By Ria Windcaller | eCiderNews
NEW YORK — New York wants to become “The State of Cider.”
The New York Cider Association (NYCA) is seeking a strategic marketing, brand and communications partner to help turn that ambition into a cohesive statewide identity, bringing together programs that already include Cider Week, cider festivals, the New York Cider Mark, a statewide cider trail and growing efforts around restaurants and agritourism.
It is an ambitious assignment.
And NYCA Executive Director Scott Ramsey is clear about where he wants New York cider to go.
The harder question, and one the association’s new Request for Proposals is designed to help answer, is how to get there.
“We already do a cider week the first week of May. We have our New York Cider Festivals that we do. We have our Cider Mark that we’re promoting. We have our trail app that we’re promoting,” Ramsey told eCiderNews.
“And so it really is just a way to kind of put that all under one umbrella and create some attention around what we’re all doing here in New York State around growing and producing this beautiful hard cider and these amazing apples that make the hard cider.”
Read the Source Document
Want to read the full Request for Proposal?
Download the New York Cider Association’s NY State of Cider RFP (PDF).
A Strong Identity Looking for a Larger Audience
New York already has many of the ingredients needed to build a recognizable cider identity: apples, orchards, cideries, tourism infrastructure and established cider-producing regions.
The campaign’s language deliberately connects cider to one of the state’s most recognizable identities.
“We’re already considered the Big Apple. There’s certainly the very popular New York State of Mind,” Ramsey said. “We’re kind of capitalizing on that idea and sort of elevating New York cider and New York apples to that space as well.”
Ramsey points to cider-producing clusters across the Finger Lakes, Hudson Valley, Catskills, western New York and other regions as part of what makes a statewide identity possible.
“We like to think of ourselves as a collective space where people can come and enjoy cider in all these different regions, but also the idea that we are the state of mind idea, right?”
But having the raw material for a regional identity and getting consumers to recognize that identity are two different things.
Ramsey acknowledges that cider still faces a fundamental problem: many consumers don’t fully understand the category.
“I think we’re all, the whole industry is still in such a space of consumer education, and we really want for people to understand what a beautiful product this is, that it is an agricultural product, that it’s a local product,” Ramsey said.
“There’s still a vast expanse of consumers and folks who enjoy these products that don’t really understand what it is.”
That makes the State of Cider campaign about more than creating a slogan.
“I’m hoping it serves as more of a runway to kind of create some sort of collective understanding and maybe a little bit of a hook in people’s minds that will get them more engaged or more into a space where they’re open to understanding and being educated about the fact that hard cider is this beautiful, vast category.”
An Ambitious Assignment
The RFP asks the eventual partner to help NYCA across a wide range of areas, including brand strategy, communications, creative direction, digital strategy, public relations, agritourism and broader consumer engagement.
NYCA has set a professional-services budget of $70,000 for the first year, with paid media, printing, video production, photography, travel and other direct expenses budgeted separately.
Rather than building all of these efforts from scratch, Ramsey said the challenge is figuring out how to make the association’s existing work operate more cohesively.
“I’m really looking for this partnership with this agency to really help coalesce everything that we do into more of a holistic campaign, if that makes sense.”
That means determining what is already working and what needs to change.
“Here’s what’s working really well. Here’s what you’re doing great in social. Here’s what’s great on your website. Here’s what’s great in all of your storytelling. But here’s how you elevate it and pull it together even more so it can even be stronger and more effective than it already is.”
That distinction is important.
NYCA knows the story it wants consumers to understand. New York grows apples. It produces cider. It has distinct cider regions. It offers tourism experiences. It wants more restaurants, retailers and consumers engaging with local cider.
What remains less defined is which levers will have the greatest effect and how those efforts should be prioritized within one campaign.
That is, in large part, what the association is hiring someone to determine.
How Much Cider Knowledge Is Enough?
That creates another challenge familiar across specialized industries: finding outside marketing expertise that does not require months of education before the work can begin.
Ramsey said NYCA isn’t limiting its search to large agencies.
“I’m open to whatever seems to make sense, whether it’s an individual that is building their agency or has a strong understanding of what’s going on or it is a whole team.”
What matters particularly to Ramsey is a connection to agritourism.
“That is not as important to me as the fact that they do have some degree of connection to agritourism.”
He also wants someone who understands the broader ecosystem surrounding cider.
“Obviously have a very strong understanding of the craft beverage space or the culinary space, depending upon where they sit so that they’re not just, have no connectivity to that.”
And Ramsey made clear that NYCA wants the successful partner moving quickly.
“One of the things I will be looking for is to have to do as little of that as possible, quite frankly, because we are in a need for these folks to hit the ground running.”
At the same time, he doesn’t believe deep cider expertise is necessarily a prerequisite.
“I also think that there’s something about, hey, like, we have this expertise, and we get these spaces, and we’ve seen success in other areas around developing the understanding of a product or the agritourism space or all those things that marketing and brand agencies do.”
“But we know what cider is, and we understand the opportunity, but let’s learn and grow together.”
That balance may prove important.
How much category knowledge does a marketing partner need on day one? And how much value comes from bringing ideas and experience developed outside cider?
New York’s eventual selection may offer one answer.
Beyond Producing More Content
NYCA already has many of the communications tools that a marketing campaign might otherwise need to create: a website, social platforms, email communications, video, podcast content, events and an app.
The next challenge is making those individual pieces tell a recognizable story.
Ramsey believes storytelling has to come first.
“I think you have to start … with storytelling and you have to really make sure that your presence [is] in all the spaces where we’re getting all of our media.”
Today’s media landscape, he said, presents its own challenge.
“It’s very splintered and fragmented… I just think that cohesive storytelling space is really important.”
That presents a challenge extending well beyond New York.
Creating content is relatively easy. Building an audience that recognizes, trusts and acts on that content is considerably harder.
For cider associations trying to grow a still-developing category, the question is not simply how much media they can produce. It is whether that work changes consumer understanding and behavior.
From Storytelling to Tourism
One place Ramsey believes New York has significant room to grow is agritourism.
“There is an agritourism component to that that is really important and critical to our industry that I don’t think New York State is leveraging enough yet from an economic perspective and to help these growers and producers.”
That means getting consumers out to the places where cider begins.
“If we’re seeing more engagement from our tourism partners, that would also be something that I would think would really be a goal.”
Restaurants are another piece.
NYCA is preparing a new program, New York Cider From Orchard to Table, intended to help restaurant staff better understand and sell New York cider.
“We really wanna go out and create sort of an initial cohort of restaurants and chefs and servers around the state to get them whatever information they need, help them be able to talk more about cider to their consumers and the folks who are coming into their spaces.”
For Ramsey, one measure of progress would be seeing cider occupy a different place at the table.
“I think in five years if we’re seeing one certain benchmark is honestly more 750s being sold at restaurants. I mean, I think that would be a huge indication of the fact that people are really understanding cider, that they’re asking for it when they’re having a nice meal, that they understand how to pair it with their food and how exciting that is.”
What Does Success Actually Look Like?
The answer may not be captured by a single sales figure.
“The most interesting thing is that it’s not necessarily just sales. It’s not necessarily just an increase in numbers, right? It’s more about cultural understanding, behaviors, and I think it’s fascinating when you start to really think about all those things.”
Ramsey mentioned increased tourism, stronger engagement with tourism partners, more restaurant placements and greater consumer understanding as potential indicators of progress.
But he also sees the effort on a much longer timeline than the initial contract.
“I really believe that where we are right now in the cider industry… this is the long game.”
“We are literally… building this industry as we speak.”
Ramsey compared that trajectory to the decades it has taken the wine industry to establish its position with consumers.
“I look a lot at the wine industry, and that’s taken decades, right? To really get to where it is now. I think this is a five to 10 to 20 to 30 year game.”
That long horizon creates an interesting tension for any association investing in marketing today.
Annual contracts require deliverables and measurable results.
Building a culture around a beverage can take decades.
Could New York Build a Roadmap for Cider?
Ramsey’s ambitions ultimately reach beyond New York.
“In five years, if we could be in a space where we have built this roadmap in New York and that roadmap can help other states and other regions of this country also elevate their hard cider industries, that would be a huge win for me.”
Whether New York can create that roadmap is a story worth following.
The New York Cider Association effort raises questions other cider organizations may eventually face.
- How much should associations invest in marketing versus long-term audience building?
- How much industry knowledge should they expect from outside partners?
- Which programs actually change consumer behavior?
- How should organizations measure progress when the ultimate goal is not simply selling more cider this year, but creating a cider culture that lasts?
New York has articulated the destination.
Now comes the harder work of figuring out how to get there.
As Ramsey put it:
“This is the long game.”
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