Guest Speaker Presentation

Claire Davidson, Managing Partner of Gardant Communications, was our guest speaker for the event.

Gardant specialises in strategic communications to protect and enhance industry and brand reputations, and Claire has over 20 years’ broad-ranging experience in this area – she’s an acknowledged expert in corporate reputation management with a deep understanding of how reputational issues emerge and evolve at the interface of public opinion, government and industry.

The debate focused on the challenges facing the drinks industry in 2010 with the imminent election and the political parties’ proposed alcohol policies featuring prominently. Claire spoke about her experience with Gardant Communications and how it has ‘been there’ and ‘done that’ with other industrial sectors and shared her thoughts about the workings of governments, civil servants and parties of all colours.

As part of our stimulus material we included four charts that explored alcohol consumption levels in the UK. Chart 1, Exhibit A clearly suggests that UK per capita consumption of alcohol is running well ahead of OECD averages and is very significantly (30-40%) higher than consumption levels in the USA. This chart originally appeared in a recently published article in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

The problem with this graph is that it simply leads the leader to the flawed conclusion, i.e. that Britons are drinking far in excess of Americans who in turn are drinking far less than the OECD average. The WSJ has failed to exclude teetotallers from the analysis of drinking behaviour. If you do exclude these (as we have done in Chart 1, Exhibit B) we find that alcohol consumption amongst those Americans who DO drink is far higher than the WSJ suggests, and is in fact remarkably similar to levels of per capita consumption in the UK.

Chart two demonstrates the effect on the overall UK market if UK drinkers were somehow persuaded to reduce their drinking levels to the OECD average. It shows that the alcohol market would shrink by around -8% in volume and decline by around -£1billion in value.

And if all UK drinkers were to drink in line with Government recommended daily/weekly guidelines, the impact on the UK alcohol industry would be dramatic: it would see the size of its market decline by -30% and the sales value of the market fall by up to -£4 billion.

Click to download selected stimulus material (.pdf)