Graham Villiers-Tuthillis the Marketing & Innovations Director for East African Breweries Limited, part of Diageo PLC. He is also a Non-Executive Board member of Serengeti Breweries Limited. Tuthill started at Diageo straight from campus and has been there for 15 years. He’s been based in Nairobi since 2018.
Asa globally experienced business leader, he shared his experience working in emerging markets, responding to crisis in an organisation, and the importance of the marketing team.
Working in Emerging Markets
Tuthill joined Diageo straight after college and spent the first seven years of his career building functional depth in Ireland. Moving around the business in different categories and working on projects allowed him to understand how the organisation worked on a larger scale. The fact that he was born, educated, and worked in Ireland dawned on him and it was important that he moved to get some growth outside of what he knew. Diageo has a joint venture business with Heineken in Singapore, so Tuthill decided to work there for two years and enjoyed learning how Heineken runs their operations whilst in the same category as Diageo. He then moved to Indonesia for his new role; Marketing Manager.
The countries differed from a language and cultural point of view, so while he faced challenges, Tuthill notes “it was good for me and my learning”. He was out of his depth in a new country but he knew the brand very well and had great connections with the global brand team who offered support.
Responding to a Crisis in an Organisation
While working in Indonesia, a new government regulation disrupted 70% of the company’s numeric distribution. He looked to the Corporate Relations Team for a solution but soon realised that every issue is a marketing issue; every issue has a marketing implication that needs to be well-charted out. It was the marketing team’s responsibility to handle crisis management within the company and with the consumers in the market.
COVID changed the structure of a lot of organisations and not many survived because they weren’t prepared for this event. The marketing team had to be dynamic, fluid, and agile in order to make things work during the pandemic. Years of understanding the consumer and how they are affected was enough to set out a clear narrative and a path to recovery for the business. The team accelerated a review of where the consumer is, in terms of the pandemic and managed to deploy products through mobile technology.
The Importance of the Marketing Team
As a marketing team, not only should you be dynamic, fluid, and agile, but you are responsible for giving the business confidence in your investment and a likely return on investment. As marketeers, it’s incumbent upon you to be aware of how to market in different economic conditions such that when you find yourself in a recession, an emerging market, or even a pandemic, you’re able to be the backbone of the company and offer a strategic solution that will get better the longer its reworked and applied.
Tuthill mentions that while East Africa is an emerging market, Kenya moves at great speed. An example he gives is direct e-commerce recalling, “literally over a weekend, the team in Kenya set up a WhatsApp function to allow direct delivery from our distributors, which has now evolved into an e-commerce portal called Party Central”. A challenge we have as a marketing community is when we try and separate “digital” or “tech” from marketing. We leave ownership of our brands’ presence in a digital world to someone else.
Just at its most basic, a marketeer’s role is to diagnose the issues and opportunities in brands, set the strategy, and execute the tactics to make sure consumers enjoy the brand and win market share. All through those processes, tech is embedded, it isn’t removed from what needs to be accomplished as a team.