Creator of Baileys, Ciroc, Tanqueary, How to Creatively Disrupt Categories - David Gluckman

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3:22Thank you so much. Hello there, people and listeners of The Hungry Podcast. Today, I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome back David Gluckman onto the podcast. David was actually our first ever episode all the way back in 2020 in the shackles of lockdown. Very serendipitous, David and I kind of started a friendship over LinkedIn and David very much gave me the nudge for starting the podcast and said kind of gone down just give it some welly um but david is he's the author of of kind of i'd actually say it's mandatory reading for every challenger brand it's called that shit will never sell um and it's kind of a book about david's life and all his work in in in the drinks business basically he's a man who created many many many drinks bailey's uh shiroc sirox shirock i don't know how to say it tankery 10 um just so many brands purdys um and they're all kind of in this beautiful beautiful book or that shit will never sell um and yeah look i'm i'm grateful for you coming on this evening david i really appreciate it it's great to see you again it's been a long while it's been a very very long while so as as i it was it is very weird how this kind of just came about and um for our listeners david recommended a book by tom wolf after last time we spoke called the electric kool-aid acid test um and i've been reading it again recently and i think sometimes a book can be better the second time around but that book's all about kind of ken casey who's the guy who wrote uh one flow of the cuckoo nest and it's all about the kind of the change in the zeitgeist in the 1960s which gave birth kind of post post the war into the beatles into kind of mania into kind of this crazy lurid wild time and i think there's a lot of actual lessons for challenger brands in that in that explosion of you and that explosion of creativity but where i want to start this today is is when you arrived and your experience in that time and what that felt like and i want to read for our listeners kind of the first part of your book and it says i on the other hand was most definitely a revert a revised i don't know how to say this mate a revised site um okay yeah what does that mean i reversed it's a new a new arrival okay cool uh that's a new arrival in my lexicon as well so i'll take that so having fled south africa in 1961 aboard the cape town castle to occupy mattress on the floor a shared room in earl's court leaving behind me a possessive jewish family i'd escaped to london to make my way in advertising just before i left south africa where i'd been involved with ads for medicine secure piles sounds like a fun job david and uh devising promotions for parent fingernail clippers i'd read martin mayer's book madison avenue usa about the explosion of the ad industry in new york and on which the current hit tv series man man has surely drawn if the sexy and successful john draper had been invented then he would certainly be on my role model well i smoked as much as he does um like me he had come from a backwater to the bittering city lights to take his chance the exciting new world of post-war consumerism in which after so many years of rationing even britain would be open to new and exotic things to eat drink drive or wear having spent the six years in an account executive i'll get past that bit um anyways then it then it goes fast forward to nine um to 1973 and it says in 1970 1973 12 years after my arrival in england um and hugh and i'd set up our own office that looked into the garish sex parlors in the heart of soho it was throbbing neon heart of creative london those days private eye um yeah blah blah blah blah but what i love about that is i'd love to go back into that period of time um um because I've read a lot about it and as you as you said we had this explosion of music so we had the Beatles we had Bob Dylan we had um the Rolling Stones on almost kind of on the art side but then we had this whole explosion in brands and consumerism so what did it feel like for you arriving in London like what was London like for you in those early days?

7:46It was pretty overwhelming I mean I was born in a town called Port Elizabeth which is a coastal backwater in South Africa I grew up in Johannesburg which is rather more metropolitan but London was something completely different and coming into a place like Earl's Court I remember going on the tube to Tottenham Court Road and asking a newsagent where the football ground was and he looked at me and laughed. London was, you know, pretty exciting. I mean, there was Portobello Road in the 60s and Mary Quant and Bizarre and it was a very exciting place to be. I don't think you noticed it as much when you were there as when you look back on it.

8:35But then, you know, we weren't very rich. We were in advertising. And we were certainly arrogant and confident But we weren't very rich at that point But the music scene was wonderful The world was great Yeah, yeah, because I'd love to It seems like a glorious time to be alive I think it always does retrospectively But when you said we were arrogant and cocky, how so? We were just super confident We worked in an advertising agency Which kind of punched above its weight It was a bit like Don Draper's ad agency In fact it was owned by Americans And it was kind of conservative But there were a lot of very exciting creative people there Charles Saatchi had his first job in our agency lots of people who set up their own agencies and became quite famous in the business later, like Frank Lowe.

9:43Frank Lowe and I shared an office for a while, and I remember he walked into my office one day and said, I'm Frank Lowe, what the fuck's marketing? So I couldn't really give him an answer. But these were mates of mine, and they all went on to do great things. What did Frank Lowe go on to do? to run a global advertising agency called The Low Group, which was incredibly successful. He was an architect behind a lot of the great advertising campaigns of the 1970s when he worked in an agency called Collette Dickinson and Pierce. They produced the Heineken refreshers' pots, other beers don't reach, the famous stellar advertising, Brilliant ads for Benson and Hedges.

10:33Frank was a very heavy hitter in the ad business. We had loads of people who became top-class film directors, commercial makers, just very important people in the subsequent development of the ad business. Would you say London was more creative now or back then if you were to compare the two? I think the standards are different, the style of creativity is different The internet didn't exist in those days That kind of communication didn't exist, so it was different But I think English advertising kind of picked up its style from the better agencies picked up their style from Doyle Dane, Burnback in the US, which was a real groundbreaking advertising agency.

11:32But it was a great business to be in. It was more exciting than the Madison Avenue described in Martin Mayer's book. But I owe a lot to that book, as we all do to books, I think, because that took me out of having no clue what I was going to do for a living and turned me into somebody who was an ad guy so what because i'm trying to why was it so exciting because i really believe you can learn from from eras so i'm trying to think of people who are listening to this trying to think of ideas and come up with ideas because in this book there's fucking loads of ideas of drinks brands loads like hundreds but i'm trying to get into the into the zeitgeist of the 60s and 70s of why was it so exciting like was it the i was here in the 60s but I wasn't here in the 40s and 50s so I didn't know anything about the privations of rationing for example or being bombed by the Germans I mean I was in South Africa and the chilling on the beach of the war you were chilling on the beach while we were getting bombed not quite I mean all my uncles were up north in Egypt fighting against the Germans and And all I remember was that when World War II ended, my mother baked a loaf of white bread because for some reason it was illegal to make white bread during wartime in South Africa.

12:58But that was the only thing I knew about during the war. So I think London was exciting and different for me because I'd escaped from home, I'd escaped from my family and I was in this new country and England was breaking out of the austerity of the 40s and 50s so you know it was different for me on because it was it was different it was new it's almost like the cultural thing isn't it because it's all the is it like Jack Kerouac the beat the beatniks and all that that that kind of was in the 50s when people kind of decided to rip up all the old dogged rule book on i'm talking like a macro level and then this is in this electric kool-aid acid test you sort of see this desire to uh create stuff and find this flamboyant weird shit and if you compare it to like you know the beatles albums like rubber soul and revolver like even now you listen to that you listen to um oh my god what's the beatles song it's i think it's not a tomorrow will never come do you know that song by the beatles you listen to that now and i'm like that is just blows my mind like that song like you will never get anything like that now and that's 50 years later so if you know i'm just trying to get into what what it was like and what you're saying i suppose because we've been such everything had been so shit with the war there was this desire for this inner need for creativity would you agree yeah and i think that also the things times were changing i mean the americans were engaging in the war in vietnam and that caused a huge amount of um eruptions amongst amongst the youth but just make a point about pop music which i think to me is interesting every i'm old so i will look at pop music in my time and say it was better than it is now because I knew it better but not because it was better it's just that I was more familiar with it I could sing the songs I could dance to the music but that's a very common thing you know people who grew up in the 80s would say the same thing about their music but it was a very it was just a great time I was I was free I didn't have anybody to answer to.

15:30I think the other kind of liberating things were the contraceptive pill. I think in the 50s, people were terrified of sex because they were terrified of the consequences of getting people pregnant. And I'm sure girls were the same, had the same problem, being terrified of becoming pregnant. So that was a great liberating force in all of this. photoreceptive film and what what were some of the bands you were listening to because i actually personally think i think there's a reason that elvis is still is still some of the best music the beatles is some of the best music um the rolling stones i actually think the music was much better back like years ago like years and years and years ago you can say that i can't say that because it doesn't make me sound like a crusty old guy but have you heard of the i mean have you heard of the lindy effect which is by nasim taleb which is no basically the best books are the old books the best books are the best music is the old music the best it's not completely true because i'm sure you know i do like to boogie to taylor swift occasionally but it's it's it's don't buy a book from the top 100 because people are paying to be on the top 100 list go back and find all the old books that those are the ones that was if they stick around long enough they're good and i think that is the same with music like um elvis you know he's you listen to you listen to that i had a dream song it's like you won't hear anything like that today it's just insane um but anyway we should probably start talking about food and drink because that's what uh i like to talk about but it's just interesting it's interesting getting more of a kind of understanding the territory and the landscape landscape you were kind of operating in i think for listeners and i know you've probably waxed lyrical about this story loads but i'd love you to talk to us about how you created baileys because it is it's an iconic story it's a perennial story and it's a story that will there's just so many delicious insights and lessons so yeah do you want to kind to talk about that.

17:51Well, let me try to give a slightly different perspective on it from the normal one, because I'm a bit tired of that one. I think Bailey started 10 years earlier than 1973. In 1963, working in an ad agency, an incredibly charismatic guy came in from Dublin. He was 28 years old. He was a famous rugby player. And he'd been tasked by the Irish government to turn Irish butter from an anonymous commodity, which commanded only the lowest possible price, into a brand. His name was Tony O 'Reilly. He became a very famous businessman. and he came to an ad agency for some reason. I suppose ad agencies were the most likely sources of that kind of input and said, here is Irish butter.

18:52I want you to turn it into something that will enable me to command a decent price for the Irish farmers, very important part of the economy. And I was only a minor player in this. I came in late in the day so I can make no claim to having invented any part of it. But the brand was called Kerrygold. It became one of the marketing successes of the 1960s. O 'Reilly's name went up in lights. He became president of Heinz and went on to great things. But Kerrygold became a brand, and Kerrygold achieved his grand objective of making money for the Irish Exchequer, which was incredibly important. And it was great because it wasn't just working on fingernail clippers or pile remedies.

19:43This was a national cause. And this was the development of a brand to serve a national purpose, which was fantastic for me. I mean, it was something you could really go home and feel very proud about. And Riley had a huge impact on me as a man because having dealt with him, he was amazing. I once wrote a TV commercial, which was not, that was outside my remit in advertising. And I knew he came into the office at 8 o 'clock in the morning, so I sold him the idea, and he bought it on the spot. So suddenly I'd met people who could make decisions, and I think that had a profound impact on me in the future.

20:26So we go forward 10 years. My partner and I just set up a business on our own, just a two-man company with an assistant. the three of us, and we had get this brief from Ireland, which was incredibly to the point, I suppose. It was simply, can we develop an Irish drinks brand for export? Period. That was the brief. There was no information, there was no market data, we didn't even meet the people who issued the brief. the Irish government had introduced some legislation which said that any brand that was developed primarily for export from Ireland would receive a 10-year tax holiday, which is extraordinary.

21:18So that went to the head of the Irish company, who passed it on to the head of someone in England, who then passed it on to me. That was the brief. Never met the guy until the day we presented it. And I remember sitting with my partner in the office. We'd just been in business for about a month. And I said, what are we going to do about this Irish brief? And I said, is there anything in my Kerrygold background that we might bring to bear on it? And he just asked the question rather diffidently. He said, what happens if you add Irish whiskey to Irish cream? So me being an action man, I said, okay, down to the supermarket, let's buy some Irish whiskey, let's buy some Irish cream, mix them up and see what they taste like.

22:08And they tasted disgusting. So we went back to the supermarket and looked around, found some powdered drinking chocolate, added some sugar, messed about with it for 10 minutes. I think the whole process, most of which was spent going up and down the stairs, took about 45 minutes, and we ended up with a brown drink, a brown milky drink. And we tasted it, and I thought it tasted pretty good. So I said to Hugh, my partner, why don't we go and talk to the client in London? And he said, no, not really. He was an old Etonian, so he was very conservative, and he thought in terms of fine wine and malt whiskey.

22:50So I said, okay, I'm not scared, I'll go. Took it over to the client in London, sold the idea in 30 seconds. He just tasted it and said, this is great, I think we should do it. And the rest was more or less history. We were about to move office from Dean Street to Greek Street, and when we went along to inspect our new premises, we noticed a restaurant below the office called Bailey's Bistro. and something O 'Reilly said to me brought back memories. He said, if you ever need to come up with an Irish family name for a brand, don't use one like mine. So, I mean, taking his mantra, O 'Reilly's Irish cream would have sounded a bit whimsical.

23:41And Bailey's just seemed perfect. So I looked at it and I thought Bailey's is it. And I think that formed my entire approach to developing brands from then on. Always go for a single idea. It's very easy to come up with six answers to a problem. Very easy. So never do that. And I remember later in the years, in the 80s and 90s, if I came up with more than one solution, my clients would say you haven't got any have you there's two solutions is nothing it has to be one solution boimi our beloved sponsor by helping build the fastest growing challenger food and drink brands look if you're a small brand just starting out and you need your first indie stockist your first hundred stockist to wholesale boimi are the platform to categorically speed that up but if you're a big brand wanting to get bigger boimi are also insane they make field sales marble smooth silky slick they're just epic ollie's ollie's been on this podcast twice actually they saw a 29 uplift in sales when using boemy to check major malt listings availability insane 29 uplift by downloading an app insane lucky saying my boy aaron duff is coming on this podcast in a couple of weeks weeks he uses it to manage the team of 30 people and they've lucky to have unlocked 500 draft listings by using boemy look you've got to get involved with this stuff it's absolutely insane and it will categorically change your life it's just the sickest platform i use it all the time in ireland for people listening to this who are wanting to disrupt categories and come up with new ideas there's just so much in that story i mean you said suddenly i met someone i met people who could just make decisions um you said i'm an action man and just get things done and try ideas and ideas can come from anywhere and i think the way to disrupt categories is to look at completely different categories so bailey's comes from irish whiskey and irish cream compile them together um what you've said there about the name being right in front of you and i think being creative and trying to be a creative brand or creative founders a lot of it's about just letting creativity come into you from the world but i think people think they want to be like super creative like often it's hidden in plain sight that's what one of the guys interviewed last week and funnily enough what you said about bailey's the name was under the under the bistro uh back to the beatles for a second is sergeant pepper's lonely um sergeant pepper yeah paul mccartney was on a plane and he was and he saw salt and pepper and he put them together as sergeant pepper's lonely car up a car band if i can say it but you know what i mean and i think i think for our listeners there's just so much in there it's it's for creative ideas just look around what's in front of you and take action compile all these different things together and that's how you create different shit like i think one of the issues is one of my strong bugbears is when people look at a category to disrupt a category it's like you're just going to create another fucking product of something else you know what i mean i think the i think there are lots of components uh going there i mean i think first of all if you do what I did for as long as I did, you have to become a professional optimist.

27:08In other words, you always have to think in terms of coming up with a positive answer to a question. I've written a couple of fairly scaling pieces, one on this new low alcohol category, which I think is ludicrous, but I think it's not enough to be some wise old curmudgeon who dumps on something. You have to come up with a better solution. So when I wrote the article, two-thirds of the way through, I wrote a headline which said, if you're so smart, what would you do? And the second thing I did was I had to go at the beer business because I think the beer business is one that's ripe for disruption.

27:53Let's start with... Because I think it's just... So I was going to say, let's start with your article on no to low drinks. Like, why do you think it's a mad category with bad products chasing good intentions? I'll give you a very simple solution. I went out and bought myself before Christmas a bottle of Gordon's Zero gin at Sainsbury's. It cost me£12. Alongside it was Gordon's 40 % ABV gin, which cost£13. Now effectively what I was paying£12 for was gin-flavoured water. And it's ridiculous to pay£12 for gin-flavoured water because you pour it into a glass, you add tonic, and as the ads for fever trees say, 75 % of a gin and tonic is the tonic, so you're paying something to flavour up tonic and you're paying£12 a shot.

28:51It's ridiculous. There's better ways of doing that. which are? Well, the two that I gave, the first one was, I think this should be done by the soft drink people, not by the booze people. So therefore, if you pay a pound for a can of tonic, if you paid£1.20 for a can of London Dry gin-flavoured tonic, you'd be getting exactly the same result that you get from Gordon's and tonic as a fraction of the price. That's one simpler way of doing it. Another way of doing it is, do you know what Angostura bitters is? No. Angostura bitters is super concentrated, quite high alcohol, 44%, super concentrated bitters flavouring that you can add to a tonic.

29:47Three drops will give you, to totally transform the character of a drink. Now, if you use that model to create a gin-type flavouring, you could transform a tonic with three drops from a bottle. So those are two ways that you can do which would be much better. I think paying this ridiculous amount of money for artificial spirits is stupid. I sort of agree and sort of don't. so i i i think there's other ways around it but i was speaking to perry about um semiotics which is like the the feeling of so like the easiest way to describe it is when you go to a tap and you see blue and red your brain just automatically triggers that blue is cold and red is warm and hot water yeah and i think the semiotics change when you suddenly start doing putting drops of gin into a fever tree tonic whereas the semiotics are there to be changed yeah yeah yeah true but i think i think the the whole idea of of like sometimes i've had alcohol-free spirits and it's it's the consistency of the semiotics that makes me think i'm having a drink it's a bit like vaping basically like vaping is is not smoking but it gives you the same buzz as having a ciggy do you mean so maybe there's there's something in that so when when you said the like you've not gone against the no to low category but is in terms of like beers and stuff like that what's what's your um perspective on load loads to no beers because i think i've interviewed quite a few other alcohol-free brands and they are they're moving at like rapid pace i think they're pretty good i mean i think the distance between 0 % and 5 % or three and a half percent is not so great and you can compensate it for it by adding bitterness so i think it works quite well with beer.

32:03But as soon as you, with wine, I think the products are terrible. And I've never tried a satisfactory wine because I think there's a kind of mindset in all this which is incorrect. If people want to give up drink, alcohol, booze, then they should give it up. They shouldn't be looking for things that taste like alcohol and booze. They should be moving away and drinking something completely different and um i i that i mean to me the atmosphere that surrounds this no low movement is it's a bit like a alcoholics anonymous or a revivalist meeting i mean i don't if you want to give up drink to do something else but don't drink artificial substitutes for it yeah and also i think my view i think it's a i think we're going potentially too far the other way personally whereby we're evangelizing non non-drinking and uh being sanctimonious to those who drink so i took six weeks off drinking uh when was it uh last october and i mean i didn't feel that much different to be honest it was i was expecting to wake up feeling like fucking jesus coming coming out the the ocean do you know what i mean and i didn't and um there's definitely there's a huge cultural change even with my friends it's like oh god you're having a drink tonight as if it's like there's this punitive punitive thing and it's it's interesting so i kind of get that side where people don't drink at all or don't i kind of get where like there are effects where it you know having a drink doesn't really change much but then on the other side i kind of get in the middle of the week where you don't want to go for loads of beers you want to have two or three um so it's interesting what my mate from lucky saint called it was uh zebra stripes so it's not being it's not as binary as never drinking and not as binary as either on or off it's this kind of sort of gray area in the middle but people are all going i think the beer people the non-alcoholic beer people are going down the same line as the standard beer people are going in other words they're not differentiating enough i mean i've tried lucky saint and can you tell me why why i should try it what his point of difference is it's a good question i think i think his main point of difference is his first in terms of it's it's first like that's what that's what i would say but in terms of if it would be completely hold my hands up i wouldn't know the difference between lucky saint days uh uh what's the other one is it five stars the other one i wouldn't be able to tell the the difference it's more the fact that it's the in my opinion it's at first it's like i think it's if you can't be it's it's a there's the book i think you may have told me about it actually the 22 laws of uh immutable laws of marketing is it that do you tell me about that book no all right well i basically says you want to create like a category of one and i think what they've done is they've become synonymous with the category so it's like you think of alcohol free you think of Lucky Saint and that's why you try it personally yeah okay I mean I suppose you know my complaint about alcohol freeze is the same as my complaint about the beer market I mean I saw an ad the other night for a beer called Madry you heard of it I've had sipped it many a time yeah yeah Madry okay so I'm looking at an ad for Madry and this guy oh the stuff is brewed in Tadcaster in Yorkshire.

35:58More Madrid. And somebody sips it and it ends up making them feel as if they're in Madrid, which is complete bollocks. I mean, it just tastes like any other beer. And, you know, I just cannot see how they can justify it. Or I saw another ad for an Italian beer the other day talking about how it's lovingly produced in the old traditional way. Well, that doesn't mean anything. to people. I think there's a big obsession with process in marketing. You know, somebody says something is handcrafted, whether it be a pie mix or a food product or a drink, who cares? I mean, it's become so overused, the notion of handcraft or small batch production.

36:53that's why I liked your peanut butter because they took a stand and they talked about the way it tasted and the character of its flavour which I thought, that's how we met I actually went and bought a thing because I saw an ad for it on LinkedIn and they told me but most of these beer products you can't tell I can't tell why Brewdog beers are any different they have different names but I don't know why they're any different from any other and I think this this issue issue is the same in all categories snacking every snacking brand looks the same or feels the same not every like but it that's maybe me being a bit harsh but it's very hard to stand out in crowded categories and I think you have this thing called blanding whereby you look at your competition you become your competition and I suppose what you did people are afraid to be different well what you did with baileys which was so genius is you you went and looked at completely random places to create something completely new and i'd love to go into say you was to start a beer brand tomorrow and you were trying to get it on a um a pump at a pub or in a supermarket shelf and you've got you know all the big players you've got madri you've got heineken you've got stellar you've got fosters like how would you go about doing that um i'd build this on a on a word in other words i'd find a word that totally polarized opinion about the beer i i'd call it sour i did it once with what news came up with sour mash bitter in other words i'd use words that maybe put off 90 % of beer drinkers, but really turned on 10%.

38:49Because that's the way to disrupt a category. Don't try and be... Richard Branson is a classic example of somebody who believed that the values of his brand were greater than the individuality of his products. I mean, he brought out Virgin Cola. and he said, okay, I'm going to compete with Coke because I'm Richard Branson. I'm the great new hippie guy from the 70s who's going to change the world and people are going to flock to my brand. It sank like a stone because he didn't differentiate it. He made it, it tasted more or less like Pepsi rather than like Coke. He did it again with Virgin Vodka.

39:40Same thing. Vodka is colorless, odorless, and flavorless. And you can't just put a brand name on top of something which is the same as everything else and expect it to work in the long term. So that's sound like a stone. I worked on a project with him on Virgin Lager. And I said to him at the only time I ever met him, I said, you know, if you get to do this, you should make it different. You should make it distinctive. You should make it cloudy. or you should make it sour or you should make it something else he said no he said i will make it taste like budweiser and the brand name will carry it well fortunately for him and for my reputation he didn't do it so uh that was a non-event um it's i love so it's about owning a word and i interviewed a guy called david hyatt who's got a jeans brand and he said that's all it's about It was about owning a word and then building everything out of that.

40:40With Richard Branson, so where was it you met him and what impact did he have on you or lasting imprint did you have? Because I've read a lot of his books, but I just think you learn more from people who've actually met someone. Do you know what I mean? Well, I only met him once, and I met him at the Moment of Truth, which was coming along and presenting an idea to him. He had been approached by a brewery called Wolverhampton and Dudley who produced Banks' Bitter, which is quite famous in the Midlands. And they were going to work together to produce virgin lager because he'd done cola and he'd done vodka and the jury was still out.

41:22And the brewery approached me to work on it. And I did some consumer focus groups and we're going to cough again. so you might switch off the machine.

41:41Everybody in the country said, oh, the people I interviewed said, no, great, he's one of us. Great, I drank his product like a shot. And when I went back to him and said, I think you should make it different, he disagreed with me. But that's the only experience I had of him. I mean, we were all in dog suits and he was in jeans. in his house in Holland Park. He's a man to be greatly admired. He's a hugely successful businessman. But that particular event didn't work. It's ironic how... I spent what? It's ironic how he was different in what... I spent two hours with him. It's ironic how he was different in what he was wearing with his jeans, but he couldn't differentiate his product from Budweiser.

42:31That's hilarious. He didn't want to. He said, as long as I can match Budweiser and flavour terms, I'm in the pound seats. And fortunately, as I say, I think he might have been wrong. i think yeah i think for for food and drink brands you need you need to be different on brand and different on product and uh because i think because the other side of that is something like oat milk where there's pretty much the product all tastes pretty much the same but brand is so strong that you have different players who are both winning but by being completely different do you know what i mean so i don't know if you know rude health and minor figures do you know those brands no i know oat milk i know oatly yes oatly's one so oatly's so you've got loads of players who are all being really different but actually with oat milk a lot of the product is kind of similar um but i think the real sweet spot when you can get it right is is a brand that tastes has a feels and looks different in terms of its branding and packaging and message and then and actually has a slightly different tasting product the best example of this is trip is you know trip the cbd drink yeah i've got i've got a can in my fridge so i interviewed live the other week and these are a perfect example of a brand that's done this well so they've owned the word calm or and so basically like be kind to your mind be calm to your mind uh calm in everyday chaos they've owned that word they've then created a pack packaging around that word which is super smooth and feels um calming again on the on the it's like the way you feel as you pick up the drink and then third the actual taste of the product it doesn't taste like a diet it doesn't taste like a lucozade it tastes it's got camille camille chai mill i don't know how you say that chamomile chamomile i was miles off chamomile lemon balm all these weird flavors that make it feel again calming and they're the fastest grain um can i show you something yeah of course you can p faffs what's that well it's called faffs what why is there a word blood I can't actually read that Oh well it's in the book And it's um Whereabouts is it in the book?

45:05Uh it's called Calmwasser Look up P-F-A-F-F-S I love the name Because it was um Different Is it Why is there a P there? Oh I've got it here Is it P-Fafs or Pafs? No it's Fafs Fafs Why is there a P there? Well, it was the guy's name. He was the Belgian goalkeeper. Right. His name was Jean-Marie Pfaff. But that's called Kammwasser, and it contains chamomile, chamomile, passiflora, and so on. And how did that do? It didn't do very well, but that was a long time ago. what's what because there's what i want to talk about is your um like because you've had so many what i love and one of why you're such a big inspiration to me is you're not afraid to fail and you're not afraid to have bad ideas and you're not afraid i think you kind of agree with me in that lots of bad ideas ultimately lead to good ones no i didn't never have any bad ideas so how come that was taking me for somebody else if you read the book there aren't any bad ideas in the book they're just bad clients who didn't buy them so so but there's so there's so there's i so there's brands that didn't take off though is you'd agree with that yeah so as long as you thought they were good and that's the main thing well sometimes the client most times the client is well but i mean let me explain something to I have a very simple approach to selling a brand.

46:52It's almost as if you're sitting, if you're doing a drinks brand, and you're sitting next to a guy in a bar, and you imagine, and the guy says, hey, what are you drinking? And you say, I'm drinking a new gin I've just developed. And he says, God, I really hate gin. So I said, well, why is that? Because gin has a kind of bitter, almost dirty taste. To which I then say, well, try this gin, because it doesn't have a bitter, dirty taste. It's made from fresh fruit and fresh botanicals, and it has a real, clean, fresh taste, unlike any other gin you've ever tried. Let me buy you one. So I buy him one, and he tastes it.

47:36He says, hey, you're right. Much more interesting than vodka. I'll switch. And I think if you can have that monologue or you can have that dialogue with somebody about a brand you've developed, then you've got something that's saleable. You've given people a reason why they should buy it. What pisses me off most, though, is that when this particular brand, which I did develop, has come out, you know what the advertising says? You should drink it because Stanley Tucci drinks it. so this 60 year old bald bloke drinks it and i've gone to all this trouble to bust my butt to come up with a unique distinctive uh selling point for my gin but it's completely thrown out the window it's crazy it's that is fascinating and i'd love to know like how do you come up with ideas because lots of people i think ideas are the the currency and the kind of the force that allows you to get through obstacles or around obstacles or under obstacles or over obstacles what is the i think there are a lot of dump how do you come up with ideas a lot of there are a lot of elements to coming up with ideas one of them is i think panic you know you're afraid of failing you're afraid of not delivering something that you i think you have to totally believe in what you're doing.

49:03You have to believe that it's impossible for you to come up with anything better than the solution you've come up with. And there are lots of components that go to making that. I think I've been blessed with an incredibly good memory. So I remember things from 60, 70 years ago that have embedded themselves into my brain, they pop out as and when needed. I remember once having a brief, being called to Dublin very suddenly to get a brief on developing a coffee cream liqueur for the Baileys people, because a competitor had arisen in Dublin. And so they called me to Dublin and they said, we want a review on this coffee cream, McEwan.

49:55So I get to the airport. I stop in at the bar to get a box of matches. They're pulling a pint of Guinness. This is 10 o 'clock in the morning. That's Dublin for you, and that's airports. And I'm looking at it and saying, what a beautiful sight it is. It starts off like a kind of giant Bailey's brown, and then it separates out into its black and white components. It looks wonderful. So I get across to the meeting, which was just five minutes off the airport at a hotel. And we're in the meeting and there's about five people there and the client, and they've got all these white boards and boxes of data and everything else.

50:39And I said to the client, would you mind very much if I ordered a pint of Guinness? He said, hang on a minute. He said, it's 10 o 'clock in the morning. We're not an old-fashioned booze company anymore. We're a professional marketing outfit. I said, please, please. I had a heavy one last night. I need to redress the balance. So he reluctantly agreed, phoned down to the bar and ordered up a pint of Guinness. And I then said, do you mind if I make a presentation now? I mean, I've been there to get a brief, not to make a presentation. And he said, well, OK. so I said well how would you like a coffee cream liqueur holding up the Guinness where you drink the coffee part the black bit to the cream part the white bit and that'd be coffee and cream he said well how would you do that so I said well then I remembered something that my father had in drink cabinet in 1948 when I was 10.