What actually makes a drinks brand culturally credible
Celebrity can open a door. It cannot build a brand.
The recent legal challenge against 818 Tequila over its production claims, which the brand disputes, made visible something the drinks industry already knew: in categories where provenance and craft are genuinely meaningful, attention and credibility are not the same thing. Fame can manufacture awareness. It cannot manufacture proof.
The brands that last are not the ones with the most famous faces attached to them. They are the ones that built something culturally coherent underneath the visibility. When the spotlight moves, there is still a brand standing.
Culture is not decoration
The fastest way to reference a culture in branding is through motifs. The predictable colour palette, the folkloric symbol, the familiar visual cues that reference a place or tradition. These are also the fastest way to undermine credibility with any audience that actually belongs to that culture.
Tequila is the clearest example. It sits inside a denomination system, a set of legal and geographic guardrails that define what the product is allowed to be. It is a cultural export with visible rules. When a brand uses Mexican visual language decoratively, without grounding in what Mexican identity actually looks like now, anyone with genuine cultural knowledge sees it immediately. And increasingly, so does everyone else.
Culturally credible drinks branding starts with genuine insight, not surface reference. In Mexico today, identity is shaped as much by contemporary design, architecture and streetwear as by heritage. That is far richer territory for a brand than any motif borrowed from the past.
Craft has to be visible
The brands that hold cultural credibility in spirits and wine are the ones that make their production story legible. Not through legal disclaimers on the back label, but through design choices that signal what the product actually is and how it is made.
When Dwayne Johnson talks about Teremana, he references the agave plant, the process, the craft. That level of participation gives a brand depth that endorsement alone cannot. It signals that the people behind the brand understand the category, not just the opportunity.
The same principle applies to brand design. A bottle that reflects how a liquid is made, where it comes from, and what distinguishes it from everything else on the shelf is doing real cultural work. A bottle that borrows visual cues without that grounding is doing costume work.
19 Crimes and the celebrity brief done right
When we work on celebrity or cultural partnership briefs, the first question is not how to use the celebrity's image. It is what the brand needs to stand for when that association fades. The celebrity should be additive, not load-bearing.
Our work on 19 Crimes operates on exactly this logic. The brand's cultural foundation is the history embedded in it: real people, real stories, real consequence. The augmented reality technology that brings those stories to life is not a gimmick. It is an extension of the brand's core idea. Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart work within that system because the collaboration makes sense for the brand world that already exists. Neither one is the brand.
That distinction is what separates durable cultural brands from ones that are entirely dependent on a single famous face.
Credibility has to show up everywhere
Cultural credibility is not a campaign position. It is a consistency standard. It has to show up in the packaging, the naming, the communication and the transparency of how things are made. A brand that borrows culture for a launch and then abandons it in day-to-day execution will be found out, usually at the worst possible time.
The design brief, from our perspective, is to build something coherent enough to stand without the celebrity if necessary. That means the visual identity, the tone of voice and the brand story need to carry genuine weight on their own terms.
The brands that will earn cultural credibility in the next decade are not the ones that find the most famous person willing to attach their name. They are the ones willing to do the slower, harder work of building something real underneath the attention.
Denomination's Head of Strategy, US, Rory Fegan, wrote about celebrity branding and cultural credibility in Campaign US, January 2026.
