Paul Keogh has an impressive CV. As well as heading up his own management consultancy practice and sitting on a number of boards, including in the voluntary and charitable sector, the self-professed provider of “elder lemon advice” is adjunct professor at DCU’s Business School.
This last is particularly fitting, given that winning over students was at the core of one of his earliest marketing successes.
Since then he has gone on to take up senior roles in a string of heavy hitting businesses, including a gig as boss of record company PolyGram, worldwide marketing director of digger maker JCB and chief operating officer of home builder Ballymore.
Over the course of this varied career, a key component underpinning all his success has been an ability to be brave and follow his intuition, says Winterlich. It’s something marketers struggle to achieve today.+
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“Marketing is now professional. It’s trained. It’s a discipline. We’re well versed in theory. But sometimes with that professionalism comes a lack of risk taking,” explains Winterlich.
Keogh started out studying commerce in UCD and followed it up with a master’s degree in international marketing, a new course at the time.
“Back then marketing was only done by people like Procter & Gamble and Unilever. There weren’t too many marketing people here and it wasn’t defined, as it is today. Back then it was the person who looked after the customer, and demand,” he explains.
Working in the Horse Show House in Ballsbridge led to his first job in the drinks industry while on his J1 in America, delivering beer into Manhattan on trucks, thanks to two regulars, senior executives at Guinness.
He came home and secured a position in the marketing department at St James’ Gate, which at the time amounted to just 12 people responsible for stout, ale and lager.
The structure was simple too, with a brand manager reporting to a marketing manager who reported to the marketing director, “plus one guy in research for every brand”, he recalls.
Ahead of its time
He joined at an interesting time, just after the disaster that was the launch of Guinness Light. “’They said it couldn’t be done’ was the slogan and the lads in the pub all said ‘yeah, they were right’,” recalls Keogh. “It just bombed and was the most expensive brand launch failure of its time.”
As brand manager of Kaliber, his job was to launch its alcohol-free lager.
As the success of Guinness 0.0 attests, the brewery wasn’t exactly wrong, it was just ahead of its time. “It was a couple of decades too early. The market just wasn’t ready for it,” he says.
As it happened, Kaliber developed a niche market, helped by a launch that included runner Eamonn Coghlan, then at the height of his success.
Keogh went on to become marketing manager for Steiger Lager, and also handled Fürstenberg, before becoming marketing director for Budweiser at what was, by then, Diageo.
The task was simple: make Bud the best-selling beer in Ireland within five years.
“By that stage we had a bit of a track record in launching beers targeted to a particular audience. But then Bud came along with probably the most admired marketing department. Its ads were famous. In America it encapsulated the whole spirit of fun, college life, American football, baseball and all of that,” he explains.
There were over 500 people in the Anheuser-Busch marketing department alone.
“They had category marketing people for everything, for the beach parties, the end of term events, marketing managers for the off trade, the on trade, all of it. In Ireland we had just the marketing manager and at first the Americans found it hard that they were talking to just one person,” he recalls.
It didn’t help that one person, which was Keogh, that the early market research suggested there was no thirst for Bud whatsoever here.
“Still to this day I’ve never read a piece of research as negative. The summary was ‘no market for it in Ireland, no respect for American beer’. We were on a hiding to nothing,” he explains.
The only way through was to get creative.
At the time, as he points out, there was no social media to help. “Word of mouth was literally word of mouth. There was no way of mass communicating other than press, radio and TV,” says Keogh.
So he decided the best thing he could do was to try and get Bud into the hands of students at Dublin’s legendary Trinity Ball.
“That was the start of it. Students started to talk about Budweiser,” he says.
Life’s a beach
He scored another coup soon after by approaching the owner of the Dropping Well pub in Milltown, this time close to University College Dublin, and offering to run a beach party.
“This is where genius, madness and marketing all come into play because we wondered just how wackily could we do this,” he recalls.
In the end he poured sand into the entire pub, ankle deep, and invited students to come in their beach wear. “We’d pick the best dressed ... and they’d immediately win a trip to anywhere in the world.”
The pub had standing capacity for around 400 people at the time. Some 5,000 people queued to get in.
“It was a brilliant success and got coverage all over the media here, in the USA and Europe,” he says.
It had been a bold move but it was meeting the publican the next morning that took real bravery. “Typical marketing,” he laughs. “No one had thought about how we’d get the sand back out.”
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