Lewis argued that a lack of investment in core brands including Crown Royal and Smirnoff in the US – while focusing more on tequila, for example – has hampered growth in the country.
“These are very big, very important brands, which quite frankly, we’ve not done a great job with. We need to go back and we need to do that. And we need to obviously recover the momentum in tequila. We’re confident we know how to do that, but it won’t be overnight,” he said.
“I see some weaknesses in core brands for a number of years that’s being covered up by the growth of tequila. And actually in the last year, we’ve seen tequila suffering quite considerably for a number of reasons, and … that’s why we’re losing share in North America.”
On Smirnoff, O’Keeffe added: “As I have travelled around the US in the last two months, I have been struck by how poor we look on shelf with Smirnoff. There are a number of packaging missteps that we have taken, which I am currently undoing.”
These moves include rolling back the use of rPET – “which is cloudy and opaque” – and moving the Smirnoff mark into virgin plastic (alongside glass).
Lewis outlined plans for a more balanced focus across core brands under his organisational restructure – something he said was “almost impossible if you’re [managing a portfolio] country by country” (as the business did previously). “We need to be much more strategic about how we think about the resources and the activity plans that we put together,” he said. “The new organisation allows me to do that.”