Enrique Torguet is Director of communication, sponsorship and institutional relations at Grupo AGORA, to which brands such as Ambar, Moritz, Lunares, Konga or La Pantera and companies such as La Zaragozana belong.
Torguet participated in #MCDay21 with his presentation ‘How to organize a successful Zaragoza Beer Festival’. We talked about how Ambar has contributed to generate a positive and recognizable image of Aragón outside our borders.
Ambar is almost a brand image of Zaragoza and Aragón. How has the brewery and the beer contributed to promote Aragón outside the community?
Well, in the end, when a brand like ours is 120 years old, it is not a heritage of its own, it is a heritage of all, and therefore that heritage is directly linked to its origin. In this case with the origin of Aragon. When we go abroad, when we do any activity, we think from the origin and that is noticeable, or at least we try to make it noticeable, because that is a sign of identity. Aragon is not lacking in identifiers, perhaps we lack some commercial identifier because either we have done it more timidly or perhaps we are less confident, and this is a mistake that must be corrected. The human capital we have, the talent, the companies established and those entrepreneurs that emerge… I believe that people are increasingly realizing that competing in the global market is not about being from one place or another, which is also true. People do not identify you with something negative and it seems that we are losing that hindrance. Capacity, talent and possibilities, I believe that we have to generalize them every day and Aragon has them.
How have you created Aragon’s own brand?
There is a long-earned trust on the part of the Aragonese people and that gives you a certain guarantee of commitment and, above all, of effort, to guarantee that it can come from here. For us, the beer market where we compete is a very fragmented market, where there are some multinationals or large companies that dominate the market.
But we, being small, are the smallest of the big ones and what we want to do is to grow among giants. We are trying with all our energy and we realize that in this attempt to conquer the national market, which we have been trying to do for some years now, Aragonese people are ambassadors of their own products. When they see the brand, they are the first to defend it and, above all, they are the same ones who ask for it wherever they see it. Maybe we are not so proactive in asking for it when you don’t see it, but when you see it, you are certainly asking for it. And this always gives us a lot of encouragement to continue, to try to do better, because in the end, behind our brand we know that there are emotions and above all the emotions of the Aragonese people.
You have worked on multiple campaigns with emotions.
That is fundamental. I believe that brands grow when you are telling things that are interesting. We have been telling things that have been interesting for a long time, beyond making your brand very competitive and really trying to maintain the differentiation by how you do it and what you offer. Above all, the important thing is to connect. And connecting is when you say things that have interest. Now, for example, we are in a campaign that we could possibly say is very relative in the message: All good things end up in a bar, but it is not so in the context and at the moment in which we are with a hospitality industry that has suffered the pandemic and has been one of the most affected sectors.
And you also work the brand with events, don’t you?
Of course, the event at the end of the day is an orderly contact of the brand. If a third party does it, it is an orderly contact of the brand through an event created by another. Therefore, you have to choose very well where you are and what you want to achieve with it. Events are an important experiential channel for brands and companies to approach and generate impact. An impact that obviously has to become positive. And I believe, and it has been seen in #MCDay21, that there are enough human and material resources in Aragon to make events, whether they are held in Aragon or we do them for people from outside, really successful. I said «success is happiness in the result of a business or an activity». Well, that is what it is: we are looking for things to make us feel happier.
In your presentation at #MCDay21 you said that «where there is music there is beer» and Ambar is present in almost every event where there is music in Aragón.
Where there is music, there is beer. This is clear. And where there is beer, there is also music. In the end, music is vibrations, it is energy and it is life. In the end, it is a way of communicating. And it is creativity and ingenuity. How can Ambar not be with all those who create, with those who excite us, with those things that make us happy when we are part of those moments of happiness? Because in the end, you always accompany with a beer. Beer is a drink between water and soft drink, between soft drink and alcohol because it has all these components. But it is also a drink that has an agrarian root that takes you back to agriculture. In other words, it is a beverage that has a millenary history, it has more than 7,000 years of history and if it has managed to last so long, it will be for a reason. Because it really satisfies many of the needs that people have. At one time it was food and now it is pleasure. Well, in that pleasure, music and beer intercommunicate and are perfect.
What stage of expansion is the company at?
In our expansion, we have spent approximately five intense years investing in the brand, investing in customers… This period of pandemic has made us all stop and obviously the hotel and catering sector has been quite damaged. Between 20 and 30 % of the hotel and catering business has disappeared. We are now seeing how it is recovering. Therefore, all the plans we could have as a company are under review, but we are eager to grow, being the smallest of the big ones, offering very wide ranges of beer, innovating. We were tremendously innovative almost 40 years ago with non-alcoholic beer. But we have been pioneers giving and offering products for those who have gluten intolerance, we are offering 0.0 beers that are really providing very positive nutritional content for people who have diabetes problems, and so on. In other words, we are innovating on the health side. And also on the more experiential side, with a collection of beers that integrate zero kilometer ingredients very well.
How?
With root products. Earlier I mentioned Monte Perdido beer, but we have made Trigal beer with wheat from Monegros or we have made Viña Vieja de Olite beer. Well, a very wide range, with the collection of ambitious beers and all these portfolio beers allows us to face an expansion offering to the market, to the hotel and catering industry and above all to the consumers a singular range of beers with a distinction also in what are the production processes. We understand that we have a niche and that we will continue to grow in the future.