Missing the Point

I was reading an article online this weekend and reflecting that whoever wrote the article – or, at the very least, whoever wrote the headline – appear to have missed the entire point of the interview and the issue it was set up to cover. However, the gentleman being interviewed appears to have caught it on the first go, proving that he has a better grasp of the realities of business than the Fox News business department has ever had…

You can pick up the original story here, if you’d like, but the interview was with the Chairman Emeritus of the Marker’s Mark organization, who had been the CEO for the previous 35 years before handing the job over to his son. If you’re not familiar with the company, the Samuels family has been making bourbon (and related products) in Kentucky since 1780 or so, but the business has only been producing a premium product for the last couple of generations, and has only started offering new variations on the flagship product over the last decade or so. You might reasonably expect, as the Fox News people clearly did, that a multi-generational family company that make distinctly American alcoholic beverages would be upset by news stories claiming that the finest whiskey in the world is actually made in Taiwan…

According to the interview, however, Bill Samuels Jr., the Chairman Emeritus, is delighted by the international spotlight that has been turned on his industry, and is predicting that the attention from around the world will increase sales for all of the company’s products, including the new high-end beverages they have recently introduced. Leaving aside just for the moment how much additional business that such international acceptance will generate for the brand domestically, the fact remains that three quarters of the world’s economy and 94% of its population do not live in the United States. It is highly probable, in fact, that if the company’s product takes on the image of an internationally sought-after luxury product that domestic sales will increase, but even if they do not, it’s a big world filled with a lot of people who seem to like bourbon…

Now, to be fair, we should probably acknowledge that Bill Samuels Jr. has spent almost his entire life – from the day his father convinced him to abandon a career in aerospace and come to work for the family business – thinking about distilled spirits and ways in which to sell more of them. By contrast, the Fox News staffer who wrote the story has probably only considered the industry as a consumer, and may not actually have any business credentials to speak of. And by the same token, I don’t believe that it is a coincidence that the company decided to bring out its new Maker’s 46 and Cask Strength products just as international attention is starting to develop for this product category…

So why am I telling you about this, I hear some of you asking? You don’t necessarily run a premium distilling company, and you’d never believe that Fox News knows more about any industry than a guy who has managed a company in it for 35 years. The point I’m going for here is that anything that moves our company or its products from being a specialty product purchased by a limited subset of consumers in one corner of our industry to being part of an international competition for the best product in the industry, even if we did not win that competition, is a good thing. And assuming (as somebody at Fox apparently did) that news reporters for a major media outlet must somehow know more about an industry than someone whose family has been in that business for over two centuries, and who has devoted his life to the family business, is just another good way to get yourself mocked by scruffy bloggers from all over the Internet…