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Campari's latest fight is not just about a successful Italian aperitif. It is about what happens when a brand becomes so culturally dominant that retailers, bars, and rivals start treating its visual codes and serving ritual as category shorthand. Reuters reports that Campari is stepping up efforts to defend Aperol as copycat spritzes and rival aperitifs chase a global spritz market that grew to nearly 4 billion servings in 2024, up from less than 2.5 billion in 2019. At the same time, Aperol is no side business inside Campari - the Aperol franchise represents 26% of group net sales, while the broader House of Aperitifs accounts for 44% of the business.
That concentration explains the urgency. In Campari's 2025 annual report, the group said net sales reached about €3.05 billion, with organic growth of 2.4%, and that advertising and promotions rose to 17.9% of net sales. In other words, management is still spending aggressively to protect and extend its growth engine even as the broader spirits sector faces pressure from softer demand, moderation, and channel volatility. Q1 2026 results reinforced the same point - Campari reported 2.9% organic growth, 18 countries in growth, and continued share gains in sell-out, especially in the on-premise channel.
For brand owners and CMOs, the strategic signal is clear. Once a brand becomes the default mental reference for an occasion, the threat is no longer just direct substitution. The threat is semantic drift - when "an orange spritz" starts feeling close enough to "an Aperol Spritz" for operators, retailers, and some consumers to treat the difference as optional. Campari is reacting as if that drift matters, and financially, it does.
The most important detail in the Reuters reporting is not the supermarket shelf. It is the bar rail. Campari's Andrea Neri said that, since 2023, some bars and restaurants in Italy have been serving orange-coloured drinks - often from tap - that are not made with Aperol, while consumers may believe they are drinking the original. Campari's response has been operational, not just legal: a communication campaign stressing that not every orange drink is a genuine Aperol Spritz, rollout of pre-prepared Aperol Spritz kegs, and a loyalty program certifying the sale of original Aperol Spritz cocktails at 2,000 venues in Italy.
This matters because the fastest-growing threat to iconic serves usually appears at the point of service, where speed, labor costs, and throughput shape brand choice. Campari's own 2026 Q1 materials show that management is leaning into "fewer, bigger bets" and an innovation pipeline built for peak season and operational convenience, including an Aperol RTD, a new Aperol bottle, and Campari Spritz RTS. The same Q1 release said Europe grew 1.9% and that the Aperol franchise, including new formats, was a solid driver of growth across the region.
That is the deeper lesson: authenticity alone is not enough if the authentic serve is slower, less consistent, or harder to execute than a substitute. Campari is effectively saying that premium brands must solve the bartender's workflow before copycats solve it for them. For C-suite alcohol leaders, format architecture is no longer a distribution decision sitting below brand strategy. It is brand defense.
The off-premise threat is different, but just as revealing. Reuters reports that Italian supermarket shelves increasingly feature orange aperitif lookalikes that can sell for 30% to 40% less than Aperol. Live retail listings on Carrefour Italy show how wide that ladder can be in practice: Aperol 70cl at €10.80, alongside lower-priced alternatives such as Torriani Bitter Aperitivo 70cl at €4.49 and Sant'Orsola 25 Aperitivo 70cl at €5.99. Even more established branded alternatives sit close by, such as Select Bitter Aperitivo at €8.90 and Martini Fiero at €10.30.
That shelf set tells brand leaders two things. First, the "copycat" problem is not only about trademark mimicry - it is about the retailer's ability to create a visible price-value spectrum inside the same consumption occasion. Second, once a signature color and serve become legible category cues, lower-priced products do not need to replicate the original perfectly. They only need to feel recognizably adjacent. Reuters notes that Campari views supermarket lookalikes as a longstanding Europe-wide phenomenon, but the continued emphasis on Aperol suggests management is not treating it as harmless background noise.
For marketers, the practical implication is uncomfortable but important. Price gaps this wide can train consumption in two directions at once: downtrading for at-home occasions, and brand substitution when shoppers assemble their own spritzes without a bartender mediating the choice. The answer is not always to narrow the gap. It is to widen the brand meaning gap - through distinct packaging, ritual cues, occasion ownership, and premium signals that make the branded choice feel socially safer and more rewarding. Campari's elevated spend, venue certification, and format expansion all point in that direction.
Campari has reportedly sought to protect Aperol's orange through trademark registrations and, in some cases, legal action against small competitors. That instinct makes sense: the bright orange hue is one of the strongest assets in the entire serve. But color is a difficult fortress to defend on its own. EUIPO states that color can function as a trademark in the EU, yet its case law repeatedly shows how hard it is to secure and enforce exclusive rights over simple colors or color combinations without strong evidence of acquired distinctiveness. The General Court's 2024 Veuve Clicquot ruling on an orange mark is a good reminder that even famous brands face a demanding evidentiary burden when trying to monopolize color in commerce.
That legal backdrop helps explain why Campari's playbook extends beyond IP filings. The loyalty program for authentic venues, the push into kegs and ready-to-serve formats, and the insistence on telling consumers that not all orange drinks are Aperol are all ways of protecting what lawyers would call source identification, but through commercial execution rather than courtroom theory. In practice, the strongest moat may be the complete system: the liquid, the glass, the garnish, the venue signal, the menu language, and the social proof that says "this is the real one."
For alcohol brands with iconic visual assets - a bottle silhouette, a serve color, a garnish, a glass shape - this is the big takeaway. If your most distinctive cue is easy to imitate at a glance, then legal protection should be treated as supporting infrastructure, not the whole strategy. The real work is to make the branded version unmistakable at the moment of choice and easy for trade partners to uphold under pressure.
Campari is defending Aperol, but it is also expanding the spritz battlefield on its own terms. Reuters notes that consumers are moving toward lower-alcohol aperitif drinks and that daytime consumption is rising. IWSR has been tracking the same structural shift, saying spirit aperitifs gained from the broader trend toward lighter drinking and aperitivo-style social occasions, while also warning that future growth will face more competition from wine-based aperitifs, liqueurs, and RTDs.
That competitive pressure is already visible. Bacardi is actively recruiting consumers into the elderflower lane with St-Germain. Its 2026 "100% Chance of Spritz" campaign explicitly leans into lighter, fresher, daytime moments, and a May 2026 Bacardi media release said global search interest for the St-Germain Spritz rose 20% in 2025 while interest in Hugo Spritz rose 58%. Reuters separately reported that Bacardi told it St-Germain had posted double-digit year-on-year sales growth, helped by demand for Hugo Spritz.
Campari's answer is not to rely on one orange flagship alone. Its own materials show a House of Aperitifs that includes Aperol, Campari, Sarti Rosa, Crodino, Mondoro, Cynar and Campari Soda. The fixed-income presentation described Campari as the "creator of the modern spritz," and on the same deck the company highlighted brand innovation across RTD, RTS, tap, and Sarti Rosa expansion. That suggests a deliberate portfolio strategy: defend the hero brand while ensuring the group still wins if consumers drift toward pink spritzes, elderflower profiles, non-alcoholic aperitifs, or more portable formats.
This is where many brand owners can learn from Campari's posture. Category leadership today does not just mean owning the bestselling SKU. It means owning the migration paths around that SKU. If consumers move from classic orange to floral, from evening to daytime, from bar-made to ready-to-serve, or from alcoholic to non-alcoholic, the company wants that migration to happen inside its own portfolio whenever possible.
The first move is to treat signature serves as systems, not recipes. Campari's response shows that a winning serve has to be protected across execution, retail visibility, and operator economics. For any alcohol brand that depends on a named cocktail, that means auditing the full chain: bartender prep time, menu wording, tap and batch formats, glassware cues, garnish compliance, trade incentives, and the availability of official shortcuts that keep the branded version faster than the knockoff.
The second move is to separate "awareness" from "authenticity." Many teams assume that if consumers know the hero brand, the market is safe. Campari's Italian certification program suggests the opposite. When a ritual becomes mainstream, awareness can actually widen the substitution window because the occasion is famous enough for cheap stand-ins to piggyback on it. In that environment, authenticated points of sale, partner education, and overt quality signaling become as important as reach.
The third move is to use data and investment to sharpen, not dilute, the moat. Campari entered 2026 still funding growth, still prioritizing Aperol, and still pushing new formats while reporting broad share gains in sell-out. Europe sell-out in Q1 2026 was ahead of the spirits sector overall, and Campari flagged ongoing outperformance across almost all European markets. That combination - higher spend, strong distribution discipline, and operational innovation - is what premium defense looks like when imitation becomes normalized.
The easiest reading of this story is that Campari is fighting counterfeit vibes around Aperol. The more useful reading for CEOs and CMOs is broader: iconic growth brands eventually stop competing only on taste and start competing on ownership of the occasion itself. Reuters' reporting, Campari's financial disclosures, and IWSR's category work all point to the same conclusion - the spritz is no longer a cocktail trend. It is a scalable, lower-ABV, increasingly daytime consumption platform with expanding format and flavor variants.
In markets like that, the winners are rarely the brands with the best liquid alone. They are the brands that make the branded choice easiest for the trade, clearest for the consumer, and hardest for rivals to imitate at the level of ritual, visibility, and meaning. Campari seems to understand that the defense of Aperol will not be won only in court or only in advertising. It will be won wherever the next spritz is poured, pictured, priced, and remembered.
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