Meet The 87 Year Old That Invented Baileys - David Gluckman

0:00David Gluckman:If you do consumer research and 9 out of 10 people think you've got a great idea, the chances are you've got a pile of crap. Because it's average, you know, it appeals to everybody. How did you navigate the conversation around, like, let's really create a challenger brand? It's a kind of 24-7 thing. You think about it all the time. You never stop thinking about it. I remember coming up with a brand name for a beer, being stuck in a traffic jam behind a German truck which had a lot of boxes in. I took one word off the truck and used it as a brand name for a beer. It was Gunz, B-A-N-Z. Who are you and what problem do you solve?

0:36David Gluckman:I'm old, which is a problem I can't solve, unfortunately. It'd be silly to not sit down with you and talk about the B word, Baileys. He looked at it, tasted it and said, that shit will never sell. What is the one question that the audience should be asking themselves?

0:57David Gluckman, thank you for being here.

1:00David Gluckman:It's a pleasure. I'm really excited for this one. We always start our podcast off the same way. Who are you and what problem do you solve? I'm old, which is a problem I can't solve, unfortunately. And I try to help people do new things. I suppose I put that very broadly. So if anybody calls me up and says, I've got a problem with the brand, can you help? I do the best I can. So the work that you've done in your career we're going to get into, but typically what were those set of symptoms that meant I'm going to give David a call to help me? Generally, it was people calling to say they needed a new brand in whatever category, ranging from fish fingers to cognac, if you like.

1:45David Gluckman:Most of it, fortunately for me, was on the cognac side, fish finger side. And when you think about, I'm a big fan of the visual, and I imagine over the years that you've been doing this, you get to a point where you've got mental models or ways to think about coming up with new, fresh ideas. If I was to bring in a brand new alcohol, bang it on the table, it's label-less, how would you start thinking about developing a brand? I think that it's difficult to answer that question. A lot of people say, what's your method? Do you have a technique or anything like that? Quite often, the methods are governed by fear that you won't come up with an answer, which is always a concern, I think, for any creative person.

2:31David Gluckman:The desire to impress, sometimes you're working with people who perhaps didn't rate you very highly, and you get a brief from them and you say, well, I have to do this better than any other. So those are human motivations rather than any methodology. And the rest of it, I think, when you're trying to solve a problem, it's a kind of 24-7 thing. You think about it all the time. You never stop thinking about it. is I remember coming up with a brand name for a beer, being stuck in a traffic jam behind a German truck which had a lot of boxes in it. And I took one word off the truck and used it as a brand name for a beer.

3:13David Gluckman:It was GANZ, G-A-N-Z, which I think means complete, but just sounded good for a beer. So it's just constant, you're constantly on the lookout. You're constantly afraid that you might not come up with something that you really, truly believe in. And I think there aren't any particular motivations. The other thing I suppose that's helped me a lot, I've got a really good memory. And if you remember things, they pop out just when you need them. And that's quite important. So you said fear. So when you look at your career, say you're on Blackpool Tower, we take you to our end, and you're looking out on your career.

3:50Can you think of a time where you felt like fear might get the better of you, but then you overcame it?

3:56David Gluckman:Every single project I've worked on, I think. I don't think there was nothing. What happened after some early successes, I realized that if you do a creative function properly, you can only come up with one answer to a brief. I remember when we first started, we did a job for Bird's Line. We came up with 48 ideas, which we took to them. And they were impressed, what a lot of ideas. But they didn't know what they wanted. So we had no idea what they were after. So we just gave them a lot of ideas. And I think quite often when you work with people like designers, I always loved designers who came in and said, this is the answer to your brief.

4:36David Gluckman:One design, not 28 designs. And then you take the decision. I think it's very important as a creative person that you take the decision yourself. You make a recommendation. And there was an ad agency in the 60s in London called Collette Dickinson Pierce. And I remember working in a more conservative agency. They always went with one idea. That was it. That was their solution. If you didn't like it, either they'd fire you, which sometimes they did, or they would go away and do something else if you had a good reason, which was persuasive to them. And you mentioned decision making there. So I'm sure you've learned a lot about the way people make decisions in your career.

5:19What have you seen time and time again when you look back now?

5:22David Gluckman:I think that when I first started in advertising, I think the relationship between creator and buyer was often quite adversarial. In other words, you know, you were being challenged and almost taunted to come up with a good idea, but you never knew whether the client would recognize it anyway. I think what worked best for me was developing friendships with people I worked with. So therefore, there was never that adversarial challenge. We were both two guys in the same boat, two people who had the same problem, both trying to solve it. And that works fantastically well when you've got a challenging and difficult brief.

6:00David Gluckman:Does that answer your question? It does. It does. And I suppose if we were to flip it on its head and say, from a consumer perspective, so the brand is ready to go, it's on the shelves. What do you think makes someone engage with one brand and perhaps ignore another? If I knew that, it's very difficult. What I've tried to do, I think, is I've got a picture in my computer of a really hard-looking bastard. And that picture is in my head all the time because that hard-looking bastard is, firstly, a guy from a sales force in a company. And you suddenly think, this guy's got to go out and sell the 753rd brand of gin that's available.

6:47David Gluckman:and he's got to persuade an even harder looking bastard to do so, a retailer, he's got to put it on his shelf. And he's got to say, I've always looked at any ideas in terms of people like that. You know, how do you sell another goddamn vodka? I mean, vodka by definition has no flavor, has no color, has no aroma. And you have to come up with another one. How do you do it? How do you persuade people? So I've tried to go beyond just doing a pretty pack and a pretty price by looking at the sales guy and saying, OK, this is your ammunition when you go off to a retailer, and this is how you persuade him to stock your product.

7:32David Gluckman:And then you hope it gets down to consumers eventually. How much do you feel that the story is responsible for helping the sale? That depends. And stories, it's a very popular mantra these days. Storytelling is everything. It depends what this... I developed a vodka brand called, well, I didn't name it, but it came out called Siroc. Now, the story behind Siroc is that we were required to come up with a brand to compete with Grey Goose, which is at the top end of the scale. And my conclusion was we need to try and come up with something that's different in product terms. Now, with vodka, this is kind of difficult.

8:13David Gluckman:But I came up with, I remembered something that somebody had said to me in a place called Tbilisi in Georgia 10 years earlier. When I said to him, do you make vodka? And he said, we did. And I said, where do you make it from? And he said, we make it from grapes. And I thought, what an interesting and different idea. It stuck in my head. And when we came out to compete with Craig Goose, I said, why do we produce a different kind of vodka? made from grapes not grain or potatoes or whatever they make vodka from so that is that's a story now what's interesting in the story to you i think the the bit that stands out to me is it's different it's grapes it's uh but when when i think about ciroc so like you're competing with gray goose so what you're what you're selling is not just necessarily vodka but it's probably the feeling of I am drinking something that is luxurious it is being hand-picked I imagine a man on a field maybe picking those grapes how did you in those meeting rooms I guess navigate the conversation around like let's let's really create a challenger brand well what I would have tried to do I didn't have anything to do with Ciroc I mean I came up with the idea of grape vodka and it went out of my hands into somebody else's to be screwed up in many different ways.

9:36David Gluckman:What I would have said was that I would have gone to technical people and said, I want you to give me a vodka, and I'll give you an abstract word, it tastes fresh. I want a grape vodka that tastes fresh. That would be my brief to the technical guy and how they would achieve, because fresh is something that's different from vanilla. Fresh is more a kind of state of mind of the taste, if you like it. So that's what I would have said, and that's where I would have left the story. I hate things like handcrafted, because they don't mean anything. And you know, you come, we were talking about Diagio, the biggest booze company in the world.

10:16David Gluckman:The thought of anything being handcrafted, you know, across a million cases is kind of hard to imagine. So I never liked stories about, that weren't true, batch distilled. What the hell does that mean? And who cares anyway? I mean, I don't care. As a consumer, if somebody comes along and says, this is batch distilled, how big is the batch? No, not important. but tell me what it's actually going to do for me in taste terms and I'm interested. Do you think there is something about novelty that you've been seeking in your career when you've come with a brand? Well novelty is good if it's relevant, not for the sake of it.

11:01David Gluckman:I mean I thought grape vodka was a really good idea and what my formula would have been, I'd have made it in California because they make grapes And there's no reason why you shouldn't have a premium vodka made in America. But no, what they did, they went and talked to consumers and they made it in France, which is what Grey Goose did. So why copy them? Why not, you know, assert your own? We're not dealing with small challenger companies here. We're dealing with a great big corporation. I think they messed up Sorok before Diddy did his thing with it. You know, his reputation dragged it down. But they messed it up before that.

11:41David Gluckman:It could have been so much better. To me, it would have been America. I've met many, many people who drink Siroc. And I say, what's different about it? They don't know. Because they've never made anything of the grape thing. To me, grapes is really important. To me, grapes, every serve would have had a peeled white grape in it, you know, just to make the point. And they didn't do that, which is a pity. So how did they become successful without it? Did he? Right. Did he took it to his network? And I don't understand influence of marketing the way perhaps you do or younger people do. But did he got it into his network?

12:21David Gluckman:But, you know, again, the higher you fly, the harder you fall. And that's what seems to happen then. Oh, God, I'm so tired. I've just been talking to qualified prospects all day without any wait time. How have you been doing it? Because I've been cold calling people on my mobile and I reckon I've spoke to one person. No, no, no. Stop that right now and use Nooks.ai. Why? What does Nooks do? It finds me the right people to call and it calls them and it connects with them over and over and over again. So you're saying it's Nooks.ai and I can just be speaking to qualified decision makers all the time?

12:57No other better connection, right? Wow, Nooks.ai. eye. She said something quite interesting there is they took it to the consumers and they kind of built it around what they thought people want. But when I speak with a lot of people, especially in your world, it's actually the consumer don't necessarily know what they want. That's why you've got to maybe bring it. How do you think about that?

13:19David Gluckman:I think you're absolutely right. And I think there's a, on the front of my book, there's a line which says the men who sold the world what they didn't know that they wanted again and again i i i don't think consumers are any good at coming up with ideas and i i think if you do consumer research and nine out of ten people think you've got a great idea the chances are you've got a pile of crap because it's average you know it appeals to everybody so you're reinventing coke which i I think it's a problem. You know, if somebody said to me, we want to go after Coke, the only way I would, I think, do that is by taking a tiny piece of Coke and competing with that.

14:06David Gluckman:So in other words, I wrote a piece on LinkedIn about it. It was called Sour Cola. I'd say, okay, let's assume that 2 % of the population like the idea of Sour Cola. that's probably a billion-dollar brand in Coke's terms. So don't listen to consumers. We never did. We never went to consumers and said, what do you think we should do? We went to consumers and said, this is what we're going to do. Do you want it or don't you? And in the case of Bayley's, they said, no, not interested. So put the report in a suitcase and didn't bring it out for 10 years. And then, obviously, it feels like we probably have to dig a little bit deeper.

14:49So you put that report in the suitcase for 10 years. Then what happened next?

14:53David Gluckman:We had a good laugh at the anniversary party. No, we didn't. In fact, I've always been a research denier. I think research is a means of dumbing things down. You go and ask people what they like, and they dumb it down, they dumb it down until it becomes familiar. And I think innovation isn't about that. It's about giving people things that they didn't expect. So we were talking just before we went live about some big pitches that you've done in your life. And there'll be lots of people listening who get in boardrooms and have to pitch ideas. What are some stories and some things that you've learned along your pitching career?

15:32David Gluckman:I think to me it's one-on-one. I think the idea of a boardroom pitch, Alan Sugar's style, is not for me. I mean, I think that basically you're dealing with one person who's taking responsibility for a problem and for a brief, and you're working with that person. And you're two minds trying to solve the same problem. And it can be fascinating. I mean, I like people who like simplicity. I've always looked for real simplicity in ideas. I remember we developed a single malt back in 1984. And the company didn't have, they had one rather obscure single malt nobody had ever heard of and done not much.

16:12David Gluckman:And we looked at the numbers and malt whiskey sales were about 3 % to 4 % of all whiskey sales and blended whiskey with the rest. So I came up with a blindingly obvious observation, which was, why are we selling a malt trying to compete in the 4 % area when we can compete in the 96 % area? Why do we develop a single malt or blended whiskey drinkers? That's an utterly simple solution. And so in other words, you can't persuade people who drink famous grass to switch to Lafroix because it's too punishing. It's too difficult to transition. So let's develop a malt for blend drinkers. And we did, and it was called the Singleton.

16:59David Gluckman:It's, what, 40 years since we developed it. But it's now the number four single malt in the world, based on that just very simple proposition. I mean, I don't think people could tell the difference between single malts and blended whiskeys. anyway i can't then the guy ever could so how do you take so there's the audience there right there's the there's the 90 % audience of blended whiskey drinkers and this is made for you how's how's that transition how's the story told there you just got the world's smoothest single month no punishment i mean that was beyond my remit in the sense that my job was to develop the brand So I'd come up with the idea, the name.

17:39David Gluckman:I'd be involved in briefing the packaging. And that was it. I mean, then you say goodbye and whatever people do with brands after that has nothing to do with me. Sadly, I mean, you know, you get very annoyed when people change the packaging for the worse or anything like that. But there's nothing you can do about that. I wanted to ask you about this kind of burn the boats theory of so many entrepreneurs and so many marketeers are always relying on a plan B option. They've got another alternative in case things don't work out. I guess in your world, what's your thought process around that? I created my own problem in the sense that I said, I think after we did Bailey's, it made no sense to come up with a plan B.

18:28David Gluckman:you'd go to a company and say this I think is the best solution to the brief and what do you think and luckily for me most times they they bought the idea and but they did the ideas didn't always work but most times they bought the idea because it's it's quite good being successful right at the beginning of your career gives you a bit of credibility so we are we're sales people we're selling every single day i feel that you are also a salesperson because you're you're selling your ideas and you're trying to pitch and and win and convince people that your idea is ultimately the right choice how have you approached selling those ideas to to these companies uh i'll give give you another vodka example this is 1990 and smirnoff in america because a lot of our orientation was towards the US, because that was the big market, the place where in those days, you know, you could make the most money and the greatest success.

19:29David Gluckman:And Smirnoff in America was very much a supermarket vodka. Smirnoff wrote a label with supermarket vodka. And then there appeared two brands that changed the whole face of the vodka market. One was Absolute, which was one of the most beautiful brands I think ever developed in any category. Great pack, great name, brilliant advertising. Everything about Absolute was perfection. And there was Solich Naya, which was authentic Stalinist Russian vodka. And the Smoloff had shifted their management from Hartford in Connecticut to London, much to the annoyance of the Americans who built it through the Cold War.

20:14David Gluckman:And the brief that came to me was, we want to develop a premium Smirnoff who compete with Absolute and Solly in the US. That was a bit like trying to get a Michelin star for a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. You know, it's a tough ask. I mean, how on earth do you take, transform something as downmarket as was Smirnoff and produce a top quality. It's like, you know, coming up with a Lada car, a premium Lada car to compete with Porsche or Mercedes. It's kind of difficult. It stretches credulity. And if you get a brief like that, you have to accept it. You can't say, the brief sucks. I'm not doing this.

21:03David Gluckman:You know, I was just a supplier. And I came to this conclusion by a number of odd insights. On the old Smirnoff red label by bottle, there was an embossing on the glass on the shoulder of the bottle, which was 1818. It's a date. Now, the still that they used to make vodka, which is called the continuous still, was only developed in 1830, which meant that in 1818, if Smirnoff was developed then, it must have been made in what's called a pot still. So I got really excited about it. That was first pot still vodka, not realizing that 10 years later, I think nobody cares about pot stills, which is true.

21:53David Gluckman:So that was in my mind, pot still vodka. And then I said, we have to come up with a, you've got to find something new to say about the product. that persuades absolute or stolly users to consider you, if not to actually buy you. And I found a word. And that's often, I think, for me, the basis of whatever we tried to do. You find a word and then you build the brand from the word. And the word in this case was smooth, which was not a word in the vodka vocabulary. There were things like sharp, strong. That's what you get for vodka. but you wouldn't get smooth because it's kind of a round word. Vodka was all sharp words.

22:36David Gluckman:And I said to a technical guy I worked with, I said, can you produce a vodka which, when people tasted blind alongside absolute, they said, I prefer it because it's smoother. People don't like the burn of booze. Nobody really likes the burning sensation on the tongue. They might say they do, but they don't. And we went to New York and did a few focus groups. And at the beginning of the end of each group, we did a blind tasting. And this guy was sitting behind a one-way mirror, reformulating. And at the end of our four groups, I think we did, eight out of ten people said, oh, I like this one better than that one because it's smooth, smoother.

23:18David Gluckman:And when I told them it was Smirnoff, they couldn't believe. But they said the product is so good that we'd buy it, even if it was Smirnoff. And I even went to the point of saying, well, I've done groups right across America, and everybody thinks that the Smirnoff, the idea of Smirnoff super premium vodka is a contradiction in turn. They said, no, no, no, no, we think that's a fabulous product. Talk about it. So that's a really challenging brief to be given. It feels like there's probably no brief that's come across your desk that you said no to. You can't. I was under retainer. I had to accept every single brief.

23:58Yeah, and that probably sounds like there's been a blessing then, because there probably are ones that you would have said no to if you were able to, that actually turned out to be a good thing.

24:05David Gluckman:I was never able to. I mean, I always have to say yes. I mean, I wouldn't have taken on a cigarette brief, for example, because I wouldn't like to persuade people to smoke cigarettes, having been addicted myself for many years. Or I wouldn't take on a brief for a political party, as ideal, if they didn't believe in. But, you know, when it came to this is my day job, I had to satisfy every brief that was given. What's the weirdest brief that's come across your desk? Weirdest? I'll give you one of the toughest ones which came up, which was to compete with Bacardi. Somebody came up and said, why don't we develop a brand of white rum to compete with Bacardi?

24:46David Gluckman:Which I think was one of the most enjoyable, satisfying briefs, but one of the biggest disasters as well. And it's quite interesting that because what do you do? You look at information about Bacardi. You look at ads. You see Bacardi ads are always men and women on beaches in the tropics somewhere, palm trees and stuff. How do you go about that? It was a weird brief, really. First thing was avoid, find a country which is nothing like Bacardi land, which is kind of difficult because Bacardi is all about the Caribbean, tropical islands and stuff like that. And so I took a globe of the world and went around the tropics and found Australia.