A History of Marketing / Episode 38
“Why should all alcoholic drinks taste punishing and challenging? Why shouldn’t they taste pleasant?”
My guest, David Gluckman, asked himself this question in 1973. It led him to develop what became Baileys Irish Cream, a liqueur that’s now sold ~2.5 billion bottles globally.
In our conversation, David shares the remarkably haphazard origin story of Baileys along with the contrarian lessons from his career creating alcoholic drink brands like Tanqueray No. Ten, Cîroc, and Smirnoff Black.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
We dive into the stories and insights from David’s book, “That sh*t will never sell!” David’s candid about his disdain for modern marketing practices, his frustration with Baileys’ brand extensions, and why he believes great ideas never come from middle management.
I also ask David about how brands interact with unexpected internet memes, the ethics of marketing alcohol, and if cavalier marketers like him can succeed in an era when brands have become bureaucratized.
Here is my spirited conversation with David Gluckman.
Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.
How a Tax Break Inspired Baileys Irish Cream
Andrew Mitrak: David Gluckman, welcome to A History of Marketing.
David Gluckman: Thank you very much. Nice to be a part of it.
Andrew Mitrak: I loved reading your book, That Sh*t Will Never Sell, which is a really fun read. I’m excited to speak about your full career and all of the amazing products and beverages you’ve had a chance to work with. But I thought I’d start off with one of your most famous stories and case studies, and that’s all about Baileys. Could you share the story of developing Baileys?
David Gluckman: It all happened very quickly and it happened pretty well seamlessly, as well. We got a brief on a Friday afternoon which said that the Irish government were looking for brands for export, and if they were successful, they’d get a 10-year tax holiday, which is quite significant. But it was just a telephone conversation late on a Friday afternoon.
And the following Monday—we had just been in business on our own—my partner came in and I said, “What are we going to do about this Irish brief?” We discussed it and I said, going back to my previous career 10 years earlier, “Is there anything in my experience in the development of Kerrygold butter—branded Irish butter—which we could bring to bear on this?”
My partner said, “Well, what happens if we mix cream and Irish whiskey?”
So, being an action man, I said, “Let’s go down to the local supermarket, buy some cream, buy some whiskey, mix it together, and see what it tastes like.” There was no intellectualization, there was no identification of a target group or anything like that. We simply—the brief was hot off the presses, so we just started thinking.
The mixture of Irish whiskey and cream was pretty disgusting. But I just figured there was something there. So we went back to the supermarket, looked around, and we bought some powdered drinking chocolate. Added it, added some sugar, and I think the realization dawned: Why should all alcoholic drinks taste punishing and challenging? Why shouldn’t they taste pleasant? And what we had with this mixture was a very pleasing, chocolate-flavored drink.
I got quite excited by this because there’d never been anything quite like it that I’d come across. So I called up my client and said, “We have an idea in solution to Friday’s brief. Can we talk?”
And that’s how it started, really. It was my experience on Kerrygold that was the trigger, if you like, that led to the first part of the solution, which was the product, the liquid.
The Benefit of Ignorance: Developing a Drink with No Training
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that’s right. It seems like such a jump. So this, to place this in time, this was the early 1970s.
David Gluckman: It’s 1973. That’s right.
Andrew Mitrak: 1973 that you’re developing Baileys. And you had worked previously with Kerrygold and on Procter & Gamble products. But it seems like jumping into you mixing the drinks themselves and coming up with a concoction, it seems like a jump. And you were also involved in the branding elements as well. So this is an example of the product being developed with the same people behind some of the branding of the product. I guess, could you speak to that experience of just developing a drink and developing a beverage itself? Did you feel like you had any training or authority to do that? Or what prompted you to actually develop the drink?
David Gluckman: I think that not having any training and being fairly ignorant was probably a benefit. Because had we had some scientific knowledge, we would have been deterred by the thought that something that contained cream could survive in temperatures of 40 degrees above zero or 40 degrees below. If you have a certain element of ignorance, you can do anything. If you don’t know what you can’t do, you can do anything.
And I think ideas start in different ways, and that’s how this one started. I can’t explain why. We didn’t start like this every time, but I wasn’t averse to mixing products up and changing things around.
Andrew Mitrak: There must be so many lessons in this because it all starts with a tax incentive, which is—I wouldn’t imagine, it doesn’t seem like the best reason to start a beverage is because of for tax reasons, but why not? You do that. You mix it yourself with ingredients from the grocery store and it’s, I don’t mean this in an insulting way, kind of dumb. It’s just like, “Oh, that’s Irish cream, Irish whiskey, why not?” It’s not really over-intellectualizing it.
And then you go on to develop the name and the brand and the bottle. Can you speak to the next steps of building everything that surrounds the liquid itself? What did that look like?
From a Bottle in a Cab to the ‘Baileys’ Bistro Sign
David Gluckman: I was excited, so I jumped in a cab and took it over to my client. And he was just intrigued by what I had in a bottle in my hands. So, not allowing any foreplay, he grabbed it and tasted it and said, “Hey, this tastes really good. Maybe we should do it.”
And that was the most important part of the whole procedure because had he turned to me and said, “Look, this is not our thing,” that would have been the end of the brand and the end of the story. But he bought the idea immediately. He just thought it was worth taking to his technical people to see whether they could make it happen.
But then he said to me, because he was a man of some impatience, “We must now think about branding.”
And I remembered... the best way to start branding is to start with a name, a brand name, because you can’t design a package without a brand name. And I remember talking to a gentleman, the late Tony O’Reilly—very famous businessman, he was for a while president of Heinz in America, worldwide, and also one of the most famous men in Ireland. He said to me over a drink, “If you ever develop a brand that requires an Irish surname, don’t use one like his.”
So I said, “Well, why ever not?” I mean, O’Reilly’s, whatever it was, sounded perfectly normal to me. He said, “No, Irish family names have a tendency to sound whimsical.”
So that lodged in my cortex somewhere. And I remembered that. Anyway, we were moving office, and as we arrived at our office, there was a restaurant below it called Baileys Bistro. And I think when you’re developing brands, you think about every aspect of the brand almost 24/7. It becomes a kind of an obsession. It’s always not too far from the front of your mind. And when I saw the name Baileys, I thought it was perfect.
Baileys Irish Cream. It just seemed to fit. And so I called up my client and said, “Why don’t we call it Baileys?” And he said, “That sounds terrific. Let’s do that.” It’s an Anglo-Irish name. And that’s how the name began.
Crafting an Instant Classic: The Design and Branding of Baileys
David Gluckman: And from there we developed packaging. And I think that in the brief for the packaging, there were echoes of Kerrygold. I said to the designer, “Imagine Kerrygold with all that wonderful bucolic greenness that is Ireland, and build that in. But remember that it’s an alcoholic drink and people will pay a premium price for it. So it doesn’t belong in the chiller cabinet, but on the liquor shelf. So give it some status and some quality.”
And he got it almost in one. But in effect, that was the Baileys story. There are one or two bits and pieces, but effectively that was it.
Andrew Mitrak: The thing that surprised me is just the time in which this happened. 1973... I was born in 1990 and that, and so Baileys was around before I was born and certainly had been around by the time I became of drinking age. And it just seemed like one of the products that’s been around forever, right? That so many spirits and liqueurs feel like pretty old brands. And Baileys, for me, just seemed—I would have assumed that it was a hundred years old or more, not just invented today, like 50 years ago or so.
Did you think about creating a history for Baileys or having it appear to be older than it really was and have some traditions to it? Or did you want it to be perceived as, “This is a new product, this is a new option for you, this is a new alcohol you can consume?”
David Gluckman: I think we were governed by the kind of style that attached to alcoholic drinks at that time. You know, there was a lot of heritage, dates going back to the 19th and 18th century. There were idiosyncratic devices, like the bat on the Bacardi bottle. I think the convention was antique and conservative. Although there were brands that were emerging at that time that were much more modern, like Malibu, for example, which didn’t follow those rules.
But no, I don’t think so. I think we just had a vision in our mind of what the label and the packaging had to say. And it was all about a celebration of Ireland’s green and pleasant land. And I was imbued with a certain passion for the country through working with O’Reilly and on Kerrygold, and that always stuck with me.
‘Benefit Out’: Why Baileys Wasn’t Built for a Target Audience
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned that there wasn’t a lot of, you know, target audience and persona building and things like that that went into it. Did that come down later, after you had invented it and passed it off? Did the targeting and demographics and how to go to market and where to target first—did that come later after you had handed off the product, or was it never part of it? Was it just a beverage for everybody to begin with?
David Gluckman: Well, my belief, I think, is what I call “benefit out.” In other words, I think if you have a product that has something to offer, communicate that to people and it’ll find its own level. So I didn’t have any particular target archetype in mind. People were doing that kind of thing back then, but having been in this particular field for 50 years, I think most of that is bullsh*t.
You design a product, make it available. The advertising and marketing people will fine-tune it if you like, but we handed it over the product as it was and left it to the companies. I think it’s one of the saddest things about my job is you develop a brand for which you have a passionate feeling, and then it disappears and perhaps isn’t developed along the lines you would like. But that’s life.
The Creator’s Dilemma: Letting Go of a Brand You Built
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. So this is something I wanted to follow up with you about because you were a consultant, and you obviously had a massive part in Baileys, from the conception, the ingredients, the name, the bottle, so much of it. It’s you bringing this to life. And then you don’t own it at the end of the day. You hand it off. And you write, “I can remember being introduced as someone who, quote, ‘a man who helped out with the label design.’” And that rankled you a bit, but you let it go. And is it hard to let go of a product that you helped create?
David Gluckman: Not really. I mean, I think that the remark to which you refer was made at the launch party in Dublin in 1974. And somebody... I think the Irish are very protective of brands that go out under their name, as they should be. And somebody introduced me not as one of the people who created the brand, but someone who helped with the pack design. Since I have absolutely no graphic skills whatsoever, that rankled a little.
And then I think if you look back on things, you realize that for ideas to succeed, other people need to own them. In other words, what this guy was saying is, “This is my brand, not his,” and “I own it.” And I think that’s important. It’s a grown-up way of accepting the situation with brands. But if people start buying into it and feel ownership, then it’s very important.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s an important lesson and something I think every marketer and brand person could keep in mind.
What Explains Baileys’ 50 Years of Staying Power?
Andrew Mitrak: So reflecting on Baileys, it seems like there are just so many spirits that have been introduced and come and gone and had various levels of success over the last 50 years. And why do you think Baileys has had the staying power that it’s had?
David Gluckman: Well, I think what amazes me about Baileys is how it hasn’t been superseded by competitors. In other words, it’s sort of kept its position. And I think that’s largely through manipulation of price because Baileys, I think, sells for far less than it ought to. But I think that in that way, Diageo, because of the economies of scale, et cetera, are probably able to prevent any other operator from really damaging it. I don’t think that’s forever. I think that will happen.
I hate Baileys’ advertising and I loathe Baileys’ brand extensions because I think they’re cheap and nasty and trivial. And I’ve been quite vocal in my comments along those lines. But that’s... it’s been a long, long dead for me as a brand.
Andrew Mitrak: You’ve watched it from the sidelines over the last five decades or so since you handed it off. And they have, you know, Baileys candies and peppermint Baileys and all these new flavors of Baileys. And it’s just like, “Okay, that seems a little...” Parts of it seem a little gross, but it also seems to cheapen the brand and some of the core ideas that you helped develop there.
When a Meme Takes Over: Baileys and the ‘Old Gregg’ Phenomenon
Andrew Mitrak: The first time I ever came across the brand Baileys was in this viral video that was an early meme called “Old Gregg.”
Andrew Mitrak: And I was a teenage boy, like probably 15 years old when this came out. And there’s this absurd sketch that has a line from this character named Old Gregg. And the character asks:
“Have you ever drunk Baileys from a shoe?”
And this was my first time, I’m like, “What is Baileys?” And still today, within a very small group of people who are give or take five years from me, if I’m at a holiday party or some gathering and there’s Baileys, someone might say, “Have you ever drunk Baileys from a shoe?” And it’s just a silly thing. And I’m wondering, did you ever come across this sketch at all? And do you know if anybody at Baileys had a reaction to this Old Gregg comedy bit?
David Gluckman: I don’t. In fact, the first time I saw it was the link you sent me yesterday. Yeah. And I’d not heard of it before. And bear in mind, I went to the Baileys 50th-anniversary lunch recently, but that’s the only connection I’ve had with the brand since the 1970s.
Andrew Mitrak: There’s an interesting thing where there’s meme culture of the internet. There are these people who like share things, and brands don’t always have control over that. That the internet—you bring a thing to life, and then some comedy sketch makes a silly joke and has your product being drunk out of a shoe. And no control over your product whatsoever, but sometimes the internet just will run with a thing. It just seems like an interesting little case study of what a lot of brands deal with, where there’s some meme that now comes across on the internet that a brand has to somehow choose to embrace, choose to ignore, or just choose to live with for a bit. And it just seems like an interesting element of today’s media culture of how a brand might have to interact with the online universe.
David Gluckman: Well, again, that’s beyond my pay grade. You know, the brand has been handed over, and I either jump up in the air with delight or cringe when I see the way it progresses. But you know, that’s life.
Why Great Ideas Start at the Top, Not in the Middle
Andrew Mitrak: You go on through your career and it turns out okay. You work on a number of great brands: Tanqueray No. Ten, Smirnoff Black...
David Gluckman: Cîroc.
Andrew Mitrak: Cîroc, yeah. And more, the list goes on. And rather than tell the story of each of those, I’d also, in your book, you also talk—there are these themes that come through your work as well and lessons that you’ve learned from all of them. And I thought we could talk about those lessons, and maybe some of your stories of those other brands you worked on could come through that.
And one of the lessons that I totally identified with is that successful ideas don’t start in the middle of the organization. They start at the top. And that you need corporate cojones, you need leaders—usually the president or CEO or founder—to have conviction and make bold bets for a product to succeed, for a brand to succeed. Can you expand on this idea?
David Gluckman: Yes. What happened was that roundabout the time... I think I started in brand development in ‘69. Around ‘72, I think, an American called Tom Peters and a colleague called Robert Waterman wrote a book called In Search of Excellence, which we read. And we got very excited by this book because it talked about how companies worked, how big—and these guys were McKinsey consultants, I think—and they were talking about what it was like being inside big companies. And we came to various conclusions. It took a long time for these conclusions to bed down, but I think they’re very appropriate now.
One, that you could never develop a successful new brand if your path to development was through middle management because middle managers didn’t have the power to make things happen. So what IDV did, which was before it became Diageo, was instituted a thing called the “champion system,” which we got from Tom Peters, which said that anybody could commission a new brand provided he or she had the power to make it happen.
So we were getting top members—we had the finance director come in with a brief—mainly top-level management because, A, top-level management weren’t interested in the mechanics of doing something. A middle manager has to go and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars researching an idea to prove to his people above that it’s going to work. We didn’t have that problem. You would simply be asked by your client, “Will this work?” to which the answer was, “Yes, I think so, but I’m not sure.” And you can never be sure whether something would work.
So we had this top-down approach. The other thing is we didn’t engage marketing people. None of the brands we developed went down the marketing route or were developed through the marketing route. Marketing was very successful in making the brands work, but we didn’t use marketing. We didn’t use that constant desire to prove everything. If you look at Baileys and deconstructed it, nothing would have been as it was if we’d gone through the marketing route. Everything would have been questioned and debated and alternative before it happened, and might not have been quite such a successful brand. So we had a different way of working.
“Don’t Go Through the Marketing Route”
Andrew Mitrak: I want to follow up on this idea that you don’t go through the marketing route because something that I’ve thought a lot about on this podcast series is I want to cover the stories of a lot of the greatest marketers of all time. And within business, the greatest marketers of all time within companies, very rarely would you think that it’s the CMO, actually. If you look at a list, you’ll see it’s often founders or CEOs that have very strong marketing instincts. Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Oprah Winfrey, Lee Iacocca.
David Gluckman: A lot of people in the drinks business: Sidney Frank.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. And it strikes me that a lot of the best... if you ask somebody, “Who is one of the best marketers in the world?” they usually won’t name somebody with “marketing” in their title. They’ll think of a CEO or founder who has really strong instincts. Do you have a reaction to this?
David Gluckman: I think that’s true, and that’s certainly been my experience. The best people I worked with were board directors. O’Reilly was a fantastic guy to work with because he could take a decision. And he’d take a decision—I was a junior executive, aged 24—and if I came up with something that he thought was interesting, we’d do it.
Whereas with marketing, you go through strategic analysis and you look at target audiences and you spend buckets of money doing market research. I remember I did a pitch to Unilever 30 years ago, and I said, “If I ran your business, I would cut your research budget, your market research budget, in half, and then I’d halve it again. And get people, A, to use their brains more, and B, to look at the data you already have.” I didn’t get the business, but that wasn’t a surprise.
Andrew Mitrak: That is funny. It is interesting how often a company will always want to commission new research, even if the company’s been around for a very long time and probably has decades of existing research you could draw from and draw conclusions from faster and more cheaply.
Why Buying an Idea is as Important as Creating One
Andrew Mitrak: Another idea of yours is that the person who purchases the decision deserves as much, if not more, credit than the person who comes up with the idea. Can you speak to that or can you articulate what this idea is?
David Gluckman: This is something you learn over time. Ego plays such a big part in this whole business in which we work. But when you come to think of it, if somebody had said, “Look, I don’t think this chocolate milk stuff is our kind of thing,” that’s the end of the story. I think the people who buy ideas are not given nearly enough credit for that. I would say that every single idea of mine that got out of my office and into somebody else’s and worked was down to the person having the ability to buy the idea on an argument, because we never spent any money on research. We figured it was a complete waste of time.
Because if you get nine out of 10 consumers thinking an idea is good, the chances are it’s mediocre because you’ve just reinvented your competition. Good ideas will get two passionate people out of 10 loving it and the other eight hating it, and you build from there. But you can’t use that as a tool to sell it to your marketing guy. Two out of 10 people think it’s a brilliant idea, you ought to go with it? No chance.
Andrew Mitrak: So how does this change your behavior over time, knowing that you’re really dependent on the person buying the idea? For me, for instance, this totally resonated with me. And I know that I almost treat my ideas a little more cheaply in a way where there was a time, especially early in my career, when I feel like I had a good idea, I’m like, “Oh, this is so precious. I shouldn’t share it with anybody. I should really develop it for a long time.” And now I’m like, whenever I have an idea, I just share it. I try to get it out there. And I know whether it gets adopted or not, I’m not going to feel too bad over it. Of course, I’d like things to succeed and be adopted, but just get it out, share the ideas, be confident you’ll come up with more ideas. And if somebody buys it, great. And of course, do your best job to try to sell it, but if you don’t, try to not let it be out of your control. Is that your thinking about it, or are there other ways we should treat our ideas differently, knowing that really their success depends on somebody buying the idea?
“There’s No Plan B”: Why it’s best to pitch only one idea
David Gluckman: When I worked in advertising in London in the ‘60s, there was one agency called Collett Dickenson Pearce, which I think was one of the best agencies in the world in its time. But they only ever produced one idea in response to a brief. When they went to a client, they said, “This is what we think you should do.” And there were two ways out of this: the client would give them good reason not to do it, in which case they’d do another one, or they’d fire the client and look for somebody else.
And at the time, we were just amazed—working in more conservative agencies—how could they do that? How could they just go with one idea? But I think when you engage with the business of creativity and the business of solving problems, you realize that there can only be one solution within your capability. Now, I’m not saying it’s the perfect solution. There might have been a better idea than Baileys, and there may be better elements in brands. But I think if you’re really true to what you believe, you go with one idea.
To the point, I had this long relationship with my client. I remember once going with two ideas, and my client said to me, “You haven’t solved it, have you, if you’ve got two ideas?” And I said, “No, I haven’t.” So they said, “Go away and come back with one.”
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, one of the quotes in your book is, “There’s no plan B.”
David Gluckman: I think that’s what we had to do. After Baileys... when I started, the first pitch I ever did, there were 48 ideas. That was because we weren’t sure what the client wanted, and the client wasn’t sure what they wanted either. So there were 48 solutions. Whereas once things became more specific, you could look for one idea.
Innovation vs. Renovation: The Case for Inside-the-Box Thinking
David Gluckman: The areas I... I think there’s a lot of glib nonsense talked about my particular field. The word “innovation” is used because somebody comes up with a turnip-flavored Smirnoff or something. But that’s not innovation. That’s something that you knock up on a Friday afternoon after lunch. That’s not innovation. Innovation is something new and doesn’t happen all that often.
I have this... you know, people talk about breaking paradigms and disrupting markets. Most of that’s complete bullsh*t. My counter-theory to this is what I call “inside-the-box thinking.” I think most of the thoughts and ideas that have been any good that we’ve produced have been from inside the box, from looking at past research that people have done, just reading through documents and reports. From looking at... coming up with ridiculously obvious observations.
Like, I remember when we did Tanqueray No. Ten, the observation upon which it was based was: Did you know that there’s 10 times as much vodka sold as gin? So why don’t we try and get vodka drinkers to drink our gin? And how do you do that? You take out all that juniper flavor and tame it down and make it fruitier and fresher-tasting. Now, that’s inside-the-box thinking because that’s based on data that’s already there.
Andrew Mitrak: I love this idea of inside-the-box thinking. Do you have some practical guidance or a few tips for embracing this, for discovering ideas that are hiding in plain sight?
David Gluckman: Well, I think you have to disregard consumer research because I think it’s a very blunt tool. And I say that from having done hundreds of focus groups all around the world, many, many in America. But you don’t have to go and ask consumers what to do. There’s a legend on the front of my book, which is the story of the man who sold the world what it didn’t know it wanted. And I think that’s what you’re doing. You’re trying to develop things that people didn’t know they wanted. I think that’s quite an important... you know, if you take the research route into innovation or development, you just end up with what people say. Can we produce a product to compete with Red Bull that doesn’t taste quite so ridiculous?
The Rise of Non-Alcoholic Beverages (and Their Puzzling Price Tags)
Andrew Mitrak: Back to alcohol brands, you’re mentioning the brand extensions that Baileys has done over the years. It seems like there’s this tension between alcohol beverages wanting to be part of cultural trends and to be innovative, but also that there’s this history and this tradition to it, right? Johnnie Walker has been around for 200 years, but I remember not too long ago when they were releasing all these special Game of Thrones editions to their brand. And similar with Guinness, you know, it’s a big piece of Irish pride, they’ve been around for hundreds of years. I hope they don’t mess with the recipe too often. But now I’m seeing the alcohol-free version of Guinness. And I actually think it’s pretty good, as far as non-alcoholic beers go. But it’s very different than traditional Guinness, and it almost seems like sacrilege to mess with Guinness, right? So, do you have thoughts on how brands both stay true to their values, their history, and not damage their brand with too many brand extensions, but still want to try new things and to innovate and be relevant?
David Gluckman: I’m quite an outspoken critic of the non-alcoholic category, particularly wines and spirits. I bought a bottle of Gordon’s a while back, Gordon’s Zero. And it cost a pound less than a bottle of full-strength Gordon’s. And when you think about it, what you’re paying for that money for is gin-flavored water, which is crazy, really. I mean, gin-flavored water for £14.
Andrew Mitrak: You’re totally right that, especially with a spirit or wine, the trend to go from like 14% to 0% just seems like almost too big a jump somehow. I think it works better with beer, but the pricing of it doesn’t make any sense to me at all. That if you look at the non-alcoholic beers at a supermarket, at least here in America, basically the same price, sometimes even higher than the alcoholic ones. There’s a thing called hop water, which is like the hops in an IPA beer that are infused in water. And sparkling water will be 30 cents a can here, but hop water will be like $2 a can or more. And it’s like, why is that? It’s just sparkling water with a different sparkling flavor.
And then mocktails, if you go to a restaurant, there’s this thing called a mocktail instead of a cocktail, and it’s juice. It’s just juice! But it’s priced the same way a high-end cocktail is, and it just seems crazy.
David Gluckman: Yeah, exactly. I find it strange. I had some non-alcoholic product, which I will not name, the other day, which cost, I think... on a 70cl bottle, which is our unit size here, cost about £42. And a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, where your capital has been locked up for 12 years in a warehouse, costs £35. I think that’s just crazy, really, that you’re paying for a kind of flavored squash thing for £7 more than Johnnie Walker Black. It’s ridiculous. But that’s the way the world works.
Marketing Alcohol and Navigating the Ethics
Andrew Mitrak: I want to talk about this trend towards non-alcoholic beverages because I think it does coincide with more awareness about the negative health impacts and societal impacts of alcohol. People are almost willing to pay more because it’s perceived as healthier. Do you think that’s part of it?
David Gluckman: It’s in part. I think we went there in 1984. The guy to whom I reported at IDV, who was a global director of the company, said to me one day, “Well, look, I think that alcohol is going to come under attack.” This was 40 years ago. He said, “Alcohol is going to come under attack.”
We were amazed at how successful Perrier was, especially in the US. Because to me, Perrier is just soda water with history. And so we looked at developing a series of non-alcoholic products, which we did, and they were quite successful, except the company committed too much money. They set up a separate organization to manage it without having the critical mass of some big brand to make it successful. But we were there then. We had developed a brand called Aqua Libra, which was incredibly successful in the UK for a while, and another drink called Purdey’s, which is now owned by Britvic. So we went down that route. But the company, I think at that time, went into the merger and took the decision that their business was alcoholic beverages, not non-alc. So they were dismissed.
Andrew Mitrak: I do want to ask you about this a little more as well because on the one hand, I’m mesmerized by the capabilities of developing an alcoholic beverage and the marketing around it, and iconic campaigns. Absolut Vodka, the Super Bowl is so full of great beer advertisements that people will talk about for weeks afterwards. So a lot of the best marketing and branding and advertising is around alcohol, but it is something that does have societal harm to it. My family has a history of alcoholism, and I’ve seen firsthand it’s had really, really bad impacts on people. And I’m kind of... it’s a tension because I can both admire the brilliance that goes into developing the products, but I can also see some of the harm that the products have had on people and in society.
Does that ever come up? How often does that come up as you were working on these products, as you work in this industry? Do folks think very much about that and how they reconcile some of the negative impacts of the products they’re selling?
David Gluckman: There was always that background feeling, as there would be with cigarettes. You know, should I be doing this? Is this the field in which I should be engaged? And because I smoked when I was younger, I would never have taken on a cigarette brief, I don’t think. But alcohol... well, it was there in the back of my mind, but it didn’t stop me from working in the category. It was just so interesting. And the laws protect us from selling booze to children and things like that. So that’s an adult decision.
Andrew Mitrak: As companies introduce new brands of alcohol, they’re doing that because they want their company to grow, right? And they want to sell more. And in America at least, the top 10% of drinkers consume like 90% of the alcohol. And I’m wondering, where do they want to sell more to? Do they want to sell more to that top 10% of drinkers who are already drinking a lot? Are they trying to find new drinkers and bring new people into the market? Are they trying to upsell people so they’re paying more for alcohol than they otherwise would, so they’re not going at the bottom-shelf liquor, they’re going more for the premium one? Do companies have that strategy in mind of like, which market are we breaking into? How are we growing our product? And how does that reconcile with the ethics behind alcohol marketing?
David Gluckman: I think most of the time people copy other people. So if somebody brings out a raspberry-flavored vodka, seven other people will come up with raspberry-flavored vodkas, which is copying. When Seedlip came out with their non-alcoholic spirit, about which I was quite scathing, other people have rushed in and copied Seedlip as well. So a lot of it is just copying what other people are doing. Not many people are looking to completely change things around.
Could There Be Another David Gluckman?
Andrew Mitrak: I’ve really enjoyed this conversation and reading your work. One of the questions that I have is that, could there be another David Gluckman? You seem to have been in the industry at this moment and had this career where you could come up with these ideas and work with relatively small teams and take bets and find the right decision-makers to champion that.
But a whole industry and things have been bureaucratized around it, things have been so formalized with more stringent types of market research. It seems like there’s so much more consolidation within the beverage industry that they might be a little more risk-averse, and that having independent voices or having smaller teams create bolder ideas just doesn’t seem to happen as much anymore. So I guess the two parts of the question is, could there be another David Gluckman or a person like you who does what you do? And if so, how would they go about it?
David Gluckman: I think the only way that would happen is the way it happened for me, is to find a client with whom to work who makes that possible. A client with corporate cojones, if you like. A client who says, “Yes, we can,” has a very positive attitude. And the client—I mean, I think if I didn’t have a client, I would have been... I might have done one or two brands if I’d been lucky. But the client that I had that could go to a member of the main international board and sell an idea off the back of a cigarette pack, and they empowered this kind of thing, they stimulated you.
I think it’s the company. Otherwise, it’ll happen with entrepreneurs because the beer business is certainly full of people like that. Brilliant, brave people who went with their instinct.
Andrew Mitrak: Again, for listeners, the book is That Sh*t Will Never Sell by David Gluckman. It’s full of great stories, some of the case studies you’ve heard here, but they go into more depth, and there are lessons and a lot of wit and fun throughout it. So, really enjoyed the book, David. Aside from purchasing your book, are there any places you’d point listeners to as far as where they can find more of your work online?
David Gluckman: Well, I think they’ll be all over the place. So if you just Google me, you’ll probably find some stuff. If anybody buys a book and wants to have a chat, my Zoom door is always open.
Andrew Mitrak: Oh, that’s a very nice offer. I hope you get flooded with meetings. So yeah, David Gluckman, thanks so much for your time. I really enjoyed the conversation.
David Gluckman: It was a pleasure, Andrew. Enjoyed it too. Thank you.
