The Brands Cutting Through Are Not the Ones Spending More. They Are the Ones Being More Specific: A Conversation with Jordan Tepper, Co-Founder, Apologue

Jordan Tepper has a specific way of describing what challenger brands need to do to cut through in a market that has become almost impossibly noisy. He calls them creative grenades – credit, he notes, to Steven Grasse – and the point of a grenade is not to reach everyone. It is to be impossible to ignore in a specific place at a specific moment.

Apologue, the Chicago-based liqueur brand Jordan co-founded, is built around that principle. And the most concrete expression of it is an activation that cost almost nothing and generated more genuine attention than most brands achieve with marketing budgets that dwarf it.

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