Advertising
The Man Who Kept Johnnie Walker Walking
Diageo CEO Ivan Menezes, who died on June 7, turned a lagging whisky brand into an international front-runner.
In 1999, Johnnie Walker was a 180-year-old Scotch whisky brand with a distinguished past and a depressing present. It had an image problem: Compared with newer brands, Johnnie Walker was perceived as fusty and outdated. It had a consistency problem: The brand was running 27 ad campaigns around the world, each with a different message. And it had a financial problem: Sales had declined 14 percent in three years. What’s more, the future looked grim: In the U.S. and elsewhere, drinkers were preferring wine and vodka to whisky.
Then a farsighted marketing executive changed branding history.
Ivan Menezes had been working at Johnnie Walker’s parent company, the international spirits corporation Diageo, for a few years before becoming global marketing director for the company’s beverage division. In an interview with the Scottish newspaper The Scotsman, he succinctly summarized the Johnnie Walker crisis: “We are losing older drinkers by the the bucketful, but only gaining new ones by the thimbleful.”
He could have let the brand die a slow, ignominious death or a quick and efficient…
