Lose the Mystery, Keep the Magic: In Conversation with Sir John Hegarty
He’s one of the advertising world’s living legends, the man behind some of the most iconic campaigns ever devised. But Sir John Hegarty also owns a vineyard and is passionate about wine.
He talks to Areni Global about the power of creativity, and what it takes to come up with some really compelling ideas that would inspire a whole new generation of consumers to think about wine in a new, more attractive way.
The below interview has been shortened and edited for clarity. It is only part of a much longer, fascinating interview that you can find on every podcasts platforms.
Areni Global:
What do you do, in a very few sentences, because you do so much?
Sir John Hegarty:
I spent something like 50 years in the advertising industry. I helped found Saatchi & Saatchi in 1970, then a European agency in ‘73, and then my own agency with two other wonderful partners, John Bartle and Nigel Bogle in 1982. And that was called Bartle Bogle Hegarty, of which I am the Hegarty. We turned that into a very, very successful agency. We eventually had nine offices around the world, worked on brands like Levi’s and Audi and Johnny Walker and British Airways and Unilever and big, big brands like that. So that was my experience in advertising. I was a Creative Director, creating the work and also directing it. That’s what I was doing.
I left the advertising industry in 2014 and founded The Garage here in Soho that same year. Garage is an early stage investment company helping people get their ideas up off the ground and hopefully creating a success out of those. We find them funding and then guide them, help them with building their brand, which of course where the value resides. And for the last three years we’ve been developing talks on creativity, getting people to businesses to understand the value of creativity.
What connects you to the world of wine?
I own a vineyard in the Minervois in France. We’ve had that, my wife and I, since 2000 and 2003 was our first vintage. The hottest vintage for about a hundred years. Great start in the world of wine! We produce 80% red, 20% white out of the classic local grape varieties: Grenache, Syrah, Carignan, Mourvedre etc… We have 15 hectares under vine, we went organic in 2008 and then biodynamic in 2010.
We sell it throughout the world. Obviously we distribute a lot through France, and in the UK we are with Wanderlust Wines, which is wonderful. For some reason, one of our little brands called Open Now does incredibly well in Japan, so it’s always bizarre. We produce about 35,000-40,000 bottles a year, whcih is not huge but big enough that you have to sell it!
I have heard you’ve been introduced as a marketing legend and as an advertising legend. What title does fit you best in the sense that how would you define the differences between marketing and advertising?
Well, first of all my family would say “what’s all this legend thing!” But then in term of differences, it comes from the words; always look at the word and what the word tells you. Marketing comes from the word ‘market’, to understand the market, to try and anticipate its needs, to try and make sure you are serving it the goods and products that it wants. That’s what marketing does.
Advertising means communicating with your audience. It comes from the Latin word ‘advertere’ meaning to turn towards. So you are trying to get people to pay attention to what it is you are saying. Those are the two branches, so to speak, of the communication industry. One is understanding the market, what’s happening in the market, what things are going on. And advertising is communicating with your audience in a way that they can be inspired by, but also that they will remember or understand all the things that you are telling them.
Advertising means communicating with your audience. It comes from the Latin word ‘advertere’ meaning to turn towards. So you are trying to get people to pay attention to what it is you are saying.
Sir John Hegarty
I’ve heard you said marketing is not needed if you make an exceptional product; marketing is most useful when it comes to selling the average. That made me react in many different ways. There are some cultures like France for example, that would differentiate fine wine versus luxury wine through their use of marketing: luxury wines need marketing to get sold at that price, but fine wines because they’re inherently beautiful, aesthetic, exceptional, sell themselves. But what happens if you’re not that great?
The point I was trying to make was, we often spend too much time talking about the marketing of a product rather than the quality of the product. I used to be in client meetings when I’d sold the creative work and I’d politely have to stay there to listen to them talk about the rest of their business so that I showed interest and helped sell the work. And so often I’d be listening to a client talking about their sales and “things aren’t going particularly well in the northeast, and maybe we should do a bit of promotion and maybe our distribution isn’t quite right”, all those kinds of things that affect marketing.
And I’d be sitting there thinking, nobody’s actually said, why don’t we make a better product? And I think the danger in the world we’re in is we focus so much on the marketing and not enough on the quality of the product. Get the quality of the product absolutely brilliant, as best as you can make it and then ask how are we going to communicate that to people? And so that’s really the point I was trying to make. And I think the danger, as I’ve said, is that we get obsessed about marketing rather than obsessed about the quality of the product.
The wine world might be the reverse. We care so much about the quality of the product, we put so much energy into making the best wine that we can that we sometimes undervalue marketing.
Well, I think there is a problem in the wine world in that they don’t really appreciate how to communicate to people.
I’ve given a talk on this and it’s called “lose the mystery, keep the magic”. And as an industry, we do our best to keep people out. We make it very, very confusing to buy wine regions, grape varieties, years… All of the things that make it hard to purchase wine and open doors to people. So I would say the wine world has to simplify how it presents its product. Because nobody likes to look stupid. You don’t expand a market by making people feel foolish.
Nobody likes to look stupid. You don’t expand a market by making people feel foolish.
Sir John Hegarty
So yes, make the product as brilliantly as you possibly can, make the best product you possibly can. But don’t forget to communicate about it. I think we don’t communicate enough the difference between organic and non-organic. I don’t think we sufficiently communicate the difference between irrigated and non-irrigated. You do that in other foods, why don’t you do it in wine?
I think sometimes people have a bit too much of an ego when it comes to their wine and think that just because they’re really good in their context, that’s going to make them successful in a bigger context. Which was then my question: do you have to choose a strategy that would highly focus on marketing or that will highly focus on advertising, depending on your understanding of your own quality?
When I worked in advertising, a client would often come in for what we call a credentials presentation. They’d come in, they’d talk about their industry. And so often or not, they would say, of course our industry isn’t like everybody else’s industry. And you’d go, oh yes it is. All industries are amazingly similar.
The wine industry, I would argue, is a completely different case. Think about it—no brand leaders, nobody’s leading the market. A market that thinks £8 is about as much as you should spend on a bottle of wine doesn’t understand quality or the heritage doesn’t understand it. Even when tasting a great wine, they may not like it.
So you’ve got a very, very complicated market. If I parked a Ferrari outside your front door, you wouldn’t walk out and go, “Oh my God, terrible looking car”. I’m sure you’d look at it and go, “amazing car”. It may not be for me, but you’d recognize quality. Our problem is we are a very, very complex market and nobody’s leading it. Nobody’s driving it. Certainly in the UK, something like 90% of sales go through a supermarket. A supermarket is not that interested in expanding your knowledge. It just wants to give you a value wine that satisfies you. So in a way, we’re in a world where everybody’s driven. I use the car analogy a lot where everybody’s driven a Ford escort, but nobody has got into a Ferrari. So they never experience better. They experience cheaper wines and they think that’s what wine is.
Why don’t we have wine brands?
Well, because there aren’t big enough people making good wine to actually command a market and drive it. It’s a scale thing.
That’s why I say you’ve got to simplify it and you’ve got to kind of make it easy for people to go, ”This is an expression of Grenache that isn’t like somebody else’s”. And tell people on the bottle. How many bottles of wine do you pick up where they explain what it is that they’ve done and why? What you get on the back is either nothing or you get some piece of information that says “we’re passionate about wine”. Well, of course you are passionate about wine! That’s why you are bloody well making it! It’s a nonsense word to use.
We don’t give people real pieces of information so they can make decisions.
From your experience, when you are in a business which is about communicating about greatness and quality, what’s the best way to do that?
You start from the product and you look at why this product is better. And then you advertise that in a way which captures people’s imagination. You do it with emotion, you do it with storytelling.
You start from the product and you look at why this product is better. And then you advertise that in a way which captures people’s imagination.
Sir John Hegarty
When we worked on Levi’s, the great famous 501 campaign, we took all aspects of the jean, how it was made, the stitching double stitched, how you could wash it and wash it and wash it. And we did communications around those issues, but wrapped in an emotional story that captures people’s imagination. So that’s the way you create great advertising. The brand is at the heart of the communication, and you find something intriguing about it that you turn into a story that makes it come alive for people.
The three main takeaways from this Levi’s campaign were: 1. use your heritage to create your future, 2. Make it relevant to today 3.Make the product the hero – It’s all about the product. We do talk about the product, we do talk about heritage. I guess the problem is that we don’t make that intriguing and into a story.
No, we can’t, because individually we don’t have enough money. We don’t have the budget. But regions could. So for instance, my region within the Languedoc is Minervois. Now why haven’t Minervois created communications about what makes it special? They don’t do that. And what they do is they do various trade shows. They don’t try and expand the market.
Twenty years ago, Eric Asimov – the wine write for the New York Times, called the Languedoc the most exciting wine region in the world because of the diversity of its offerings. Now why hasn’t the region adopted that? Why didn’t they do a campaign saying “Languedoc Roussilon: the Most Exciting Wine Region in the World”, so that people can bring a bottle of Languedoc wine at a dinner party and say: they can put the bottle on the table and say, “I bought a bottle of wine from the Languedoc. Why? Because it is the most exciting wine region in the world”. What would everybody around that table say? They’d go, “oh, that’s interesting. I’d like to try that.”
But we don’t do it. What we do is we have a completely meaningless communication with our audience. We don’t drive our region. And so the only message we are left with is we are good value.
Can you think of another industry that has collective branding like this, and should we invest in this more?
No, I can’t. And that’s why I said the wine industry is almost like any other industry because it’s so diversified, which in many ways is its strength, but also its weakness.
And we know that collective brands in wine are fundamental. We’ve asked people, what kind of attributes does a wine need to be fine? And the fact that it needs to come from a well-known region is always one of the top three.
I think with wine, you’ve got to be very courageous in a sense. If you are going to— I keep using this analogy—if you are going to some friends for dinner and you’ve bought a Bulgarian red, what will your friends think? They’ll probably think, oh, John’s just gone out and bought a cheap Bulgarian wine because they have no concept of Bulgaria. So the region has to give credence to your purchase. When you put it on the table, it has to say something about you because a gift says something about you. But even when they’re buying it for themselves, it’s saying something about themselves.
So even when you are buying wine for yourself, you are constantly reminding people of why you’ve made a good decision and not bought something from somewhere else. What does your bottle of wine say about you when you put it on the table? And that’s where a region should be coming up with a point of view that says what it says about you.
You’ve got to think about wine. What is actually wine offering? What is it actually doing? Is it about conversation? Is it about food? Does it makes any meal taste better? There are lots of ways you could come in it, but there’s no overall body that goes, this is what we’re going to do for wine in the way that the whiskey market has done for example with Johnny Walker. These are big markets and brand that have redefined how people think about whisky. We don’t have the budget to get people to redefine how they think about wine.
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What does it take to have those creative campaigns? What’s the minimum budget that you need?
It is about the power of the idea that matters. In today’s world where you’ve got social media and it’s easier to get a message out there, it’s just the power of the idea that is going to be transformative. In the previous world of communication, television was very expensive, newspapers were expensive, all of those things were expensive. But now you could start on social media with a brilliant idea about wine, and then let that catch on.
How do we talk about wine that actually captures people’s imagination? Nobody’s really done that. No region has done it. Individual brands, individual vineyards can’t afford to do it. I always say revolutions start at the edges and they work in, they don’t start with a million pound budget. They can start with a very small idea and it catches fire. That’s the genius of a great idea: it gets passed on, and that’s what we need in the wine world, and we don’t have it. We don’t have people who think like that. And the regions could be the people who do that.
You need clarity of thinking. Then of course, you’ve got to have somebody who can judge your idea, because not all ideas are great, and that does require a bit of knowledge, but it isn’t about money, it’s about the will to do it.
Revolutions start at the edges and they work in, they don’t start with a million pound budget.
Sir John Hegarty
Creativity solves problems. Yes, money can solve problems, but people forget that a great idea solves problem. And that’s what we need people to understand. We need people who think imaginatively about wine.
What would be your definition of creativity?
Well, my definition of creativity is it’s a very simple one. The first thing you have to accept is that we are creative. That’s what separates us from the animal kingdom. . A dog doesn’t get up in the morning and think about the meaning of life. We get up in the morning and think about the meaning of life. What am I doing? What am I going to do? How am I going to change things? That’s us being creative, that’s us employing our creative thoughts.
Most people when asked to define creativity, they go, oh, it’s taking a number of disparate things, putting them together to make me look at something afresh. That’s very good, but that’s the process of creativity.
What is the philosophical heart of creativity? The philosophical heart of creativity is it is an expression of self.
And that’s very similar with fine wine because one of the five pillars that we’ve defined is the winemaker’s vision. Fine wine doesn’t happen by mistake.
Absolutely. Now obviously some people earn their living by being creative. So what you can do is you can hone your ability to be more creative. You can learn how to be more creative just as you can learn how to sing better. You may not go to the Albert Hall, but we can all learn how to be better.
So, the first thing to understand: you are creative. Two, creativity is an expression of yourself, your feelings, your emotions.
The way you dress, the way you think, the places you go on holiday, the food you eat, the kind of films you watch, the way you think about all these things are driven by your creative self. Understanding that is part of what makes your life and gives your life more meaning.
That’s the important thing about creativity. It is the very essence of life. It drives culture, it drives business, it drives everything about us. It drives what we do, what we feel, what we think. And yet people can’t define it. They don’t know that they are creative, they don’t accept that they are.
That’s the important thing about creativity. It is the very essence of life.
Sir John Hegarty
And how do you reconcile this when you are creative at a service of a brand? Because you’ve got your own personal individual expression of self, but you are also serving an external entity, which is needs to answer to their consumers.
If you are employed by a brand, you say, “Well, if I was advertising and making this, this is how I would do it”. Yes, you listen to your client, but you say, “This is how I would do it”. And you’re either right or you are wrong.
All artists who were commissioned throughout history had to do this. Michelangelo was asked to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He was given a direct brief by the Church, they didn’t ask him to paint just to decorate, and he had to understand it. And then he had to go, “Well, this is my way of expressing my belief in God and the Church”.
I think we’ve gone through a period of very left brain thinking over the last 20 years. It’s happened before this in the ‘50s. It was all very scientific and stuff. And I think a revolution will come when people realise that they’ve got to create empathy. That logic is fine, but only up to a point. And creativity is about creating empathy, getting you to understand the value of something over and above its rational self.
That’s what creativity is brilliant at doing. It lifts your spirits, it makes you feel better, it encourages you to think, it does all kinds of things that the world right now needs. And where technology is driving us all into ghettos, into echo chambers, creativity does the opposite. It brings us together. It wants to embrace us all. While technology is driving us apart, creativity pulls us together.
While technology is driving us apart, creativity pulls us together.
Sir John Hegarty
Would it be fair to say that marketing relies on data, but creativity relies on imagination?
Data is just knowledge, and knowledge of the past. More people are going on holiday, more people are eating at home. That’s knowledge and that’s what data gives you. Then when you’ve got that data, you go, now what do I do? But we have to remember, no data went into the iPhone. Nokia had all the data in the world and they said make it smaller, smaller, smaller. Well, along came the iPhone and it changed the way we thought about phones.
So data is good, but it also can be misleading. It can lead you down the wrong track.
Should a brand invest in data driven marketing that allow you to talk only to a niche of targeted consummers or in big outreach campaigns where they can be visible by all?
Well, you’ve got to do both. It’s called persuasion and promotion. Most digital advertising is promotion, buy this because of that. Whereas persuasion is saying, look, we are wonderful. You should think about us. And it expands your market, so it makes your promotional idea more valuable. The trouble today is people have forgotten the value of persuasion and they just do promotion because they can measure it, and we are in a world where we want to measure everything.
If you read the Bible, Jesus stands on the mount and what does he do? He talked to the masses. The Bible doesn’t say, Jesus stood on the mount and he spoke to 18 to 24 year olds with a disposable income of 24 shekels a week. No, he spoke to the masses, he was converting. And a brand is like that. A brand is made not just by the people who buy it, but also by the people who know about it.
A brand is made not just by the people who buy it, but also by the people who know about it.
Sir John Hegarty
If there’s something that the wine world is really afraid of at the moment it’s to be totally irrelevant to the next generation of consumers and to the younger people out there. But to what extent is generational marketing or generational advertising relevant?
I’m slightly wary of this thing of generational differences. I think what you have is attitudinal differences. Of course, there are certain things that youth will do that older people won’t do, but you’ve got to be very, very careful if you dissect your market in that way. And especially with wine, because a 21-year-old can be drinking wine, and an 81-year-old can be drinking wine. So you’ve got a very broad market. You’ve got to talk to people. I mean, that’s again what creativity does. It is brilliant at bringing people in. And you might say, oh, I can see this is talking to a younger audience, but it’s doing so in a way which I can enjoy. And that’s the clever thing that a great idea does. It embraces people. It doesn’t exclude people.
Can you tell us a bit about the Johnny Walker campaign?
We started working with Johnny Walker in 1999, at the turn of the century. And they came to at BBH and said, look, whisky is in decline. We really need a great idea to reengage. So we looked at the whole market and realised advertising was presenting whisky as a drink you have when you are celebrating success in some way. So the advertising of the time showed people on the back of luxury yachts, or in a penthouse, or in a beautiful estate in the countryside.
And someone said, but success isn’t a place. Success is a constant journey. Truly successful people never stop. They keep going. And from that, we got to keep walking very, very quickly.
Now the irony is that the brand had been called Johnny Walker for over 180 years. It had a striding man for almost a hundred years. But they never got to “Keep Walking” because they didn’t have that simple insight that yes, you drink whisky when you want to toast success, but actually success isn’t a place. It’s a journey. And so you create a whole series of ads, and the rest is history. It turned the market around and made Johnny Walker very successful.
You said right at the beginning that wine should drop the mystery but keep the magic. Can you expand on that idea?
Well, I think wine is a very, very difficult market, a very difficult category to get into. It’s full of mystery regions. I don’t understand them. Nobody expands a market by making it mysterious. They expand the market by helping people understand it. And then what you want to do is keep the magic because wine is magical. So I say lose the mystery, keep the magic and help people understand it. Help give people an entrance point. Give people a door they can go through to go.
Create accessibility.