Detroit’s Boldest Bourbon Is Coming for the Whiskey-Averse — and It Has a Strategy to Back It Up
There is a specific kind of skeptic that every bourbon brand eventually has to reckon with. He’s not hostile. He’s not uninformed. He just tried whiskey once — maybe at a college party, maybe at a dive bar — and what landed on his palate felt like a controlled burn. Since then, he’s ordered beer, ordered vodka sodas, ordered just about anything else. The word “smooth” on a label means nothing to him because every bourbon he’s ever encountered has called itself smooth, and none of them delivered on the promise.
Mayor Pingree Bourbon, the flagship whiskey line from Valentine Distilling Co. out of Ferndale, Michigan, has decided to go after that guy directly. And they’re doing it with a campaign that doesn’t just admit the skepticism exists — it leans into the joke.
The “Smoother Than You Expect” Campaign: What Makes It Different
The campaign, developed with Detroit-based creative agency Farley Oil, is called “Smoother Than You Expect.” On the surface, it sounds like every other whiskey tagline. But the creative strategy behind it is more considered than a simple reversal of the “burn” perception. The research that informed the campaign found that very few people outside of the hardcore cocktail crowd push back against the idea that bourbon is harsh — they hear the word “smooth,” but they don’t believe it, and they feel that brands just say it out of reflex.
That distinction is the crux of everything. The creative team realized that smooth wasn’t the problem — belief was. They needed to give people an out: a way to reconcile the idea with the reality. And so the campaign doesn’t try to convince the skeptic that bourbon has always been smooth. Instead, it gives him permission to be surprised. The line “Smoother than I expected” doesn’t require anyone to admit they were wrong about bourbon. It just lets them register honest astonishment — and keeps their dignity intact in the process…