The social drinker

Once upon a time, I worked as a business journalist. Something journalists, stockbrokers, analysts and chief executives all like to do is invent complex reasons to explain success and failure. Especially failure. Success is usually ascribed to good management. Failure is usually attributed to malign outside influences.

Sometimes there are indeed complex or difficult-to-foresee reasons for failure, but, most of the time, company A’s failure is due to company B’s superior products.

An example of this is C&C Group; an Irish company that produces Bulmers, various other drinks, and once owned the Club Orange brand. C&C has been listed on the Dublin Stock Exchange for years and issued its fair share of profit warnings along the way. The excuses are multitudinous. My personal favourite is poor weather. A child could tell you that any business strategy that depends on sunshine in Ireland every summer is doomed, but a bit of rain still seems to surprise the folks in C&C.

What C&C never seems to do is rethink the rather average drinks that it produces and sells here in Ireland. I thought about this on a recent afternoon, as I sat in a pub, drinking a pint of Orchard Thieves, a new cider brand from Heineken which has the great advantage of tasting like apples, quenching your thirst on a hot afternoon and being available in hundreds of pubs. To be sure, there are better ciders available in Ireland, but Orchard Thieves is a decent drink that does exactly what you expect when you order a pint of cider. I’m sure it will make a packet for Heineken. Meanwhile, poor Bulmers struggles on, as its oncedominant position in the Irish cider market is chipped away by rivals. Next time they have a board meeting, perhaps management could ask themselves if they should think about changing the taste of their cider.