spaced along the sidewalk holding mason jars and pickle jars. The man filling them was the same man who poured me a gin flight in January.
He was not running a campaign. He was running a shift.
In about ten days, most of the spirits industry has announced the same thing. Anheuser-Busch. Pernod Ricard. Bacardi. LVMH turning perfume lines over to hand gel. Several hundred small producers nobody outside their zip code had heard of two weeks ago. The federal guidance loosened, the ethanol was already on site, and the press releases arrived within days of each other, most of them using the word pivot.
Some of those announcements read as relief. Some read as a bid for coverage.
A pivot is credible when the audience can already see the line from what you were to what you just became, and if that line has to be explained in the press release, it is not a pivot, it is a costume.
Three questions sort them, and I have used all three this week with clients asking whether they should be doing something visible.
One. Was the capability already yours? A distillery has ethanol, tanks, bottling, and a state permit. Making sanitizer sits closer to its ordinary Tuesday than to a stunt. General Motors talking about ventilators is a real answer for the same reason. A software company announcing a hardship fund is fine, but that is charity, not capability, and it should be named as charity.
Two. Who is it actually for? The distilleries handing filled jars to hospice nurses and grocery clerks have an answer. The ones whose sanitizer exists mainly as a photograph of a bottle with the logo turned toward the lens have a different one.
Three. Would you still do it if nobody covered it? This is the only question that matters and the only one nobody answers honestly in a conference room. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. The plan gets built backward from the coverage, and then everyone acts surprised when the work reads as thin.
Would you still do it if nobody covered it?
Patagonia closed its stores and kept paying its people, and nobody needed the logic explained, because the logic had been public for thirty years. Permission structures get built slowly and spent quickly.
Truffles and Barnaby have no position on any of it. Their supply chain is intact, their routine is unchanged, and one of them has moved into the box my jars came home in.