The Big Interview: Andrew Cowan

If it happens to be 22 September and you remember to say ‘Happy Arthur’s Day’ to a sober-looking chap as you serve him his pint of Guinness, and he suddenly starts dancing round the bar punching the air with untrammeled glee, then that’ll be Andrew Cowan you’ve got there.

Cowan took the post of country director for Diageo GB in July after running the drinks giant’s Irish operation. He had arrived there “at the tail-end of the ‘Celtic Tiger’,” he says. “The credit pipeline had stopped. It was the toughest time of my career.”

And it was at that point they invented Arthur’s Day, the global celebration of Guinness’s founding father, an initiative that Cowan is particularly proud of.

“Rather than spending money on ads, Arthur’s Day was part of a strategy to drive consumption in the pub. It could have been a self-indulgent celebration of the Guinness brand but we worked with the on-trade around the idea that the pub is the only place to drink a pint of Guinness.”

With the black stuff accounting for nearly four in every 10 pints sold, “Guinness is in the bloodstream of every single pub in Ireland”, says Cowan. And he’d like to import some of that feeling into Great Britain.

“Guinness is unique, and it’s becoming cooler all the time. Look how much we sell around the rugby and St Patrick’s Day. Now we need to champion the relationship between a great pub and a great pint of Guinness.

“The care and attention paid to pouring a pint is part of Guinness in Ireland. Can we take that into the mainstream pub here?”
Cowan thinks we can, and with a field quality team of more than 250 people “we’ve got the resources”, he says.

Already the company’s Raise the Bar training programme, covering the perfect pour and merchandising, as well as carrying out ‘blitz’ cleans and upgrading coolers and taps, has increased Guinness sales by up to 7.2%.

“It creates a halo effect around the draught offer,” says Cowan. “A great pint of Guinness says it’s a great pub.”

Still feeling his way a little bit after only a few months in charge of such a large and complex business, it’s understandable that he’s at his most comfortable talking about Guinness.

Cowan joined Diageo in 2008 after spending most of his career with GlaxoSmithKline, where he first got to know pubs as sales director for Lucozade and Ribena.

“I led the distribution of Lucozade into the on-trade in competition with Red Bull,” he says. “We had no routes to market before then so I set up deals with regional brewers and over 18 months built a network. It gave me an insight into the pub trade.”

He was enticed to Diageo by being offered the role of commercial director for Northern Ireland at a time when the company had big growth plans.

“I’d never been to Northern Ireland before I arrived for work on that Monday morning. My introduction was a taxi ride from the airport that took me through some places that got me a bit worried. It wasn’t like south-west London.”

He soon settled into the task, though, focusing on the draught beer that drives the Northern Ireland market.

“Moving to Diageo was the best career decision I’ve made,” he says. “It’s been really exciting, the brands are hugely dynamic and known across the world. I enjoy working with bars and seeing a great bar doing everything the way it should.” And that, really, is what lies at the core of Cowan’s plans for Diageo GB.

“There’s an opportunity to get the consumer to return to the pub more often. Where we can make a difference is in how you construct offers — the perfect pint, new products, the latest Smirnoff flavour. Added-value drinks are key.”

He gives the example of Captain Morgan Spiced Rum. It’s an interesting one. The Captain Morgan figure himself had been virtually retired to the old sailors’ home, not seen as fitting the brand’s youthful profile.

But now he’s back as a physical presence, bringing character to the brand in the pub.

“You can only do that through brilliant customer relationships,” says Cowan, and that’s something Diageo is being quite systematic about.

Across the road from the country director’s office at Park Royal in west London is a new ‘customer collaboration centre’.

It’s split into nine zones. Around a central space for meetings and presentations it recreates all the environments in which people drink, including a pub.

The idea is that, by having the conversation here, rather than in an office far removed from where consumers are actually going to buy your product, it can stimulate fresh ideas.

“It’s something we planned with our customers over a period of 12 months. We need to understand what they are trying to achieve, to challenge the boundaries and open
our minds.
“Doing that in an environment where the customer sits can bring to life opportunities far better, we can see through the lens of the consumer. It’s something the fast-moving consumer goods guys have been doing for a long time.

“We want to collaborate with customers on that, rather than just telling them what we’re doing.

“We’ve not got all the answers here, and they have an invaluable experience to bring. We’d like to see a massive explosion of customer partnerships.”

One area that collaboration will concentrate on is on creating a more premium offer. Cowan is conscious that premium brands tend to under-perform in pubs.

“It’s a matter of getting the fundamentals right,” he said. “It’s hugely profitable if you get the right brand and a great delivery by well-disciplined barstaff. People place a value on that.

“But how far you premiumise depends on the pub, and it’s up to us to have the right conversations with customers so that we can put appropriate brand portfolios in there.”

Then there is the thing that Diageo has always been famous for — creating innovative new brands and brand extensions that can bring an extra dimension to a pub’s drinks offer. And certainly there’s no let-up on that score either.

Cowan is especially keen on the possibilities for Jeremiah Weed, a 4% ABV bottled ‘brew’ designed to be poured over ice into a glass like a jam jar. It comes in two styles, Root Brew, with a ginger flavour, and Sour Mash Brew, with a Bourbon-infused flavour.

A 2.8% ABV version of Guinness has been trialled, and Guinness Black Lager is currently being tested in Northern Ireland.

“We also have more ambition for flavoured Smirnoffs. There’s plenty of scope for finding interesting ways of mixing products, and even at the basic level we have simple cocktail lists for pubs.

“The resources are there”, Cowan emphasises, and not for the first time. The new man is making clear his aim to work more closely with pubs and allay suspicions that Diageo is only interested in the supermarkets.

“Are we too focused on the off-trade? I’d just refer you to what we’re doing — it’s pub-focused. The work around getting the right brands behind the bar and a quality delivery is all about giving people more reasons to visit the pub over the long term. And we do that because pubs are where our brands show up best.

“If I want to achieve anything at the moment, it’s getting the pub trade to think — ‘Diageo, they’re behind us’.”

My kind of pub​

“I don’t go to working men’s clubs or the top-end bars, I want a mid-range pub where you get an eclectic mix of drinkers and people.

“I live in Kingston-upon-Thames, south-west London, and there’s nothing better on a Sunday afternoon than sitting by the river with my kids and my partner drinking a cool pint of Guinness at the Boaters Inn.

“It does a cracking pint of Guinness, too. The barman there wished me a happy Arthur’s Day when he served my pint — and you won’t have seen a more delighted country director!”

Key dates​

1989 ​
Andrew Cowan joins SmithKline Beecham as graduate trainee

1995 ​
Moves to Boots

2000 ​
Returns to the now GlaxoSmithKline as director of sales, driving Lucozade and Ribena in the on-trade

2004 ​
Is commercial vice-president

2008 ​
Joins Diageo as the commercial director

2009 ​
Moves south as commercial director of the Republic of Ireland

2011 ​
Appointed country director for Diageo GB