The Zombie Cocktail & DXP, the zombie software category that just wont die
Issue №20 - It may cold where you are, but we are making Tiki drinks, exploring Tiki bar history, and diving into a zombie software category that just wont die.
Put on Surfaris’ classic Wipe Out, put on your swimsuit, get in the sun (or under a sun lamp), and bear with me while we explore the cocktail that arguably launched an entire faux cuisine and milieu to the upper echelons of American culture, a whole new category of drinks. We’ll explore Tiki bar history and focus on a zombie software-behemoth category - DXP! Cheers! And Happy Holidays!
Editor's note: It might seem an odd time of year to feature a tropical drink - since most cocktail oriented sites are focusing on the holidays - but we like to be different at C&C. Plus, this aligns with the C&C Newsletter growth plan. Forty-five percent of our readership resides outside the United States. Of the other geos, the U.K. leads with fifteen percent. We are under-penetrated in the southern hemisphere, with only one percent of readership residing south of the equator, and none in Indonesia. Let’s feature a tropical or summer cocktail to appeal to summertime in December! Plus, at least half of our bougie readership will likely be on a beach sometime over the holidays. I have attached the report for your reference.
Cocktail: The daring, dangerous media sensation! The Zombie Cocktail!
The Zombie is a classic cocktail created by the legendary bartender and restaurateur Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt, aka Donn Beach. It's one of many popular cocktails created and served at his lively Hollywood bar, Don the Beachcomber, which opened in 1933 and was responsible for kicking off a faux-Polynesian cocktail craze that influenced American culinary culture for decades to follow - and a whole new chapter in the cocktail pantheon, the tiki drink.
Tiki and its legacy are complicated. Fake and appropriated, kitschy decor meant to convey an exotic fiction. Drink names meant to convey danger and witchcraft. Cultural assignation and completely made-up shit. For many people, Tiki was and remains no more than a marketing ploy, and any arguments for perpetuating its iconography, milieu and decor are thin.
But despite that, mixology has benefited from all the hard-working bartenders who devoted their careers to the tiki-drink genre and culture. Tiki drinks, with their complexity, legacy, and craft are indisputably among the pillars of American drink-making.
Ernest Gantt - provocateur, impresario, and mixology genius
The son of a New Orleans hotelier and a Texan oilman, Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt was born 1907 and raised in New Orleans - growing up to become a restless world traveler. At age eighteen, Gantt squandered his college fund and took a trip around the world, including to the South Pacific and Caribbean. The trade winds brought him to Los Angeles just as Prohibition was drawing to an end, and in 1934 he rented a tiny twenty-five seat bar just off Hollywood Boulevard on North McCadden Place, and opened Don the Beachcomber - with a South-Seas theme, decorating it originally with flotsam and driftwood he gathered on California’s beaches.
The paintings of Gaugin, the tales from Mellvile and Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Hawaiian music craze of the early twentieth century had already planted visions of the tropics in American’s mind. Nightclubs, like the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles, and countless hurricane-themed bars already dotted America. But despite the pretenses of the tropics, these places served what people expected as they danced and partied - martinis, Tom Collins, and beer. What Gantt opened up was entirely different.
Gantt stocked his tropical-themed ‘rhum shack’ with inexpensive West Indies rums - which were widely available in the U.S. after the repeal of prohibition - and invented an array of faux-tropical drinks, using fruit juices and unfamiliar liqueurs. His philosophy was simple: “If you can’t get to paradise, I’ll bring it to you.” Gantt - who later legally changed his name to Donn Beach - got to mixing and launched the Tiki cocktail trend that has, remarkably, survived nearly a hundred years.
Of all the tiki-style drinks Gantt and other’s created, none quite had the impact that the Zombie did. Even though the recipe was a secret, and the drink was originally only served at Don the Beachcomber, the Zombie became the first famous/infamous of the tiki drinks when it became a media sensation. Radio comedians, newspaper columnists, and editorial cartoonists made the drink the butt of innumerable gags, gossip, and punchlines - raising the drink’s profile in American consciousness as a dangerous and feared concoction.
That was no accident, because Gantt played that up. The Don the Beachcomber bar was the haunt of many a Hollywood celebrity back in the day - and in the booze infused frenzy of Hollywood, Gantt refused to serve more than two Zombies to each customer lest they risk “never being the same”. But it also did not hurt that his “mender of broken dreams” - as he called it - was also an addictively rich, complex, unique, and balanced drink that his patrons loved and raved about.
The origins of The Zombie
While Gantt really had combed the beaches of Polynesia, it was in Jamaica that he found his Tiki drink template - Planter’s Punch. Recipes vary for Planter’s Punch but the core of tiki are all there - lime juice, grenadine, lots of rum, simple syrup, angostura cocktail bitters and mint. Gantt created over thirty complex, layered variations of Planter’s Punch - Navy Grog, Rum Barrel, Pearl Diver, Missionary's Downfall, with the most famous being the Zombie.
An old sing-song Planter’s Punch template calls for “one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak” - with the latter coming from water or ice - and the Zombie follows that template very closely. It is a behemoth of a cocktail that features three different rums - Jamaican, Puerto Rican and 151-proof rum - along with fresh lime juice, falernum, grenadine, a few drops of absinthe and what Gantt called his secret ‘Mix #4’ - a cinnamon-flavored simple syrup mixed with fresh grapefruit juice, he recipe for which was not even discovered until 2005. It's emblematic of the type of cocktails served at Gantt's bar—strong and complex with many ingredients and multiple rums.
Tiki wave, redux
Gantt went to great lengths to protect his recipes - including his original 1934 recipe for the Zombie a closely guarded secret. He even went to the extent of encoding it - with code numbers in the recipe corresponding to numbers he put on pre-batched bottles in his bar. The actual contents of those bottles were even a complete mystery to the employees who mixed drinks in his bar. However, that did not stop rival Tiki bars - including Trader Vic’s - from trying to improvise their own versions of The Zombie. Soon, these inferior Zombie knock-offs became the norm across hundreds of copycat bars and restaurants across America from the late 1930’s and well into the 1970’s -many lacking anything close to the well-balanced, rich drinks that Gantt created.
While tiki arguably peaked in the 1960’s, by 1980 a chain of Don the Beachcomber bars stretched from Chicago to Waikiki and ‘tiki’ was becoming passé in American culture and cuisine. By that time Gantt’s Beachcombers were also eclipsed by his most famous imitator - Trader Vic’s - who’s Mai Tai would eventually replace the Zombie as the most iconic tiki-style drink in the pantheon of cocktails.
Tiki, now in its third wave, is having a bit of a renaissance. Bar owners, bartenders, and mixologists are reclaiming tiki and modernizing it - calling their drinks ‘tropical’ instead of ‘tiki’, dropping the use of indigenous words and names, dropping the cultural appropriation of tiki-mugs and glasses, using it as an opportunity to highlight Polynesian history and culture, and exploring and updating this genre to our taste buds’ tropical delight - when done right.
So if you happen to be at a decent bar on a beach somewhere, tempt fate and order a Zombie - or make one!
Cheers!
I would like to acknowledge the sources used in research for this article:
“Smugglers Cove - Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and The Cult of Tiki” by Martin Cate. Ten Speed Press, 2016
“Get to Know Donn Beach of Don the Beachcomber Fame”, Liquor.com
Zombie Cocktail Spec, serves one:
But this is blender cocktail, scale it up and make a batch!
1 ½ oz (~45 ml) - Gold rum (Bacardi Gold Puerto Rican rum recommended)
1 ½ oz (~45 ml) - Gold or dark Jamaican rum (Smith & Cross Jamaican Rum recommended)
1 oz (~ 30 ml) - Overproof demerara rum (Lemon Hart 151 recommended)
¾ oz (~22 ml) - Fresh lime juice
½ oz (~15 ml) - Falernum (John D. Taylor’s Velvet Felernum recommended)
½ oz (~15 ml) - Don’s Mix #4 (See recipe below.)
1 teaspoon (~5 ml) - grenadine
4 dashes - Absinthe
1 dash - Angostura or ‘house’ cocktail bitters
Garnish - whatever makes you feel tropical and happy (Umbrellas! Flowers! Icons!)
The process:
Combine all ingredients in an electric blender with 6 ounces (3/4 cup) pebble or crushed ice, then blend at high speed for no more than 5 seconds. Pour into a Zombie Glass or tall Collins or highball glass. Add crushed ice to fill. Garnish with a mint sprig. (Preparation time: 10 minutes)
*Don’s Mix #4
1 part - cinnamon simple syrup (see note below)
2 parts - fresh grapefruit juice
Notes:
Crushed Ice - having crushed ice at home may be challenging for some. An easy hack, a clean cloth bag and a mallet. If you don’t have a clean cloth bag, wrap the ice in a towel and get some aggression out!
Cinnamon simple syrup (and really, any simple syrup) - To make simple syrup, simply add one part sugar to one part water and dissolve the sugar. A classic at home spec will be 1 cup (~2.36 dl) water to 1 cup (~2.36 dl) sugar, which yields an appropriate amount for the home bar. To make an infused syrup, like this Cinnamon Simple (sounds like a great band name to me!), add what you are infusing - along with the sugar and water - to a saucepan and bring it to a simmer. Allow to cool to room temperature and let sit overnight with what you are infusing the syrup with (or not, depending) - in this case cinnamon sticks - cover and refrigerate.
Preserving simple syrups, cordials and shrubs - A simple syrup will last a week - or two or three (ok, I may have stretched this in the past) - in the refrigerator. To preserve simple syrups - or their close cousins cordials and shrubs - a bit longer, add a splash of high proof clear alcohol, such as vodka or moonshine, to the container or bottle. You will probably get a month - or two or three (listen, I am not a food scientist) - if refrigerated.
Cocktails & Commerce Launch Party! NYC! NRF!
Join Bill & Brian at one of our favorite cocktail bars to help celebrate what we are building with Cocktails & Commerce!
We will be gathering in NYC the Sunday evening before everyone’s favorite conference of the year, NRF (ha!), really gets rolling - so come into town early and let us buy you a drink or two as you mingle with others in the C&C and commerce tech & services community. It is early enough for you to grab dinner with clients after, or bring them along!
East Village, New York City
Sunday, January 14th, 2024
5-7pm ET
Limited space available. To register send an email to: events@strategyem.com and we will get you on the list and get you the details.
Analysis: From zombie drinks to a zombie software category - it is time to kill ‘Digital Experience Platforms’
The Digital Experience Platform market is one that is all at once very large, strategic and a complete fiction. The DXP category is a zombie software category.
Invented by analysts, amplified by marketers, and embraced by software vendors large and small, DXP is a software category that no one actually buys, and that no one has really effectively delivered or been implemented. It is time to kill the zombie.
Why focus on this now?
I got a message from an industry friend the other day - one with whom I had talked about DXP years ago. He shared with me a link to a LinkedIn post by a prominent industry CEO celebrating Forrester putting his company in effectively the number two spot in the most recent DXP Wave. My friend’s only comment in his text was, “???”, but it got me thinking again about why we are still talking about this zombie category. (My intention is not to relitigate the utility and purpose of these reports - if you are curious about that or want to revisit it, find that analysis here - paired with the delicious Hanky Panky cocktail.)
It struck me as funny that a CEO was declaring victory in a long held quest to conquer a software category that in fact never had any real usefulness or utility in the actual software marketplace. Not when it was created, and not now. This is a strategic software category that no one actually buys.
Why it matters - the investor thesis
Market sizing research is overall pretty hard to find, and often questionable. If you ask me, there is strong evidence that early examples of Generative-AI are to be most easily found on the long-tail of industry research sites - such as Grand View Research - so I suggest you take the following with a very large grain of salt.
Surveying the available market research, the global DXP market is around $12-13 billion USD, with compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) projections ranging from eleven to thirteen percent from 2023 to 2030. Many would rightfully argue that ‘digital transformation’ remains a critical macro-objective for most organizations, and COVID-19 pandemic certainly gave a big gulp of 5-hour Energy to the trend, but when no one buys a category, how does that work?
The concept of the DXP is now over a decade old. In fact, I wrote one of the first pieces on this when I was still at Forrester way back in 2011, opening the piece with this being, “new type of solution is emerging on the commerce technology landscape that promises to help eBusiness leaders drive customer targeting, content relevancy, and personalization on their sites and across digitally enabled consumer touch-points.”
Others may define it slightly differently, but most typically a DXP will include (stay with me here): Content Management; Personalization; Multi-Channel capability - including web, mobile, apps, social media, and IoT; Customer Data Management; E-commerce Capabilities; Analytics and Optimization; Integration and API Management - including connections to CRM, ERP, Customer Service, marketing automation, and a multitude to ecosystem solutions; Search and Navigation; Security and Compliance; AI and Machine Learning, such as predictive analytics, automated content tagging, and chatbots/conversational experiences; and finally Collaboration and Workflow Management.
When it was introduced, DXP resonated so much with the content management, commerce, and personalization markets that it defined not only these companies positioning, but even more importantly corporate development strategies and investment theses. Businesses that wanted to be bought, positioned in the DXP market - just as CEOs, boards, private equity firms, VCs, investment bankers, business owners, and marketers working in and around the large enterprise software market were bitten by the bug. DXP quickly became a M&A and investor thesis - a shopping list.
Adobe, Acquia, IBM, OpenText, Oracle, Liferay, Salesforce, Sitecore, SAP, Bloomreach, and later Episerver (now Optimizely), Crownpeak, and yet others, all pursued and executed a DXP strategy through acquisition. In each case, money was put on the line to chase a business case and a thesis that these large “DXP Suites” wanted to chase. A vision for a large customer footprint, massive licensing and services contracts, and an install base who has given blood, sweat and tears to implement the solution and would never leave.
The realities belay the vision
Every one of these players bought market share, did not do the hard work of integration (which is indeed very hard), and either did not invest in these products after acquisition or certainly have not been able to make much progress. What they got, and then turned around and sold, was some really sexy powerpoint and a narrative to wrap around it.
But the funny thing is that very, very few deals for a “DXP” have ever actually been done, let alone implemented. This was an assemblage of products that in many cases did not work well together and required costly integration and work-arounds that clients paid systems integrators through the nose to attempt to realize the vision that was painted. This led the DXP hype cycle into the depths of despair, from which it never recovered - and is now fueling the ‘composability’ trend.
And a bonus irony, talking to salespeople and marketers about this for years now - very little pipeline has ever been created for DXP. For all the energy and attention spent - the marketing efforts, the channel investment, the sales enablement - a fraction of these companies' pipelines was ever represented by DXP opportunities. Rather, opportunities would start in CMS, start in personalization, start in search, start in commerce, etc.. DXP was a narrative and a sales motion to attempt to make the whole seem important - to cross-sell and up-sell into the other solutions, though again with modest real results.
Some customers would back into DXP, but essentially none went to market to buy a DXP - they went to market to solve a more specific and concise solution, and that is more true today than ever. DXP is just to big, too expensive to license and implement, too risky as the scope of implementation touches too many business processes, too many aspects of the customer experience, and crosses too many parts of the prospects organizations - let alone the paradigm shift to API-first, cloud-native SaaS solutions that come in and solve clear and much more concise problems for the business. It is ironic to see the handful of companies bringing up the rear on the recent DXP Wave that are actually growing - in contrast to the big DXP players - such as Contentful, Contentstack, ArcXP, and why don’t we include Amplience while we are at it.
Again, this is a strategic software category that no one actually buys. It is fiction. It is a zombie.
Zombies 101
I am not a horror-flick fan, and I do not read horror fiction. I am not a fan of the Walking Dead. Maybe because of my rather squeamish nature - prone to vasovagal syncope reactions to blood and gore - and thus, zombies are not really my thing.
But if I am going to use an analogy, I would rather not be lazy. Where did the concept of zombies come from, and perhaps more importantly, how do you kill a zombie?
The concept of a Zombie first emerged in Haiti during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Hundreds and thousands of slaves were taken from Africa and transported to Saint-Dominque (present-day Haiti), which was ruled at the time by the French. Deaths among the slaves were extremely high, with poor living conditions, brutal labor practices, malnourishment, and disease taking a massive toll. Initially it was believed that once slaves died, they would be freed from slavery and return back to Africa as spirits, but overtime these legends were incorporated into Haitian Vodou - a blending of the traditional religions of enslaved West and Central Africans, and the culture of the French colonialists who controlled the colony - most notably Roman Catholicism but also Freemasonry.
As Haitian Vodou developed, they came to believe that the undead were bewitched to perform evil tasks. In fact, the word zombie is thought to derive from the Kongo word nzambi, meaning “spirit of a dead person.”
But of course, it was films like 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, and Dawn of the Dead ten years later, that launched the concept of the zombie in the Western cultural zeitgeist - often with the trope that someone can turn into a zombie through exposure to a virus or radiation. And it is also from popular culture that we learn how to kill a zombie.
The short answer of how to kill a zombie - according to the interwebs - is to destroy the zombie’s brain. Whether it's a living zombie or a “modern zombie” (whatever that is), whether it's undead or came back from the grave - however it's functioning, “we know almost for certain if you destroy the brain you kill the zombie”. (Given the lack of sample size on the killing of actual zombies, I feel conclusive medical and scientific evidence may still be out on this one.)
So DXP is a zombie, so I guess we need to destroy its brain to kill it. But since we like to avoid overly violent analogies here at C&C, let's call for curing it instead.
Curing the DXP-Zombie brain
The central thesis of what led to DXP zombie-brain was - and in some ways still is - plausible. But of course, just because something is plausible does not make it correct.
We need to realize that DXP is just too big. DXPs cost too much to implement, cost too much to license, and present too much risk to adopt. Today’s businesses need far more agility, flexibility, and openness than these integrated suites can provide. DXPs as they exist today are simply too big, too slow to evolve, and too complicated to implement and use to be effective. Many DXPs are in fact a mash-up of large legacy single-tenant solutions together with a set of SaaS services - some of which are delivered as services. Planning, architecting, implementing, integrating, scaling, maintaining, and testing these types of solutions fell out of vogue years ago. Large programs like these - with bold visions that take a year or two to implement - are now show-stoppers inside most organizations today. Instead they are craving services that deliver clear, short-term value and integrate as services into their hodge-podge of packaged and bespoke technology. It begs the question, how can selling a “platform play” like this possibly work in this day and age? The answer of course is that it can’t.
The ROI is just too hard to quantify and buy off on. In 2019’s Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms” you can find this little nugget, “Through 2021, 85% of effort and cost in a DXP program will be spent on integrations with internal and external systems, including the DXP’s own, built-in capabilities.” Many buyers of these solutions will naturally turn to a systems integrator for help to implement - and once they see the scope of the proposal are going to ask themselves, “Wait, wasn’t I buying an integrated suite? Why am I spending so much to integrate this?” Meanwhile, the business benefit is just so damn squishy - it’s scoped too wide to hold together. If you added up all the benefits of every part of the solution set separately it would likely be simply unbelievable, and no one with any experience is going to try to sell that internally - it is just not credible to try to justify a DXP implementation in the tens of millions of dollars and multiple years to license and implement and get value from these suites. It does not pencil out.
The latest generation of AI and technology is disrupting and eroding the core of the DXP value proposition rapidly. Access to digital data, use of analytics, and the advent of SaaS and cloud drove the first wave of pragmatic AI applications to drive testing, optimization, and personalization - what content to serve, product to offer, search result to deliver. But you don't need me to tell you that we are in the midst of a next wave of AI, leveraging transformers, vector search, and vastly more data to drive yet another wave of personalization and optimization capability. While most of the major DXP players are looking to invest, most of the work that has been done really just better integrates the data flows between their products - and is focused on their install base. The real solution here to improve these businesses’ ability to deliver integrated experiences will come from orchestration and process engines that sit between and amongst a wide variety of legacy and new capability - some bespoke, built by the client. Though early in many ways, these solutions aim to tie data and processes together across the clients enterprise landscape - back-end and front-end - with the ability to integrate LLMs and the next generation of AI to not only drive better automation, attribution and rich metadata creation across the four principal domains of commerce - customers, content, and product, and process. All in service of driving the best customer experience and increased operational effectiveness.
So in other words, point solutions with contemporary event based architectures may be best poised to solve these challenges - not large suites. While legacy solutions within the DXP landscape have invested in trying to open up their solutions with improved integration hubs, and even some limited orchestration capability - and of course, the ability to run ‘headless’ - that is a far cry from the composable nature of today’s commerce, digital experience, and marketing technology landscape. In today’s market, all the real momentum is behind composable, capability-specific, APIs that are combined to complete ‘the stack’ and in a sense wholly replace both legacy apps and these composable capabilities increasingly within them. (for more on this, see Issue No.17)
Where do we go from here?
It is time to stop thinking about DXP as a product category, and more a domain space - the digital experience ecosystem. It is time for industry analysts to stop writing Waves and MQ’s, and instead focus on a new emerging category of integration, orchestration and process solutions that are emerging to solve these challenges - not that we need yet another hype cycle, but attention should be brought to these emerging solutions.
And for financial analysts, PE firms, and VC’s - time to realize that they have only been creating zombies, detached from the realities of the market.
So, in a nutshell, we can drop the “P” in DXP, because it is clear we are not going to get there with a single platform or even integrated suite, but rather, it will take an ecosystem.
DXe anyone?
If you are looking for Brian online, you can find him here, here, and here. And find Bill here and here.
Be well, be safe, and here is to good business! Cheers! - Brian & Bill, the C&C guys
Cocktails & Commerce™ is a wholly owned subsidiary of StrategyēM, LLC.
Great points throughout, and spot on with the shift towards composable as a clear signal. "The Walking Dead" is apropos, but methinks "The Last of Us" might be a suitable reference in a follow-up.
Sadly, no Tiki bar in close proximity, but I've dialed up some Zombies on Spotify. Happy holidays.