How Fortune Brands got ahead of bad news

(Credit: Fortune Brands)

We've blogged before about the value of getting ahead of bad news in order to put your company in a position of relative strength.

Fortune Brands, the producers of Knob Creek bourbon whiskey, has done just that. Fortune launched an aggressive ad campaign this week announcing that - believe it or not - they've run out of bourbon.

You may be wondering how that's good news, when their inaccurate forecasting could pinch wholesalers, retailers, and customers in a tough economy. Yet Fortune turned a potential mea culpa into an opportunity. Fortune ran ads in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere announcing double digit growth in demand for Knob Creek, thanked customers for the explosion in popularity, and promised that the next batch would be on shelves in November. The bourbon maker even mailed "Drought of 2009" tee shirts and empty bottles to loyal fans.

Fortune took what some would consider an embarrassment and positioned it as a milestone achievement. The strategy is not without risk, and I wouldn't advise every industry to execute the same way (memo to power companies: don't celebrate power outages), but it should remind us that opportunities sometimes await those who get ahead of bad news.