Menu200 years ago, in six minutes around the world.
January 10, 2019
In 1819, in the small Scottish town of Kilmarnock, a teenage boy lost his father, sold the family farm and opened up a grocer’s shop. The boy, John Walker, began selling whisky, now sold in over 180 countries worldwide as Johnnie Walker.
Johnnie Walker, the “biggest whisky brand in the world”, is part of the brand portfolio of Diageo. (Some of the other Diageo brands include Guinness, Smirnoff, Captain Morgan, Baileys, and Tanqueray.)
In 2009, one of the best ever promotional films was created. “The Man Who Walked Around the World” recounted the history of the Johnnie Walker brand.
The film was created by London agency BBH who wrote the script and hired director Jamie Rafn to film the story. It was shot uninterrupted, a single six plus minute take, with actor Robert Carlyle – of Trainspotting and The Full Monty fame – walking down a gravel path in the Scottish Highlands, interacting with varying props along the way. The final take, after two days of filming – the 40th – was ultimately the one used.
Beyond the brilliance of the film, maintaining a viewer’s attention for 6 minutes is no small feat, what does this film tell us, specifically from a branding perspective?
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Johnnie Walker The Man Who Walks Around The World from BBH London on Vimeo.
The Johnnie Walker story tells us that the brand was created by blending ambition and a drive to always improve the product. These attributes, part of the brand’s DNA, resulted in developing a blended whisky rather than the single malts then sold. It drove the introduction of the square bottle, the label placed at “an angle of precisely 24 degrees,” and the expansion of the product line from the Red and Black Label to the Green, Gold and Blue Labels.
There was also a certain amount of luck involved. John Walker’s name opened up the possibilities for the brand’s expression. Had Walker not been his last name (had it been, say, McDonald), it is doubtful that the brand’s symbol would have been the depiction of an Edwardian “dandy”, or its tagline today would have been “Keep Walking.” And this film would have never been created featuring a man walking at a brisk pace.
Above all, this film reminds us that brands are not static, they must continue to grow and evolve over time. They need to “keep walking.”
The world today is of course much faster than rural Scotland of the 1800s. But companies that only react to today’s sales and the latest social media trends do so at their peril. Who knows how many of them will still be around and celebrated in 2219?
