The Man Behind the Drinks That Define the Modern Age

If you said to me come up with six ideas to change my life, that's quite easy. But if you said come up with one, that's a real challenge.

Hi, I'm Adam Durrell and I'm the host of the Account Experience podcast. This week again we're focusing on the drinks industry and our very special guest today is the inventor of at least 30 drinks and I believe you're going to know almost all of them. So if you are a regular at this establishment, you'll know that in every episode I to catch up with inspiring industry leaders or thinkers, you know, to share best practices and tips or just be some interesting stories. The idea is, is that you can help develop your B2B account experience program and some of this knowledge and I always like to say we combine well, the cool dairy cream of client management with the a blend of the smooth Irish whiskey of customer experience and that intersection that blends we call account experience, frankly, should give you a clue about one of our guests drink brands. More of that later. I'm also father of four, a founder, and I'm fanatically interested in humans and I love anything that furthers the quality of business relationships. Today. My guest is incredible. David Gluckman. What an amazing career he's had. We'll try and touch on as many aspects of that today as possible. But to give you a bit of a background, David moved from South Africa to London in the 60s where he started to make a name for himself in the advertising business. And as a personal connection, which I also sounded out with David earlier on, my father was part of that advertising world, so it was really interesting to hear his stories in that world. And he worked as an account executive in Procter and Gamble, Kerrygold, Lion's Tees, and several Unilever accounts. And later on, as he said, he bumped into a man from idv, which if I recall, stands for International Distillers and Vinlas. Maybe David can correct me on that.

Yep, that's it.

His life changed. His life changed forever because that, that's when he invented signature brands that we know and love. Now he's worked with all the major brands out there, including I think most recently Diageo, which is where he left and retired from, I should say. And including, and I hope you can hear the, the ice clink in this one. That sound there is the sound of Ira Bailey's Irish Cream, which is one of David's drinks. And there's at least 30 others, Tanqueray, 10 Chirok, Aqua Liba, Sheridan's Purdeys and his latest drink, Cool Swan. And he's a gifted writer and his book is called that Shit Will Never Sell. And it's a witty and fascinating account of the beverage business for the last, I don't know, 40 or 50 years. And it's really highly recommended. It's a super fun read and I definitely recommend it. So I'm just going to hold it up to the camera. David, look, your book and your first brand, Baileys. Do you recognize this?

Yep, I do.

Well, welcome to the podcast, David. How are you doing?

Very well, thank you. Nice to be in Holland, even if it's virtually.

Well, thanks for visiting. Yeah, I'm in Amsterdam, you're in the UK at least. I'm going to dive straight in. I'm going to dive right with the book, which I love by the way. You start the book with an account of Bailey's and about how you invented the brand. Incredible to think, what, 1973. So when was the aha moment when you realized that you had a winner on your hands?

Well, I think you never realize that you have a winner on your hands until somebody takes it off your hands and makes it work. But I think we were pretty convinced that Bailey's was a good idea, which is worth putting out into the market. The act of coming up with Bailey's, I suppose there were two dimensions to it. The first dimension was ten years earlier and the second dimension was about three quarters of an hour, which was how long it took to take this, the memories and the experience and put them to music. We just started out. We separated ourselves from the ad agency I worked in and set up an independent consultancy, my partner and I, in Soho in London. And the first job we had was what we called the Brief from Hell because it came from someone we'd never met and wouldn't meet until the time we presented the idea. And it contained about 20 words. Please come up with an Irish drink which will be exported. There's fewer than 20. But that was the brief. We had no idea what these people, what their strengths and weaknesses were, what their likes and preferences were. Nothing. Not a clue. But the brief came initially from the Irish Finance Minister to the head of Gilbert's of Ireland, which was the company who was indirectly employing us through to IDV Management in London and onto our desk. And it said just that, come up with an Irish drink for export. And the reason for this was that the Irish Exchequer had decided to give a 10 year tax holiday to any brands that were primarily exported. So in other words, if you come up with something good and it's successful, you don't pay tax on it for 10 years, which is a pretty fantastic offer. And I remember sitting in the office Monday morning, it was pretty cold, and I said to my partner, is there anything in my Terry Gold experience which I could bring to bear on this particular project? And just to remind you, I had worked as an account executive on Kerrygold Butter when it was transformed, when it transformed Irish butter from an anonymous commodity commanding a low price to one of the most successful brand of the 60s. Now, I was a minor player in this, but it had a huge influence on my experience. I think I was working for a national cause, which is very exciting. And I said to my partner, 10 years later, is there anything in my Kerrygold experience that I could bring to bear on this ridiculous brief? And he said rather languidly, well, what happens if you mix cream and Irish whiskey? I don't think he really believed it. And I said, well, okay. I was the action man. He was the reflective intellectual. I said, let's go down to a shop, buy some stuff, mix it and see what it tasted like. So we went down to International stores in Berwick at the bottom of Berwick Market, bought a bottle of Jameson's and some Irish cream, mixed them together, and frankly, it tasted disgusting. But then he said, see, it's never going to work. I said, no, no, no, I don't believe that. Let's go back to the shop. And we did, and we looked around the shelves and I saw some Cadbury's powdered drinking chocolate. So I said, let's add that, took it back to the office, added it, added some sugar, mixed it in quantities that I could never recollect. I mean, somebody put a gun at my head and said, what were the proportions? There's no way I knew you smoshed it in. But mix and match. And we ended up with something that tasted quite good. So I said to Hugh, my partner, well, I'm going to go over to idv, where my client, a brilliant guy called Tom Jago, was a resident and tried out on Tom. I said, you want to come? He said, no, not really. So I hopped into my suit, hopped into a cab, went over to IDV in York Gate, plonked a bottle of this stuff in front of my client, and to my absolute surprise and delight, he said, let's do it. And I think thereby hangs a tale, and a very important one, that an idea is only as good as the guy who's buying says it is. You could have the Best idea in the world. But if the person who's buying doesn't like it, you're dead. And I think he had the brains and the balls to say yes. So we were on.

Yeah, I'm just going to take a small diversion on that because another founder you work with is Aqua Libra. And I'm just looking for the quote in the book that was another example of somebody who really took a chance on a single idea. You say that the senior people in the business often have. They're more risk, they're more prepared to take risks than people further down, which strikes me as almost counterintuitive at first.

I think IDB had a lot of people operating at the top level in the business who I think had a very realistic vision. We never spent very much developing brands. I think Bailey's, including the cost of the plant from conception to the time of launch, cost about 50,000 pounds in total. And our fee was pretty small in all this. I think we hope we got paid 3,000 for Bailey's, but, you know, we were paid more for ideas that didn't work. So these things do even themselves out a bit.

So let's get back to the Bailey story, just to finish that up. So you had this idea and you went along there with the suitcase. I mean, you must have done a ton of market research to test it out, am I right?

Well, what we did, market research was a kind of new thing in those days. We barely heard of it. And we said, well, let's go out and do a couple of focus groups amongst men and women to see what they said. And the male group was a disaster because one guy stood up at the beginning of the group, held up a glass and said, there's no way I'm going to be seen dead drinking this in a pub. It's a girly drink. Now, I know it's not a politically correct thing to say in these days, but he was very happy to say it. And of course, all the other guys in the group said, yeah, yeah, I agree with them. But interestingly enough, when we looked at the end of the group, all the glasses had been drained and the first ones and the second one, so they seemed to like the product. And women had a very similar view. Well, not similar, but it was. One woman said, well, it reminded her of kaolin and morphine, which was a fashionable diarrhea remedy in the 1960s. And the rest of the world said, yeah, yeah, I think you've got a point. So I literally took the report, put it in my briefcase and didn't show it to the client for 10 years because we felt there was no virtue in this at all. Bailey's was just a great operation, and I suppose the most gratifying part of it was going to Dublin to meet some people we'd never met before with no plan B. In other words, we had this ridiculous product that was unlike anything had ever been before.

Yeah.

And we didn't have a fallback if he said, well, frankly, I don't like it. And I think I traded a bit on my Terry Gold experience to give me some credibility, because he'd never met me before and I didn't exactly have a great track record because I hadn't been doing the job for that long. But it was a good story. And, I mean, the other part of the story was that the brand name came from a restaurant below our office, called Beatty's Bistro. Had nothing to do with Ireland at all. But when I'd worked on Kerrygold for a very charismatic gentleman called Tony O'Reilly, he said, if you ever come up with a brand name for an Irish product, don't take one like his. He said, irish names tend to be a bit whimsical. So when I saw the name Bayes, I thought, that's it. That just works for me. And luckily everybody agreed. I think the other thing about that is it also showed that developing brands is not a democracy. In other words, you don't go out and canvas everybody's view because everybody will change something and you end up with. Somebody said that Camel is a horse designed by a committee, and I think that's what you could end up with. So I'm very tired of Bailey's now because it's not the only thing I ever did, maybe the best thing I ever did.

We'll leave it in a moment. But there was one thing before we just leave the story. Well, I'm looking at the bottle now, and it says at the bottom, R and A Baileys. Now, was there ever an R and A Baileys?

Again, this came about in about the middle of the year before launch, which was in November 1964. Sorry, November 1974.

Right.

David Dan, the chairman of the company, called me up and said, look, we can't just call it Bailey's, we need to give it initials. And I was reading the sports page of the paper and I think it was the week of the Open Golf and there was something about RNA comment on pin placements. So I said, why don't we call it RNA Bailey? And he said, Bless him. Yeah. He didn't say why. Well, I told him why and I think he quite liked golf. Anyway, so we just called it an RNA Bailey rather than ancient.

Wasn't there a story about two brothers, two feuding brothers?

Oh, that was a. That was a fantasy that I made up in my head just to bring the brand to life for me. But I mean, we never used it anywhere because it's a complete fantasy and a lie and I don't believe in telling lies because you always get found out.

Yeah, yeah, I love that story and that. That really gives that brand the credibility. Look, before we. I think it's time to put the name on the head. I just finished my glass of Bailey's here, but I have to say, this was a big drink for me in the 80s. Very sophisticated after drink, dinner drink, and for a drink that's kind of 50 years old, I actually, really, really enjoyed that. I would definitely enjoy finishing the book. So now, another brand that you were associated with is Le Piedor. Again, I'm holding them, holding the book up here now. Again, people of my vintage will remember this as being a huge big spend on television in the 1970s. Le French adore Le Piedor, as I believe the strap line was the sophisticated wine. So tell us a little bit about that story.

That was a very interesting story, really. I think in the early 70s, wine was fairly new to the UK. People didn't know much about wine and I guess I would lay claim to still not knowing much about wine. But IDV was full of masters of wine, posh boys who knew a lot about the category. But the CEO at the time, a gentleman called Sir Anthony Tennant, who's now dead, he wanted to produce a mass market wine brand and we were given the brief. It needed to be French, he said, but it's got to be more accessible to a wider market. And I think the issue was really simple. If you went into a liquor store, and the same applies almost today, but not quite in the same way, you see a sea of labels, none of which talk to you at all, because they're all in French, they didn't say anything about the product at all. And in those days, in the early 70s, a heavy wine drinker would drink two bottles of wine a month or his family would consume two bottles of wine a month. So if he bought a bottle of French wine called Ducro Boucaillou on the 1st of the month, quite enjoyed it, chucked the bottle away come the 30th, he'd never remember what he Bought the last time around, he'd go back into the store and be completely bemused. So the real issue with wine to begin with was one of giving people something they could recognize more than once that looked familiar. And the company IDV had bought a company called Piat, a company in Burgundy. And Piat had a unique bottle shape, which was like an Indian club almost, but it didn't look like standard wine bottles, and it had an oval label, so it was quite distinctive. And we got the idea for Pieto from Benson and Hedges, because Benson and Hedges had the same kind of ethos as wine. It was special occasion. People would drink cheap cigarettes, smoke cheap cigarettes during the week, but when they went out on the weekend, they would have Benson and Hedges because they could show off to their friends. So we took the idea of the gold puck and put it on Pierre. It became Pierre d'. Or. Very simple. Gold Pierre. Nice, easy word, four letters, you know, not difficult to remember. The bottle shape was unique and distinctive.

Yeah.

And the advertising, as you say, was very funny. It wasn't true, but it was. It wasn't a lie either.

It was just fun, really witty copywriting.

Simple. In fact, the guy who wrote the ads came over from South Africa on the same boat as me. So that was a nice. It was a total coincidence. We never met in that context at all.

Who was the copywriter? Can you remember?

This guy called Len Weinreich.

Right.

And I think that one of the more interesting things about Pietor though, was the actual product, because I had a very clear vision of what I wanted the product to taste like. And the only way I could communicate it to winemakers was to fake it. So I got a bottle of Blue Nun, which, as you know, is easy drinking. White, German white wine, Quite sweet, very fresh and palatable. And I went to a supermarket and bought some red food coloring, and I added the food coloring to Blue Nun, so it looked, to all intents and purposes like a red wine. Took it to a French winemaker and said, I want you to make a French red wine that tastes like this. And it's much easier to do that than to say, try and convey it in words, because the guy knew exactly what he was setting out to achieve. And I think it was fantastic.

I think that's been one of the things I really got through. The book was about how your taste and your sort of DIY ethos of putting drinks together kind of. I was really surprised that I thought drinks were basically developed in a lab. And yet a lot of the times you talk about. There's even this great chapter in the book where you couldn't get hold of a low alcohol beer, so you took caliber lager and mixed it with some color. And I'm like, amazing how you get. It's an incredible story, David, about how you did that.

Somebody said that, I mean, you have to try things for yourself quite often to make a point because people use too much intellectual language to try to describe. Imagine going to a French winemaker and trying to tell him in words, my French is non existent. So in English, how to come up with a wine. The best thing is to say, look, Bernie's is the same thing. I mean, Bernie's was. I remember talking to the R and D guy. He developed the product, a wonderful man called Mac McPherson. He's now sadly dead. But I said to Mac, what did you think of the original sample we brought up? Because we didn't know you and you didn't know us. So we were all very polite and tiptoeing. And he said, I thought it was absolute garbage, but he said, I knew exactly what you were trying to do. And I thought that was. I think that was because it maybe had a bit of shelf life problem.

It is incredible though, how you seem to have captured as kind of a flavor zeitgeist, for want of a better word, that all the way through the book you've got this. You know, you've almost defined drinking tastes for my culture, I believe, when I grew up. It's incredible. Let's move on a little bit because you then had this amazing time working with soft drinks and there's Aqua Libra and Purdies that you invented, I remember as being this sophisticated drink to have at the sort of late 80s. Again. How did you manage to understand that that was the right flavor for the moment?

Well, I can take no credit for the taste of Aqua Libra. That was done by the technical guys. IDV had a fantastic technical group and we all kind of grew up together. So we were all on the same wavelength really from the start and from the Bailey's times. But IDV had a really visionary marketing director, a man called Tim Ambler, who was the global head of marketing and he became a professor of marketing at London Business School. And he was a brilliant man. And he said, and this is 1984. I think there's going to come a time when alcohol's going to come under attack. And I want to look at the possibility of developing added value soft drinks, as he called it. And I said to him, is that it? And he said, yes, it is. I said, well, you don't quite know where we're going, do you? And he said, no. I said, nor do I, but we'll give it a go. And the first drink we did was, we did a sports drink because in the 80s there was a boom in things like active participation in sport, membership of gyms, membership of sports clubs and stuff like that. So he produced a sports drink called Dexter's. And I've always believed, I mean, going back to P and G days, you've got to give a guy who goes out and sells your product a story to tell to the retailer he's trying to persuade. And it's got to be. It's not just, here's the 753rd gin on the market. And what's different about it is it tastes of mulberries or whatever. That's not enough. And I think with the sports drink, we said it puts back the minerals exercise takes out without the calories. So it was a very, very low calorie drink for sports people. And I still think it was a good idea. I think it's a good idea now because if you go into a shop and ask for a Diet Coke, you're saying to people, I'm a bit on the tubby side, really, I'm trying to lose weight. Whereas if you went in and asked for a Dexter's, you would be saying to people, hey, look, I'm a sportsman, I'm a jock. You know, it's a much more positive statement. So we did Dexters and then the next thing was, well, what are we going to do next? So Tim said, let's do a drink which is more directly targeted to women. No, I never liked this. I don't like targeting drinks to anybody. I like coming up with an idea and letting it find its. You know, this is the benefit it offers. Anybody interested in it, Maybe men, maybe women. Anyways, Tim said, well, I imagine a situation where I'm in the smartest club in town with six of the best top models in England and we're all drinking the same drink. And it was tough. I mean, it took me longer than anything else I've ever done. I think it took about six months to come up with it. And I came up with it by complete accident. My assistant was reading a book called the Joy of Beauty by a woman called Leslie Kenton, and I was paging through it as I was talking to the gas board, waiting to get my bills sorted out. Yeah, and there was a thing about Alkaline acid and alkaline balance in the system. And apparently most of the things in the Western diet form what's called acid ash in the bloodstream, things like coffee and tea and stuff like that. But the Western diet is made up of stuff that forms alkaline ash. So I thought I had this vision in my mind of, you know, if you go to a McDonald's, sometimes I would order a glass of milk just to kind of take the sting out of the McDonald's product. And it was kind of balancing nutrition with enjoyment. And that was what. And then it became Aqua Libra.

That became the brand, because Libra is balanced. I mean, it's a genius move that you made, and then you paired it with a beautiful label, and that was also part of it. So, yeah, I wouldn't give you credit. What an amazing brand.

Well, the label was amazing because I briefed the guy on the telephone. I said, we're going off to America, I think, for a week, and we're coming back on Friday morning and we're going to do a presentation. And this is what it is. The name's Aqualibra, and it should look as if it was developed in 1890. And he produced the label in one go. He only did one. It was perfect. The same guy who did the Bailey's.

Label, you have a story about that. You say, how come you did the label so quickly? It took you 30 minutes. And the guy said, it didn't take me 30 minutes, it took me 30 years. I love that.

I think these things all do. And I was reading somewhere that apparently it's the hippocampus, is that part of the brain that controls memory. And I think I've been really lucky to have a very good memory. And you can pick things out of different places and put them together and produce something. And if you're lucky and you've got someone at the other side of the table who can see it, and you're onto a winner.

This podcast is sponsored by CustomerGage, and they're the experienced leader in the CPG market. Let me tell you why they're contacting more people in the independent trade and modern trade than any other customer experience company out there. And you'll know the brands that they work with. We're talking Coca Cola, AB, InBev, Heineken. Just E takeaway, they're literally pulsing millions of contacts around the world in more than 60 countries multiple times a year, delivering those insights to thousands and thousands of frontline employees in those companies. But, you know, it's not just the CPG business Customer Gauge is famous for. They're ranked number one for B2B customer experience by Gartner. However, if you're in the CPG business and you have not contacted Customer Gauge to understand what is going on in your business, you're seriously missing out because we know there are other people out there just doing it once a year. Well, Customer Gauge gives you customer insights 52 weeks a year right to the front line in real time. It's going to absolutely transform your your business like nothing else. But don't take our word for it. Listen to the podcast and they'll tell you exactly why.

Let's shift gears for a minute now because one of the things you talk about in the book is you're kind of down on market research and you have. There's another brand you talk about in the book which is called Guinness Light, which tested really well apparently and then failed. So tell us a little bit about why Guinness Light was a disaster.

I didn't actually develop Guinness Light, but I did do a kind of post mortem exercise on it in Ireland. And what happened was this. Miller Lite had taken American market by storm in the beer market and Miller Lite was, I think the standard ABV for beer in America was 5, 5% and Miller Lite is 4%. It was brilliantly advertised by retired sportsmen and its advertising line was it's less filling and you've got people like kind of imagine Gary Lineker or Alan Shearer drinking it. They wouldn't be allowed now drinking it saying I like Miller Light because it less filling. So Guinness decided that they would do it and they did an enormous amount of research. What was happening in Ireland was that young drinkers are turning away from Guinness and going to lager because it was a much more acceptable drink. But Guinness was just part of the Irish mentality, the Irish psyche. And they did an enormous. Now this was targeted and that's why I don't like targeting, because this was aimed at 18 to 24 year olds. So they went out and they interviewed thousands. I don't know, they must have spent a million pounds on research to test this idea amongst 80 to 24. And I looked at all the information they had and everybody thought it was absolutely amazing. And then they launched it nationally in iron, which again was a big mistake because sometimes drench brands should sneak up on you. They shouldn't be broadcast across the national networks. And I remember doing a focus group in Galway with a guy, he said, I walked into this bar, and it was festooned with Guinness Light material. There was drip mats, there were banners and posters and glasses even. And I ordered a Guinness Light. As I put it to my lips, a hand tapped me on the shoulder and said, drinking ladies Guinness, are we? And of course, the mistake they made was they didn't interview people in pubs. People who. I mean, pub was a kind of center of all activity in Ireland in those days. And the old guys in the pub were the guys who ruled the roost and took the decisions. And Guinness Light had these ads with Armstrong on the moon with the voiceover saying, they said it couldn't be done. And I thought, you know, it seemed a bit strange to equate watered down Guinness with man walking on the moon, but there you go. It was an easy thing to diagnose.

I suppose they said it couldn't be done. And they were right.

Yeah, absolutely.

Let me pivot into something else. Just before you leave the research topic, you talk about how companies often commission lots of research and then they forget about it. It sits on the shelf instead of treating it like an asset. And you know, what's your bugbear on.

This is that, first of all, I walked the walk in the sense that I've done hundreds of focus groups right around the world. And because I was doing the focus groups not to make a decision, but to just tell me whether how right or whether there were any glitches in what we did. Somebody, I remember one girl in one focus group said, I hate the brand name. And she was right. So I changed it because one person out of 40 said she didn't like it, but I knew she was right. And I was looking for that. But I wasn't looking for somebody to say, go ahead and do it or don't do it, because these people don't know as much as I do about or as our group knew about the market. And I think the other thing, big mistake with research is that people use it to pick. Which one of these six ideas do you like best? And of course, they'll always pick the one that's closest to something that they know. People like what they know, but they don't always know what they may like in the future. So that's why also, I wasn't a market researcher. I wasn't making money out of market research. So therefore, I never did more than four on anything ever, anywhere. And more often than not, I did two. And with one, you get 90% of what you're after anyway. So I'd say for any People out there listening to this, halve your research budget and then halve it again and halve it again because you're spending far too much money on research that is not giving you anything. It's helping your middle management to cover their answers, but no more than that. And I've said this, I've been very outspoken in my views on market research and nobody comes back and argues with me. I wonder why.

Let's move on to something that you are still pretty active about. I mean, you might have retired, David, but you wouldn't know it, judging by your output on magazines like the Buyer. So I covered. I read a very interesting article that you wrote about low alcohol, no alcohol gin. Now, I, I've started to like now alcohol beer. I'm beginning to like the stuff that Heineken are producing and there's another, you know, another few things in my fridge I drink. But you're quite again, outspoken about this market. Tell us, tell us your thoughts on it.

Well, I think beer probably does it quite well. I'm not a great fan of beer anyway. I think all beer tastes more or less the same to me and everybody's trying to taste like Heineken or Budweiser. Now, I know brewers would throw up their hands in horror, but, you know, I'm talking as a consumer and I think the distance between 0 and 5% can be compensated by the addition of bitterness and other signals. So therefore low alcohol free beer tastes pretty good. I think the products are well crafted and they just taste like ordinary beer, so I wouldn't bother them. But to me, alcohol free spirits, this is one of the most ludicrous categories I've ever come across. I mean, I think gave you the example of. You won't stop laughing. I gave you the example of Gordon's. I went into Sainsbury's supermarket before Christmas and bought a bottle of 0% Gordon's gin. Yes, it cost me £12 for the bottle, probably on discount at Christmas time. But Gordon's 40% ABV gin cost 13 pounds £1 different. Now, the 0% wasn't paying any duty. If they say that they distill it and then take the alcohol out, well, they need their heads red because that's completely stupid thing to do to justify the price. Basically what you're doing is you're paying £12 for alcohol for gin flavoured water, which is completely stupid and I can't see the point in it. And these products are all over the place, they're proliferating and what you're Doing is you're paying anything. The Gordon's thing was real value by comparison with some of the others brands like Seedling. The first time I bought it was £28 a bottle. And this is just for some kind of flavoring, some kind of vinegar with an attitude to which you I tonic. I mean it's just crazy. I mean, I think there are better ways of doing that. For example, what happens if you increase the price of tonic by 20% and give it some gin flavoring? You have exactly the same result. Okay. You don't have the semiotic, the appearance of going through the ritual. But I mean, you can get over that if you're going to save a couple of pounds a shot. I think, you know, we're not living in that affluent a society now.

No, I think you're right. I mean from a personal point of view, as I, as I get older, I actually think that grown up drinks, grown up soft drinks are where I'd like to go. Ginger beer, for example.

Yeah, I mean Aqualibra was a grown.

Up soft drink, I think and that's probably where I want to invest my, my taste more. Not, not a drink that's been dumbed down, I think and, or a beer that's been dumbed down but more interesting drinks that, that I'd be happy to have like a, you know, that have some of the complexities of wine. Perhaps that's where I'd probably go as an older drinker. Well, I'm a sample of wine of course, but.

Well, I wrote a scathing piece on Britvik's recent handling of Aqualibra, which I headed. How to turn a bugatti, wonderful old 1920s motorcar. How to turn a Bugatti into a Nissan Micro. Because I mean they took a beautiful brand and completely trivialized it. But anyway, you can't win them all. I mean, I love all my brands.

When do we bring us up to date? Because you've. What's your latest brand that you're working on? As I said, you've not, you've not stopped working.

I'm not working on anything at the moment. I'm just too old to be employed.

But worse. Tell us about the premium. We started out with Bailey's and then you, in a way it comes full circle because you've got a premium Irish cream. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Well, I got together with a couple of friends, both of whom had worked at Diageo back in the day and had worked with me and we were, none of us Working with them. And this was 2006, I think, and we met in Dublin and we said, why don't we develop a brand of our own? And we looked around and we looked at trends and we looked at figures and those things never ever worked. Then we ended up going around a liquor store and what was interesting was that all the categories were premiumizing except for cream liqueurs. The premium in cream liqueurs was Bailey's and we all know that Bailey's cost 10 quid a liter in Tesco at Christmas. It's holiday premium. And we said, well, how do you come up with something that's upside of Bailey's? And we said, well, okay, one, don't make it look anything like Bailey's. So instead of being in a short, fat brown bottle, we produce it in a tall, slim white bottle. Let's not make a brown liquid, let's make a white liquid. I mean, the only reason Bailey's was brown was because we put some Cadbury drinking chocolate. There was no kind of divine reason for it. It was just happened to be like that when we started. Let's produce a white liquid because it looks great and if you add colored liquids to it, it produces beautiful looking cocktails. So if you added aperol to it, it's red, so it would make it pink and it would look really nice. Whereas if you add aperol to Bailey's it looks like Bailey's still. Then we said, let's go for the best stuff we can find. So we said let's put single malt Irish whiskey in it. Which we did. Let's put the best vanilla we could find anywhere she got from Madagascar. Let's put Belgian chocolate in it. You know, let's not put some undefined flavor into it. Let's put Belgian white chocolate into it. And the name comes from a poem by William Butler Yeats called the Wild Swans at Cool. And it's about a place in the west of Ireland he used to visit quite frequently. And Cool, it was a great word with an e on it. And I love the beautiful white bottle. It's a gorgeous product. I was still, still waiting for it to happen. But you know, I live in.

That's beautiful. Yeah. For those who've not seen it, you should look up Cool swan or cooler swan, I suppose you would say in the Holland with an e at the end of the word Cool. It's lovely. It's a beautiful brand. That's how I was introduced to you actually. So it was really, it was a really nice circular experience. On this. Well, let's just sort of finish off a little bit by just having a quick look back over your career. Let's talk about a favorite drink you've had over the years. Well, if you were to look at the lovely kittens of the brands that you've developed and reared, was there one that's. That really has been your favorite?

Well, one of my favorites is a Singleton, which is now, I think, the fourth biggest selling malt whiskey in the world. And that was developed in the morning with a few guys who knew quite a lot about the whiskey market. And we took a whole series of decisions. At that time, malt was very mysterious to people. And I think in a way there's an element of Piet d' or in this. We said, how can we make malt familiar to people? So let's develop a malt for blend drinkers. Let's not develop a malt for malt drinkers, let's develop a malt for blend drinkers. So we produced Singleton, which was easy. It was easy to drink as a malt. And it was meant to be pitched between malts and between, say, Johnnie Walker Black and Benfiddick. And the brand hung there for 20 odd years. And then I did a project in Taiwan after I'd left Diageo for the local marketing director and they were looking to develop a mold and I said, let's bring Singleton into the frame. And it really worked. They changed the packaging for the better. That's the original packaging.

Oh, that's the original again. You've used your Benson and Hedges style gold on it.

Yeah, no, it is very good. In fact, the Singleton, the Sunday Express around the competition for the best malt whiskey in England. And all the judges were top whiskey guys. And it was a blind tasting and the Singleton won. So it had the kind of basic credentials to succeed in the long term and, you know, good for the company. They hung in there with it.

It's lovely to hear. And if you think about it again, you must have had some things. You must have had some failures or plans in your life. So what was one of the biggest learnings that you had over your career, David?

What was the biggest.

What was the biggest learning that you had? The biggest learning experience, maybe from a failure? What was that?

I think you learn from individual things. And we didn't have many failures because we didn't spend all that much money. So if you spend five grand on something and it doesn't work, it's hardly seen as a failure because it's small change in terms of that, though. We did a lot. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn't. It's all down to people. It's all down to individuals. I remember somebody telling me once that there was a malt whisk, there was a blended whiskey in the states that sold 200,000 cases a year, all in Northern California, because there was a guy obviously on some kind of deal commission and he made this a huge success in one tiny part of the country. And I think it's down to people, people who buy ideas. I mean, our stuff worked because we were only dealing with board directors. We weren't dealing with middle management who had to spend a vast amount of money on research to insulate themselves from failure, which it never does, as I've shown you with Guinness Light. And I think top management know you're going to fail from time to time. And the lesson is to fail quickly and therefore fail cheaply.

Yeah, I think that's a wonderful way of putting a coder on this to think about that. People are the real deal on this. It's not taste or the bottles, it's the people make it work. Well, I'm just going to end on this by holding up your book again, David. The book is called that Shit Will Never Sell. It's a wonderful read. It's a, by the way, great coffee table book as well. Just leaving it out there. It's lovely to leaf through.

And you know where the title comes from?

No. Tell us about that.

The CEO of IDV took a couple of bottles of Bailey's to New York in early 1975 and showed them to one of the legends of the drinks business in the US A man called Abe Rosenberg. And he looked at the bottle and he thought for a minute and he sipped the product and he turned to Sir Anthony and said, that shit will never Sell. And I thought, what a great title for a book. And that's where it came from. It's an authentic quote. It will probably find its way into the dictionary of quotations. I hope it does anyway.

And he was wrong because God knows how many billion bottles of Baileys later, it's an amazing success. And what a successful career you've had, David, considering you invented something that he said would never sell. Thank you so much for joining me today. And David, if people need to reach you, how do they do that? How do they contact you?

David SWNS in other words.net David SWNS or they can look at www. That shitwillneversell.com that's the website for the book.

Fantastic.

In fact, anyone who buys a book is entitled to a free zoom call where we chat about any issues that they have in their business. Sometimes I come up with good ideas, but I'm a good listener. I quite know a bit about the business, so I'm always there to help if anyone buys a book.

Well, I gotta tell you, for anyone that's in the drinks business, I would say that is the bargain of the year because I've thoroughly enjoyed talking to you. There's also a ton of ideas in the book, but if somebody just wanted to go back and reinvent some drinks today, there's a legacy of stuff that I think is ready to come back and I'm going to carry on drinking my Baileys later on and proof the point. David, thank you so much for joining me today and being a guest on the Account Experience podcast. I really appreciate it.

Been a real pleasure, Adam. Thank you. Bye now.