In this op-ed, Tim O’Sullivan co-founder and director of Bae Juice, reflects on how real-world marketing can outperform polished digital campaigns, proving that authenticity, community and word-of-mouth are the real drivers of growth for small brands.
Most brands these days will tell you that their customer journey is a finely tuned digital funnel designed to convert at scale. Ours was a guy named Dave at a pub in Richmond.
Dave tried Bae Juice, our anti-hangover Korean pear juice, went home, woke up fine, told fifteen other people, and then somehow, that was our first viral campaign. No glossy landing page, no ‘tactical UGC strategy’, no 27-step re-marketing funnel. Just a good product, a good hangover outcome, and people keen to talk about it.
Bae Juice started with a simple insight; everyone loves a big night, nobody loves the next morning. Korean pear juice is clinically studied for its hangover-reducing benefits, but more importantly, it actually works – and that makes it a very easy product to evangelise.
People love telling their friends about products that have worked for them, and it also makes them seem marginally healthier and more conscious of the impact of something like alcohol.
However, the bigger insight came later – that real-world marketing still works better than anything else, particularly if you’re a small brand trying to cut through the noise without VC money, a marketing army, or a perfectly curated social presence.
As we’ve built our O.G. anti-hangover brand Bae Juice over the last few years, the biggest outperformer hasn’t been digital ads or influencer collabs (though we use them now), but old-school IRL methods, showing up at pubs, golf days, festivals, parties, spring carnival, and the general ecosystem where people do silly things that create demand for our product the next morning.
We have a presence there, we’re part of the fun, and we’re giving punters a product they are genuinely thankful for; can you imagine saying no to a fresh, cold Korean pear juice that will shed off tomorrow’s hangover? Probably not….
Being small is our superpower
We didn’t go into this with a masterplan for experiential brand building. We just said “yes” to things most brands would ignore because they don’t scale, or don’t look “on brand”, or don’t feel polished enough. We handed out juice at uni o-week stalls and boat parties. We threw boxes into share houses. We carried cartons into clubs at midnight because someone DM’d us that their mates were fading. We sponsored amateur footy because amateur footy is where the real elite drinking takes place.
It turns out that scrappy is a strategy. Gen Z and younger millennials don’t fall in love with brands because they’re beautiful, but because they’re real. They want to believe there are humans behind a product, ideally humans who also go out, get dusty, and understand the assignment.
Digital is incredible, but it’s crowded
Digital used to be the cheap and easy option. Now it’s noisy, hyper-optimised, and increasingly expensive for brands that don’t have an attribution team in-house. When you’re small, you need more than reach – you need conviction. IRL gives you that.
When someone tries Bae Juice at a festival or among mates before a big night, the product proves itself in context. Our best marketing channel is tomorrow morning. Word-of-mouth isn’t a ‘nice to have’, it’s what the whole business runs on. Today we sell a pouch of Bae Juice every 12 seconds, and more than half of that velocity comes from people telling other people to try it.
Community is a long game, but it scales
Brand is built through repetition, but community is built through participation. Showing up physically, even when it’s unglamorous, builds trust that money can’t buy.
The big unlock for us wasn’t placement in the big stores or the hundreds of new retail doors we’ve entered – it was that those wins were powered by a core community who genuinely cared that Bae Juice existed. Retail buyers pay attention to pull-through, and nothing drives pull-through like cult behaviour.
You can’t fake cult behaviour online. You have to earn it offline.
Saying ‘yes’ is a growth tactic
The most honest advice I give to early-stage founders is this: don’t try to act big too early. Big brands say no to everything that looks messy. Small brands should say yes to everything that looks fun and vaguely on-mission. You learn faster, you meet the right people, and you build stories, and stories create lore.
Lore is underrated. People don’t share campaigns; they share lore.
Is old school marketing back?
I think we’re entering a renaissance for real-world marketing. As long as digital keeps getting more polished, people will crave the opposite; weird, human, unscalable, and hands-on. Especially for consumer products and especially for brands trying to win Gen Z affection.
We always joke that Bae Juice was built one hungover legend at a time. It’s only half a joke. That’s the business. And honestly? It’s more fun that way.
