We’ve launched Distilled 2025 - our annual Consumer Trends Report.
Given your very successful career in the agency world, why did you decide to join Diageo?
I had spent 25 years in agencies – from being a graduate trainee at J. Walter Thompson to Global CSO of Leo Burnett and CEO of M&C Saatchi – and in that time I had worked with Diageo on numerous occasions. I knew Diageo as an outstanding brand builder. They had always been willing to plan and shape the future and have one foot in the now but equally, have one foot very firmly in the future.
And I loved the role. The first person to do this job at Diageo was Michael Harvey, who founded the function in 1997 – when Diageo was formed – and he created it in the image of agency planning, and that's why it's called Consumer Planning, instead of Consumer Insight.
That sounds like a bit of a revolutionary idea for the time
Yes, for a client to set up like that was revolutionary, and it's something that I saw firsthand from the agency side. And it led to the creation of the famed “Diageo Way of Brand Building” (DWBB), which Michael designed. And here I am, all these years later, and DWBB is one of the products my team owns. We have just designed, built and launched its fourth edition. I love the way life works out sometimes.
Can you break down for the layman what Consumer Planning is?
It's the journey from understanding the consumer by getting to the heart of some powerful insight and then building creatively with that insight. You get to ideas and then campaigns, and then output, like advertising, and finally measuring the effectiveness of what you've done.
At Diageo, we focus on understanding how people socialise, because if we can understand how people socialise, we can understand where drinking fits in, and then we can win share.
Is that how it's always been defined – how people socialise?
That's a frame that I have brought in, and it's helped a lot because, apart from anything else, it makes us less presumptuous about the role of our products within socialising. It's also been very useful because socialising has altered so much in the last few years. Diageo aims to be the company which understands socialising better than anyone.
There's then also a layer which is about future proofing the business. As a team, we've built a significant future trends capability because, at Diageo, we want to shape the future, not just have it happen to us. And this goes back to our patience as a business. We build distilleries that are not going to produce mature Scotch for 10 to 20 years – we put liquid away in casks and wait. The passage of time is actually one of the most important processes in our business. We don't simply let the future happen to us. We invest in it, plan for it, and shape it in order to win in it.
What was the genesis of the Foresight System?
When I arrived in the business in 2021, I was very clear that we needed to focus more of our thought and resources on the future. While looking at this with the team, I asked about our horizon scanning methodology. And there was an embryonic product called “Foresight” and the team took me through their vision for what it could become. It sounded great and we challenged ourselves to build it into something more substantial. Then we tested it across the business, and people loved it. We upped the investment, and three years later it's become a profoundly influential system of thought. The team have done a phenomenal job.
And how did Distilled emerge from this?
The Distilled Report examines the “preferable future” – this is a future that sits between what you might call a “possible future” and a “probable future”. This “preferable future” is Diageo’s to shape and it’s this sweet spot that we focus on.
In Distilled we're measuring global conversations that are happening online. Like any conversation you can work out what the semantic threads are. You can aggregate those threads into big themes, or you can trace them through to something more granular. Either way, you can use them as signals from a future that is starting to happen. It has proved to be a stable method, and a lot of what we started to predict three years ago is now maturing and coming true and driving the success of our brands.
Do you have an example of that?
Guinness is a great example. There are many reasons why Guinness is doing so well. But in recent years it has very deliberately and successfully tapped into the macro trend of “Collective Belonging”. The Guinness team has democratised the brand, expanded its relevance through fantastic innovations that enable you to drink the perfect pint whether at home, in the pub or in the third space. We have built this ever-deeper sense of a Guinness community at a time when people’s desire to be part of something bigger than themselves is growing and growing. Collectivism is one of the few big generational value shifts of the last 50 years, and Guinness is at the heart of it.
You must be very proud of what your team has achieved in the last three years with the Foresight System?
I absolutely am! I think it has given the business a common language for understanding and decoding the future. Getting to that alone is powerful. Beyond that it has identified a set of macro trends that are directly relevant to our business – and I am proud in what we have done in then breaking those trends down into more specific local regional conversations so we can use it to improve our tactical execution as well as our strategic thinking.