In a small studio in the basement of an office building in Beijing’s Chaoyang district, Dillon King is surrounded by whiskey bottles as he grins into the camera. With more than one million followers on Douyin, the domestic version of TikTok, the 36-year-old from Downpatrick, Co Down, has become China’s top whiskey influencer.
Live-streaming seven hours a day, four days a week, he has built a large, dedicated following and a healthy business selling 6,000 bottles a month directly to consumers. Known as Lao Jin, King also records videos in which he tastes a number of whiskeys or other spirits and offers his unvarnished opinion.
“I use a lot of tasting references which Chinese people will understand. So I tend to focus on ones which are relatable and I also use colloquial Chinese and slang,” he told me when we met in his studio. “We also do stuff like going out and seeing different food and whiskey in different locations. But mostly it’s just a combination of me being a bit of a dickhead in Chinese, and booze. And it works.”
The business model depends on China’s ecommerce infrastructure, which is more advanced and extensive than its counterparts in Europe and the US. The process of clicking and buying on screen during his live-streams is simple and streamlined, and the product King is talking about is delivered to the customer’s home within three days.
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He has been in the whiskey business since he arrived in China 15 years ago working as a brand manager for a number of companies before striking out on his own. Apart from his live-streaming and social media videos, he acts as a consultant to brands hoping to enter a Chinese whiskey market that has transformed over the past decade.
“Before we had sort of an hourglass figure, where you had the really expensive 50-year-old stuff and then you had your dirt cheap one and in between nothing was selling, whereas now what we’ve got is we’ve got like a more healthy pyramid. There’s a lot of cheap stuff and now that the economy is where it is, which is to say not good, a lot of people are trading down. So you’re seeing in the mid-range and the lower mid-range your entry level really, the volume is picking up,” he said.
“And that’s driven by the same guys who were drinking it before and now younger consumers because whiskey’s got a bit of traction. It’s now pretty normal in a TV show or in a film or in a web series or whatever to see people drinking whiskey.”
Japanese brands and Scotch are most popular, although there is a growing market for Chinese whiskey and last December Pernod Ricard opened a $100 million distillery in Sichuan to produce the Chuan, a prestige single malt Chinese whiskey. Jameson is sold widely and at a very low price throughout China but higher-end Irish brands have struggled to compete.
King points to Teeling as an independent Irish brand that has taken the right approach by putting in years of effort in the market in China and is now making an impact. But while Diageo and other corporate giants led the charge for Scotch in China, no big brand has invested such resources on behalf of Irish whiskey.
Part of the problem is that while a single malt Scotch whisky without an age statement sells in China for about €30, a non-age statement blended Irish whiskey is priced at about €45. Some producers also have unrealistic expectations about how much they will be able to sell in a market as big as China.
“It is huge, but it’s also a black hole for marketing. You can take whatever marketing bucks you’ve got and you can just throw it at China and it’ll just disappear and you will sell fanny all. It’s terrifying. The landscape changes every six months,” King said. “Someone will say, why don’t you just go and spend RMB1 million (€128,000) on TikTok? But if you don’t have the infrastructure in place then TikTok’s useless. When people see it they need to be able to search it on all platforms.”
King’s advice to small Irish producers is to take a booth at one of China’s whiskey shows without the help of an importer and offer people a taste. “You can ask them through a translator, do you think this is worth 60 quid? And, honestly, that’s the best feedback you’re going to get. Because you can go and talk to an export agent, but the guy’s probably never been to China and he’s probably got one importer that’s already got six different Irish brands and you’re just getting lost in the noise.”