Rock on Scotch: How celebrity is shaping the market

The relationship between brands and celebrities has always been rife with risk and subject to the unpredictable pendulum of a celebrity’s personal life.

A bitter business battle, ill-timed paparazzi snap or unexpected lack of charisma can leave the most robust partnerships in tatters and a brand’s image dented. Memorable missteps include Britney Spears being photographed drinking Coca-Cola while employed as the face of Pepsi, and Helena Bonham Carter declaring that she was “not really into makeup” while signed as the face of Yardley cosmetics. It is a wonder that celebrity endorsements should work at all, says Kevin Shaw, founder of the drinks brand and design agency Stranger and Stranger.

“Consumers aren’t dumb, so they know, in their heart of hearts, that some brand person has done a deal with some celeb marketing tea m and it’s all about the money, but they buy the great smell of Paris Hilton anyway,” he says. “It’s all just a willing suspension of disbelief at the junction of dreams and reality.”

Illusory they may be, but celebrity sponsorships have proven a powerful tool in the world of fashion, fragrance and wider drinks industry, to an extent. However their use within Scotch has been far more sporadic, and for good reason.

“They can smell it”, the actor Matthew McConaughey told The New York Times in July. “Millennials, and I know this for a fact, can smell solicitation, and it’s a turnoff. The best ads are not solicitous.”

McConaughey was referring to his role as creative director for Wild Turkey Bourbon, which includes writing and directing its ads. However the sentiment remains just as potent when applied to Scotch: overt marketing is a turnoff and credibility, or creating a believable illusion of credibility at the least, is vital. It is not enough to simply attach a famous face to a Scotch brand and hope people buy into its story. The story needs to be sold, and well.

Celebrity partners

Tony Enoch, partner and director at the marketing agency Nude Brand Creation, says: “It is dependent on truth and believability. Primarily [the celebrity] needs to enjoy it. You need to know something about the person and know that they have a genuine passion for that product. Otherwise it is fake, you will be found out and it won’t work.”

The Holy Grail of “money can’t buy” marketing partnerships are by association, when a celebrity chooses to publicly back a brand out of their untainted love for a product. Frank Sinatra’s taste for Jack Daniel’s and Sir Winston Churchill’s dedication to Pol Roger worked wonders for both brands. It is when money can buy you associations that brands expose themselves to risk.

Some Scotch brands navigate these murky waters better than others. Those that have chosen to sign up a celebrity have invariably been larger brands with big bucks to spend. Notable campaigns include Johnnie Walker’s “Joy Will Take You Further”, which was launched in 2015 and was fronted by, among others, the English actor Jude Law, the US rock band OK Go, the Mexican supermodel Montserrat Oliver and the professional motorcyclist Eva Håkansson.

In 2014 the former England striker Michael Owen signed a three-year partnership with Spey whisky, marking his first association with the drinks industry. Announcing the partnership, Spey said the footballer would act as a “Trojan horse” for its products in China, because of his widespread appeal in the region. However the first ad starring the squeaky-clean soccer ace was widely panned, described by commentators as at best “cringey” and at worst “staggeringly boring” and “agony to watch”. While subjective, such criticism highlights the pitfalls of an otherwise sound celebrity endorsement, so it is perhaps no surprise that some Scotch brands choose to avoid celebrity altogether. The perception of a celebrity is, after all, subjective and prone to curveballs, but for those who get it right the spoils can far outweigh the risks.

“Celebrity partnerships can add rocket fuel to brand activations, enabling a brand to reach an even wider and super-engaged fan base”, says Gillian Cooke, head of global brand communications for whiskies at Diageo, which re-launched its Haig Club whisky in 2014 with sports icon David Beckham and music mogul Simon Fuller.

Far from its first celebrity partner, Diageo has also worked with the hip-hop entrepreneur Sean Combs, otherwise known as P Diddy, on Cîroc vodka, which achieved an 18% sales growth last year thanks in part to the success of its Diddy-endorsed pineapple variant.

Cooke says: “On Haig Club we wanted to continue the approach set with Cîroc, we didn’t want a celebrity endorser. We wanted a partner like Sean Combs, who is genuinely committed to the success of the brand, and we found this in David Beckham. His level of commitment, like Combs’s, is rare and extraordinary and gives us confidence that we are working with a fantastic partner that will enable us to grow the brand for the future.”

Beckham’s partnership with Diageo was somewhat surprising, not because of his global clout and near-universal appeal, but because the marketing of Scotch as a category has typically been understated in its delivery. It has been associated with exploration and quiet discovery rather than overt celebrity sponsorship and in-your-face advertising. Furthermore Beckham was never known for his love of whisky: in fact he was a newcomer to the category when the brand launched, deliberately perhaps matching the status of consumers that Diageo was targeting.

Cooke insists: “From the beginning, David Beckham has talked about the appeal of whisky and his interest in learning more – never has he claimed to be an expert, and that’s probably one of the most charming things about the partnership, that he has taken his own journey into the world of whisky and in so doing brought others along with him.”

Notably, Beckham’s partnership came at a time when the Scotch category was going through a global decline, with exports having dropped since 2013. Fortunately, the future now looks brighter, with the Scotch Whisky Association reporting earlier this year that this decline is showing signs of slowing. In 2015 the value of Scotch whisky exports reached £3.86 billion, a drop of 2.4% from £3.95bn in 2014, but a slowdown on the 7% fall from 2013 to 2014. The total export value of Scotch, meanwhile, is now 56% higher than a decade ago. While they show a sector in recovery, these figures underline a need for Scotch to appeal to a fresh generation of drinkers to secure its future. Haig Club was never expressly targeted at whisky connoisseurs already familiar with the category, but a fresh batch of consumers, giving it a licence to break the mould.

Cooke says: “We wanted to bring a product to market to recruit the next generation of Scotch drinkers and to do so, it has required us to be disruptive and think beyond the ordinary in all that we do – presenting the whisky in a square blue bottle; launching a single grain Scotch whisky at scale when the rest of the world was talking about single malts and blends, and of course the partnership with David Beckham and Simon Fuller.” Building further upon the idea of “approachability”, last month Diageo released a second variant, Haig Clubman, a single-grain Scotch aged in American oak former Bourbon barrels, and intended to be mixed with cola.

Alternative avenues

While Haig Club appears to be successfully playing into the hands of a specific segment of the Scotch market, it is not a model many producers would seek to emulate. In fact, securing a celebrity endorsement could not be further from the minds of many Scotch marketers.

George Grant, sales director for Glenfarclas and 6th generation family member of the company behind the brand, says: “With any celebrity endorsement, if the celebrity screws up in any way it brings your brand into disrepute. Using a celebrity for a new product gives you notoriety very quickly, but the public in the US and UK is very fickle and celebrities don’t have a long shelf life.”

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For millennials, attaching a celebrity to a brand is perceived as a “gimmick”, Grant believes. What millennials want is “the real thing and authenticity”, he says.

Instead of going after celebrity appeal, Glenfarclas has, like many Scotch and world whiskey brands, chosen to highlight their own celebrities: master distillers, sales directors and brand ambassadors. After all, who is a more credible figure than the person that made the malt?

“It has been happening for years in the US,” Grant says. “I think today people do want to know more about the people behind the product. The people that the big companies are using are people that have been working in the industry for more than 30 years. They know the brand inside out and they are the ones that have the passion and belief in the brand.”

Enoch agrees that using a figure from within the trade overcomes the need for credibility. “These people have often worked their way up to become master distillers. That’s believable. Some of these characters are more flamboyant than others. Whether they can achieve the same level as celebrity chefs, I’m not sure, but I can see people like that coming forward.”
In keeping with this, last month Glenfarclas launched the final limited edition expression of its Family Collector Series – the Glenfarclas 1976 40 Years Old VI – to mark Grant’s 40th birthday. The spirit was matured in Sherry casks and bottled at 43.7%, and 1,500 bottles will be available worldwide representing the last of the family’s 1976 casks, with a modest silhouette of George Grant featured on the bottle.

“We have history and a heritage and are family-owned and independent, so if we are going to do anything we will put ourselves on the front line”, Grant says. “We know our brand better than anybody.”

Targeting men

Regardless of a Scotch brand’s approach to celebrity, there is an elephant in the room – where are all the women? Looking back, Hollywood actress Ava Gardner, whisky lover and former wife of Frank Sinatra, was famed for once telling an interviewer: “I wish to live to 150 years old, but the day I die, I wish it to be with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of whisky in the other”. But five decades later the stereotype that whisky is a “man’s drink” is still hugely pervasive, with women playing a minor role in its promotion.

Bar Christina Hendricks’s recent ambassadorship with Johnnie Walker and a brief cameo by Eva Longoria in Chivas Brothers’ The Venture Competition, the world of Scotch whisky is starkly bereft of female celebrities.

Of these two, Longoria’s contribution was limited to a cocktail competition, rather than a specific brand, while Hendricks, who was appointed Johnnie Walker’s brand ambassador in 2011, was rather disappointingly quoted as crediting her initial love of whisky to “thinking her husband looked sexy” when he ordered a dram. It seems that even when a female is used to front a campaign, men are still the primary target, which reinforces the perception that when a female is used to promote Scotch, it is to make the drink appear “sexy” rather than credible.

“Whenever we have briefs that ask us to approach the product as unisex it is still predominantly targeted at men”, Enoch admits. “Our clients know their market and where their sales are generated. If they were to launch a campaign fronted by a women, they would possibly be going after a smaller slice of the market, so I think it’s a slow process.”

This is despite females now making up 37% of whisky consumers in the US, while nearly a third of whisky drinkers in the UK are now female, according to the food and drink trend forecast company Future Laboratory.

Despite growing consumption among women, brands are, perhaps rightly, wary of exclusively targeting women with “feminine” brands, which Damien Heary, global innovation and planning director at William Grant & Sons, speaking at last year’s Worshipful Company of Distillers’ City Debate, said would be an “embarrassing mistake”, warning producers to avoid “being patronising” toward women in their approach.

Shaw adds: “If you want to sell Scotch to women then seeing cool women drinking it won’t do any harm. Hell, if Helen Mirren thought something was good then I’d try it too because she comes across as a no bullshit kind of woman. It’s just got to be the right person for the right reason.”

Whatever side of the celebrity fence a Scotch brand sits, there is no doubt that signing up a famous face can make good business sense, particularly if the brand is relatively unknown or brand new.

A celebrity endows a brand with a face and personality rather than that of a corporation, the power of which cannot be underestimated.

“Would Cîroc be anywhere without Piff Doddy? asks Shaw, teasing intended. “Don’t you think that funny little Tequila would be DOA without Clooney? Remember when Jay-Z had that spat with Cristal and flipped the hip-hop world over to Brignac?”

The problem is that celebrities are human and far from perfect, prone to publicised self-destructive acts and at the mercy of fickle public opinion. Given the Scotch category’s successful reliance on tradition, heritage and craftsmanship to sell its brands, it is understandable why some brands choose not to take a risk on celebrity. And that’s before you consider the cost involved in procuring one.

But with exports still in decline, there is a clear need to recruit the next generation of Scotch drinkers. A celebrity partnership is perhaps one way of achieving this, when executed with caution. The trick is finding a celebrity with a genuine interest and love of a product, a vested interest in a brand’s financial success and who is seemingly untouchable – which is easier said than done.