The Success Nuggets

The Success Nuggets #53 – David Gluckman: “That sh*t will never sell” (Until It Did)

• Season 3 • Episode 11

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In this episode of The Success Nuggets Podcast, we sit down with David Gluckman - the legendary mind behind Baileys Irish Cream and countless other global brands. From his roots in South Africa to the buzzing ad scene of London and the bold experiments that reshaped Ireland’s drinks industry, David shares the stories, strategies, and stumbles that defined a lifetime in branding.

It’s a masterclass in creativity and courage: how to turn “that sh*t will never sell” into billion-dollar success, how ideas are born in bars and boardrooms alike, and why the best solutions are often hiding in plain sight.

If you’re a marketeer, entrepreneur, or wisdom-seeker, this episode will give you a timeless playbook for spotting, shaping, and shipping your own big ideas.

🟡  Golden Nugget of the day  “Give one great idea time then pour it.” 

With thanks to One Golden Nugget and Maxwell Preece for editing, support and artwork

Speaker 2:

Amazing, amazing wisdom, entrepreneurs, success, success around the world.

Speaker 1:

This is the Success Nuggets podcast. Have you ever wondered what you could learn and how inspired you'd be if you asked incredible people from around the world about the patterns that drive progress? Get ready to dive into a world of insights and inspiration, of insights and inspiration. This is the Success Nuggets podcast, with the founder of the Digital Lightbulb and your host, david.

Speaker 2:

Abel, Welcome to the only podcast where branding meets bartending, where billion-dollar ideas are mixed as smooth as Baileys on ice. This isn't your dry lecture on marketing. This is the pour-it-straight, straight no chaser version of how some of the world's most iconic brands were born over late night dinners, chance encounters and the kind of experiments that start with whiskey and end with global phenomenon. If you're a marketeer chasing the next big hit, a wisdom seeker looking for patterns in success, or just someone who believes the best stories are told with a drink in hand, pull up a barstool, Because today we're uncorking the life and lessons of David, the man behind the brands. You've definitely sipped or seen, but never heard. The backstory to this, my friends, is where creativity gets tipsy. David, welcome to the Success Nuggets podcast. It's brilliant to have you on here For listeners meeting you for the first time. How would you introduce yourself? Where are you from originally? And if we turn the clock back, how far would we go? And what was your early life like before marketing and advertising?

Speaker 3:

Well, I was born, raised and educated in South Africa, born in a small coastal town called Port Elizabeth, but my family moved to Johannesburg after the war, that's World War II and I went to school with a singular lack of distinction and then, like all students I suppose his parents had a bit of cash. They wanted me to go to university. I think my mother wanted me to do law, my father just wanted to get me out of the house and I was going three very happy years at university, really not working particularly hard and doing a wide variety of subjects from Latin to constitutional law, to history of art, history of music, philosophy, english and psychology, which set me up perfectly for pub quiz machines, I suppose, but nothing much else. I came out of university I had no idea what I was going to do with my life at all and my father lent me a book called Madison Avenue, usa, which is about advertising in New York in the 1950s, and it was quite fascinating and really interesting and it sounded creative. Fascinating and really interesting and it sounded creative and I thought maybe I'd like to do something that was that used my imagination. And so I went out and made my first mistake I bought a suit and I went to some advertising agencies and because I'd been to university and because I had a suit, I was immediately pinpointed as an executive, an account executive, the kind of middleman, the bloke they call them suits, and these are the guys who liaise between the client and the real work. And I got stuck in that and had I taken a jeans and T-shirt, I might have become a copywriter, but I didn't.

Speaker 3:

Anyway, I did this for a couple of years in South Africa. I spent a stint doing market research, which I disliked, and then decided it was time to go to England. So I looked at my savings, found £35, and booked an ocean liner the Cape Town Castle to London. I left on the 3rd of November 1961, a couple of days after my 23rd birthday. I got to London and discovered that you couldn't get jobs in ad agencies at Christmas because they're all party. So eventually I did land a job in an ad agency in 61, 62, early 62, in Knightsbridge, which is a great place to work, and it was an American agency, a UK branch of a US agency. And I was to continue to be a suit because that's all I'd learned to do up to that point and I worked on some very interesting projects. I worked on P&G soap, which was I think it gave me a reality check that advertising was a very romantic profession, but basically what we were doing was trying to have a lot of fun selling soap or tea and stuff like that.

Speaker 3:

But I landed working on an account with a very charismatic Irishman called Tony O'Reilly. He was about 28 years old and he was the managing director of the Irish Dairy Board and up to that point, irish butter had no branding, had no identity and therefore it commanded a rock bottom price. Ireland had a very famous and high quality industry and O'Reilly wanted to change this. So there he was, 28 years old. I want to turn my Irish butter into a brand, and I was very junior in this and the agency turned Irish butter into Kerrygold. I think Kerrygold is now a global Irish brand. It sells in 50 countries around the world, it brings in billions to the Irish exchequer and it was a huge success. So, anyway, kerrygold had a really formative impact on my background, because I think it was more about selling a country and an economy than selling soap, both of which are equally important. But O'Reilly gave me a sense of commitment to the Irish cause, which could have been political, but it wasn't. It was economic.

Speaker 3:

Turning 30, having a family and wondering what I was going to do with my life, because I didn't see myself as a corporate type or a management figure. So I didn't see any future for me running an ad agency or even being one of the main board. I still wanted to do something creative, and so probably the most creative thing I ever did was create a new career for myself. The agencies were changing in the late 60s. They were acquiring new services. Things like research, design, public relations were all coming into agencies and I said why don't we provide a service helping companies to develop new products? And I just fancied that. I loved the idea when you got into that kind of thing. So two guys, a copywriter and I were shoved in an office and told to get on with it.

Speaker 2:

What year had we got to by this point? You'd started in 62. Had we reached the 70s by this point?

Speaker 3:

Early 69, we started with this particular business and we did quite well. We got work from companies like Bird's Eye, Lever Brothers, Young Lever Laboratories and we were feeling our way. We didn't really know what we were doing. We went to on courses to New York and in London and one of the things that I I went quite early on to a place called Strasa on Lake Maggiore in Italy and one of the guest speakers was a man from a drinks company and because I was one of the few English-speaking people in the group, I was assigned to take him out to dinner and we had a great evening and the each has the wine, and all I remember was sitting up at the bar after dinner and looking across at all the labels, the products on display, and asking him questions like why is there a bat on the Bacardi bottle? Why are there two dogs on black and white? And we had a great discussion At the end of the evening. We're setting up a new product development department in the agency. I think we just hit it off and I learned one of the key lessons about ideas and how they circulate. I think if you're dealing with people who are almost friends and with whom you share the same understanding of the problem. It makes a huge difference. So I started working with him on the development of a global white rum brand to take on Bacardi.

Speaker 3:

The brand eventually did emerge. It was called Green Island Rum. I don't think it's never really left the island, Mauritius, where it was founded I hope we had the good fortune to visit founded, I wrote, we had the good fortune to visit and I don't think Bacardi were ever scared in their boots that Green Island was coming to take them away. And, not least, going at very short notice on a plane to Mauritius for two weeks was no real hardship. And we developed another couple of brands en route because the plane lost the part in Nairobi.

Speaker 3:

So we went in to see the local office and developed a drink called Kenya Cane, because the guy said oh, if you guys are doing new products, can you do one for me? So we came up with Kenya Cane, which, which is a white spirit from Kenya, and subsequently one called Kenya Gold, which is a very good coffee liqueur. And from 69 to 72, we worked for people like Birdseye, developing fish and vegetable products, and I've created two Birdseye products that were pretty successful at that time. One was called Chicklets, which were small pieces of chicken aimed at kids and Cheezies. And then there were bite-sized butter-covered bits of cheese. They were created on the model of fish fingers, you know easy to eat, accessible, suitable for kids.

Speaker 2:

Sounds amazing. Now the audience, like me, are going to be captivated and they're going to say to me stop interrupting, david. But in that first 10 years just for any branding or advertising guys who are out there what were the key things they taught you about advertising and brand positioning that someone could take away?

Speaker 3:

Well, things like market research hadn't really happened then, so it's mostly based on our own thinking rather than anything else. We were cautious. There was an agency everybody admired in London at the time called CDP Collett, dickinson, pierce, and they were the most hot-shot creative agency in London. They only ever gave clients one solution to a brief. This is the campaign. If you didn't like it, either they'd rethink it or they'd tell the client to go somewhere else. We were always going to clients with this evening 15 or 16 answers, which was never satisfactory. I think we learned about strategy. I think that was important, something I'd not covered in all my early years in South Africa.

Speaker 3:

A lot of things happened from our agency during the 60s. We had a guy called Charles Sarchatchi who was a young copywriter who became one of the best-known advertising agencies in the UK, certainly, and maybe more widely. We had two American creatives called Bob Gears and Bob Gross, and they went off and set up their own agency the first one that went. That was listed on the stock market and their claim to fame was a campaign using the two characters called the flower graders. The ad said graded grain makes finer flour. One of my close friends, frank Lowe, went to become CEO of Quality and St Pierce and I think he learned about the buzz of creativity around the business. So I was just carrying ads, piles of ads, from the grading department to the clients and bringing back the ones that the client liked best, as I discovered subsequently, not the way to operate.

Speaker 2:

I'll come back to the buzz of the business in a minute, but one moment that really struck with me is is when you landed in the uk new suit, wrong job, small family. Now I've been there and I know the pressures of having a small family and I know and I've been lucky that I've always been. By the time you were 30 and you were pivoting. Now your own advice was kind of bluntly to yourself don't go back, and that's maybe a crossroads. People only see themselves in a movie. Was there a point where you were just like maybe I just got to stick out of this job? Or or was it the buzz of the business? You know your own determination Because you just carried on in the right place at the right time. That doesn't happen by accident, does it?

Speaker 3:

Well, there were various factors. I mean, I had a vision in my head which was I wanted to spend two years in London, two years in New York, pick up an old banger and drive to Rio and get the boat home and then bring it all to life again in South Africa. And I think the only time I ever wanted to go home was probably around Christmas 1961. I had no job, I was running out of money, I was living in a miserable flat, curiously opposite Selfridges, right in the middle of London, and it was a bad time. And I was surprised at how aloof the Americans and the English were, because there were six or seven people staying in the flat but nobody ever talked to you. People kind of all had their own thing to do.

Speaker 3:

But once I got employed I never thought of going back. But one of the problems we had then was my boat trip over was 35 pounds, I think, for three weeks on board ship with full board. To get back was a thousand. If you go back the following Christmas that would have cost me a thousand because a gross year's salary. So I couldn't afford. I didn't go back to South Africa for six years because I couldn't afford it and once I had a job, I had friends, I had a group to join and it was fabulous.

Speaker 2:

Would you say that decade, the sixts, I mean, I can only imagine the cultural references from the 60s and Knightsbridge, the swinging 60s. Would you say that was your best decade of your life? Was there more?

Speaker 3:

I don't think you realised about the 60s until afterwards, when you read about it in the papers. I mean you used to go up to Portobello Road, which was near where we lived, and people would be walking around in military uniforms. The music was all fantastic. I mean I think there's that musical thing where you always remember the tunes of your youth but you don't remember the tunes of other people's youth. So I have far less engagement with Oasis than I did with the Loving Spoonful or the Beatles or the Beach Boys.

Speaker 2:

Wonderful, the buzz of the business and the friction as your career advanced. We're sort of early mid-70s, you've started to realize there's friction in the business but but the buzz and finding people in common was a really useful tool for you kind of open the doors, like you say, with the common ground and your friend in italy and and and sounds great having dinner out there by majority inside it was winter, it was inside, but it was nice. Where did you go from there? What happened next?

Speaker 3:

We worked for a couple of years within Unilever and continued to work with the drinks company which is great and I was getting to do quite a lot of travel through places like the US, south Africa, which gave me a chance to see my family at somebody else's expense travel to places like the US or South Africa, which gave me a chance to see my family at somebody who was six months. My partner and I were hugely ambitious. We liked the idea of solving problems. We would have been quite happy to work as a twosome as long as we got good work. We opened up this office in Soho in Dean Street Very excited. We got a brief from Tom and briefs were very informal things in those days. The brief was a telephone call said we need something for Ireland. The Irish finance minister is issued an edict whereby brands developed for export would be given a 10-year tax holiday. I feel successful that was the brief.

Speaker 3:

And it wasn't something like you know. The board's desperate to solve this brief. It's just something that came in and it's quite daunting in some ways because you're creating something against no knowledge of competences, objectives or the people. Anyway, we went off home to the weekend. Monday morning came Hugh, my partner arrived and we started talking about it. I think he'd forgotten the brief the previous week. I said well, do you think there's anything in my experience of Kerry Gold that might impact on this brief? And he rather languidly said well, what happens if we mix cream and Irish whiskey? So I said well, there's only one way to find out let's get out the the shop, buy some cream, buy some Irish whiskey, come back to the office all excited, pour it into a glass, mix it around a bit and it tastes disgusting. That's utterly undrinkable, just unacceptable. But I was convinced that there was something there. So I said let's go back. Let's go look around the supermarket, find something. Because we had no laboratory, I mean, we just had bits of paper in our office and we found Cadbury's powdered drinking chocolate and I thought that's it.

Speaker 3:

Went up back up to the office. It tasted like a kind of chocolate milkshake with a slight kick and I thought you know why should all booze taste punishing? Why shouldn't it taste nice, justifying it to myself? So I said to Hugh do you want to come to IDV? I'll go and pitch it this morning. And Hugh was a bit of a snob really. He liked his fine wine, his single malts, and this particular product was not his thing. I don't think so. He said look, I don't think my suit's clean. So we used to wear jeans and then change the suits.

Speaker 3:

Hopped in a cab, headed towards Tom who was by now a friend rather than a client, and we'd felt along the same wavelength and I said I've got this new product product and I'm going to do a pitch. But he grabbed it and poured it into a glass and tasted it and said, hey, that tastes terrific, I think we should do it. And I said can you do it? He said we'll find somebody who can. And that was the end of phase one and he bought the liquid. He then said well, we've got to get to work on branding.

Speaker 3:

Branding was interesting, because branding you have to start with a name. It's the most important thing. And I remembered years before working with O'Reilly, he said to me if you ever develop an Irish brand after Kerrygold, which needs a family name, don't choose one like his. So I said why ever not? And he said because Irish names have a tendency to sound a bit whimsical. O'reilly's Irish Queen sounds a bit whimsical, it doesn't sound serious.

Speaker 3:

Bob Hugh, my partner, amy, assistant secretary, and me walking across the creek street to look at our new office and when we got there there was a restaurant below the office called Bailey's Bistro. And I remember when I saw the name Bailey's, I said that's the name. I think when you're really struggling with an idea or just toying with an idea, all the time it occupies you. It occupies me 24-7. I'd wake up in the morning wondering what the brand name was going to be and then suddenly it's as if you know you meet the girl of your dreams. There's the name on this glass saying Bailey's Bistro.

Speaker 3:

So I called up Tom and said how about Bailey's Irish Cream? And he said sounds terrific, let's do it. And there was no kind of messing about with looking at half a dozen names and testing them amongst consumers. We knew what the stuff in the bottle was going to be like. We knew what the name was now going to be, so we needed somebody to do a design, and our secretary's husband was a graphic designer.

Speaker 3:

I lived on a boat from the Thames at Kingston and so she said he'd love to do it. So I called him up and I said look, I want you to do something that has some of the ethos of Kerrygold and that lovely Irish bucolic idyll, and I'd like you to. But remember, it's going to be a booze product, so it's going to cost about five of our bottles, so it must look premium also. And a couple of days later, amy appeared with I don't know half a dozen or a dozen rough designs, and Tom and Hugh and I looked at them and chose the one that we all liked and that became the template for the original, but of all, it doesn't even end there.

Speaker 2:

There's so many more great success stories. They're all in your book. That shit will never sell. Where did that?

Speaker 3:

name come from. Well, that was interesting Bailey's. The CEO of the company, a man who became Sir Anthony Tennant, took a couple of bottles of riffing to New York at the beginning of 1975, when the brand had been launched in Ireland but not yet in America. His object was to persuade our man in America, who was a guy called Abe Rosenberg, who was a very successful marketer, and he showed him the bottle and he gave him some to taste and Abe looked at the label and said it reminded him of Vietnam uniforms, because this was, of of course, the height of the vietnam war. And then he said, when he tasted the product, he looked up and he said that shit will never sell and I thought it made a great title for my book.

Speaker 2:

It's a brilliant title. I've got the book because I don't want to give every story away. If it's possible, may you share one more how you took on the wine market through the 70s in the UK?

Speaker 3:

Well, okay, I can go back again. This is the 1970s and I wrote a figure that said that the average heavy drinker of wine. Now heavy drinkers account for 80% of consumption and are usually 20% of people. One in five people drink a hell of a lot of wine. But in fact a heavy drinker was defined as somebody who drank two bottles of wine a month. I mean, how many people would drink two bottles of wine at lunch? So two a month was the problem.

Speaker 3:

Also, the market was primarily dominated by the French. The problem Also the market was primarily dominated by the French, and the French made no concessions to people who were ignorant consumers. So you never saw French wine with English on the label. There was no kind of attempt to describe what the wine tasted like. So buying French wine was a complete lottery and people were quite diffident about wine.

Speaker 3:

In the 1970s, people would come to your house with a bottle of wine and say, oh, I hope this is good. And as I had associations with the wine business, they treated me as if I knew anything about it, which is strictly not true. And so the predominant wine was French and it was red. They treated me as if I knew anything about it, which is strictly not true. And so the predominant wine was French and it was red. And also, I think people weren't interested in whether the 72 tasted better than the 73. They just wanted something that was nice and easy to drink. It came in a smart bottle, it was a bit special, and one day I took a bottle of Blue Nun, which sort of satisfied a lot of things people were looking for in wine Easy for English people to see, easy to recognize on the shelf, easy to ask for. And the wine itself was nice and easy. It was a light, sweet German wine. And so I did something a bit unusual. I went to a supermarket and bought some red food coloring and I added it to Blue Nun. And I went along to one of these away days with the guys and I pulled out this red wine. It was blue, none disguised as a red.

Speaker 3:

I said we should go to French winemakers and get them to make us a French red that tastes like this and that became the template for the brand that we produced. And then, having got the wine, we then needed a package. And one of the problems with wines and even today, if you look at a wine shelf with French wines, they're all the same. It's incredibly difficult to. If you bought something called Du Cru Boucayu at the beginning of the month and chucked the bottle away, you'd forget what the name was by the end of the month.

Speaker 3:

So the company had a brand called Piat. It was called Piat de Beaujolais and it had a rather nice-shaped label, like a skittle, which is very different from the shape of French wines, normal French wines. And so we said can we use Piat? Because it also had the advantage of having a four-letter word, four-letter name, not difficult to remember P-I-A-T. And then, finally, we borrowed something from the cigarette market. Back in those days, people used to smoke cheap coupon cigarettes during the week, but on weekends they'd bring out a packet of Benson Hedges with a smart gold label, because you know you'd be showing off to your friends and wine was very much like that Wine wasn't seen as something you took for granted, it was special.

Speaker 3:

So we took the Piaf label, which was an oval shape, and made it gold and called the wine Piaf D'Or and it absolutely took off. I mean it became a and it was a wine that was tasted the same every year. You know, the same way that they even up whiskeys each year and blend, we do the same with wine. And there was a famous ad campaign called the French Adore le Pied d'Or, which is completely untrue but it was fun and it was taking the piss out of the French, which always went down well with the English. And Pied d'Or became a brand leader in wine in this country, in Canada, in Japan and Ireland. The French, of course, would never have accepted it. I love the stories in the book about wine spirits and also good. I mean I think there's some quite good stories about successes and failures. I mean I love my failures just as much as any other brands in the book and in my career.

Speaker 2:

What's your go-to failure that sticks out for you in your mind?

Speaker 3:

Well, when Diageo was formed in 1997, the two innovation departments from different companies blended together. One of the things they were trying to do was to create a Guinness whiskey. And after quite a lot of discussion, somebody said to me could you go along and see whether you can help? And one of the things that occurred to me is that they had a problem because they didn't have much access to Irish whiskey, which they'd have to buy from competitors. But it made no sense to me to make Scotch whiskey under the Guinness name, because Guinness is a part of Irish DNA.

Speaker 3:

And then I remember going around the distillery and somebody said to me first we make a beer and then we turn it into whiskey. And that was the moment because I said well, why don't we produce distilled Guinness? Forget about Guinness whiskey. And then the provenance of the brand would be Guinness, not the country, and we could make it today and sell it tomorrow, whereas whiskey you have to tie it up for three years, maturing in cost. We could make it taste any way we wanted. I love that idea, but nobody else did. But that's the way the world works.

Speaker 2:

You can't win them all, but you've won certainly enough. Just before we go, we have a signature question what is your one golden nugget for life or business?

Speaker 3:

I think my most. Well, I have one. I only ever present one idea, which is the best idea you can think of at the time. It may not be the ultimate idea, but I don't think there is such a thing. But I only present one idea because if you present as we did in my early career 15 ideas, you don't know what the answer is. You're expecting other people to make the decision and I think if you're going to be good at your job and true to your job, there should be one idea. That's the best thing that you can possibly do. And off the bayleys, that's all we ever did fantastic, david.

Speaker 2:

It's been such an honor having you on the show for everyone who's been listening. Once again, somebody having fun. David wasn't particularly ambitious, and you didn't think outside the box, did you that?

Speaker 3:

that wasn't a thing for you, well I think outside the box is a kind of bullshit statement of people saying look, we're incredibly creative and unusual. I think most of the solutions that we found were inside the box. There's a great quote in my book, which I'll dig out quickly, if I can find it, by a couple of academics the best ideas aren't hidden in shadowy recesses, they're right in front of us, hidden in plain sight. Innovation seldom depends on discovering obscure or subtle elements, but in seeing the obvious with fresh eyes. And they were called Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes and their book was called Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins.

Speaker 2:

That is excellent. Once again, thank you for all your practical insights and sharing your stories. It's been wonderful having you on. Thank you and audience. That shit will never sell. You can get it hardback paper, but I recommend the ebook, which I'm calling the experience book, just because of the amount of great content. Uh, digital links you can have as well there, so a book you can have on the go and find all the stories and everything behind it.

Speaker 3:

David, thanks for coming in it's been a great pleasure to meet you. Bye now.

Speaker 2:

Join David and his incredible guests next time on the Success Nuggets podcast, and to find out more, visit onegoldennuggetcom. Thank you for listening.