Bacardi CMO Ned Duggan on turning Patrón’s regulatory dispute into a campaign

Ned Duggan, global chief marketing officer of Bacardi and president of Bacardi Global Brands, has said Patrón “didn’t flinch” when its additive-free tequila campaign led to a clash with Mexico’s tequila regulator, choosing to turn the dispute into a public debate about ingredient transparency.

Patrón’s ‘100% Additive-Free Tequila’ campaign launched a year ago, promoting its three-ingredient recipe with the line: “The secret ingredient is that there are no secret ingredients.”

The messaging drew action from Mexico’s Tequila Regulatory Council (CRT), which for a time suspended Patrón’s NOM (Norma Oficial Mexicana) certification, briefly blocking it from exporting under the protected name ‘tequila’.

While stressing “mutual respect” and a “constructive dialogue” with the CRT, Patrón responded with a tongue-in-cheek follow-up, ‘Censored Truth’, which used the visual language of censorship to turn the dispute into a wider argument about transparency. The work earned Duggan recognition from his peers as the most rebellious marketing leader of the year.

‘We didn’t flinch’

“No, we didn’t flinch. We were fortunate that our entire management team, our entire supply chain… there were a lot of the big team behind this and we all felt that this is something that is so important to what Patrón is that we need to be bold and we need to tell the story in the most disruptive way possible,” Duggan said.

He is relaxed about the rebel label. “Do I feel like a rebel? Ultimately, I’m a storyteller and our team tells brand stories. In the case of the Patrón work, it was telling a story that is part of the DNA of the brand. We were standing up for territory that was very important to us.”

Duggan said Patrón was protecting its ability to keep telling customers what it had always said: that it is made from three high-quality ingredients. “There were challenges to our ability to tell that story and that’s what we feel makes Patrón distinct. So that was one of those situations where we were willing to go to the mat and to stand up for what the brand believed in. So we did.”

“It wasn’t a strategy to be rebellious, but it was a strategy to stand up for and to communicate what the brand is all about,” he added.

From finance to Grey Goose

Duggan says his own rebellion came in choosing finance. His father was a speechwriter in Washington DC and his mother worked in accounts in advertising, so his degree in finance, later MBA and early career in banking were a departure from a family background in the liberal arts.

Since his MBA he has worked only at Bacardi, joining in 2008 as a brand manager on Grey Goose. His career there has moved him from Florida to Bermuda and on to London. “Sometimes, I feel like I’ve been in three or four different companies,” he said.

He describes Bacardi as a “small company with big brands” and credits his long tenure to the entrepreneurial agility of the family-owned business and its appetite for acquisitions, including Patrón in 2018 and Ilegal Mezcal in 2023.

He enjoys working across brands at different stages. St Germain elderflower liqueur, acquired in 2012, is “still very early in its life stage” and growing fast internationally on the back of culture-led work, among them a tie-up with actor Sophie Turner.

Grey Goose, acquired in 2004, is “really having a moment again,” helped by advertising including ‘Make Time Wait’ starring Zoe Saldaña, and by its US Open partnership of around two decades. Last year was the most lucrative in that partnership’s history, he said, with more than 700,000 ‘Honey Deuce’ cocktails sold, around one and a half every second, generating $12m in sales.

He also cited D’ussé Cognac, relaunched in 2012 in partnership with Jay-Z and Roc Nation. “That was one of the highlights of my career,” he said.

Brands as experiences

Duggan said the core strategy is the same for every brand: understand the lifestyle it represents and create experiences around it. “All of these brands stand for a lifestyle. It’s more than just the products we sell but also the experiences that we provide, whether it’s in a bar or restaurant or at a music festival. That’s ultimately what people are buying.”

He argues this matters more in spirits than anywhere else, because what someone orders signals who they are. “When someone walks up to a bar and orders a Patrón Reposado on the rocks, it announces to the entire bar who that person is, how they feel about themselves and how they want to be seen. If that same person walks up and orders a Bacardi pina colada, people will look at that person very differently and that person will feel very differently about themselves.”

“The spirit brand that someone orders is the way that someone is projecting their identity,” he said, adding that brands are built not only on product quality, which must be exceptional, but on partnerships, content and physical experiences. “That’s where our brands are made.”

Orchestrating, not directing

Patrón’s year shows how brand management now involves reacting to events as much as planning them. For Duggan, that requires a strong sense of what a brand stands for rather than giving up control.

“There was a time when marketing was much more controlled,” he said. “And now with the fragmented media market, with influencer marketing, with transparency, with the savviness of consumers, there is a lot of chaos; an element of not necessarily always being in 100% control of the message. That’s why it is so important to be authentic and to make sure that, as much as possible, you direct the messaging, because people will smell it if you’re not.”

He sees the CMO as an “orchestrator” and calls marketing “a team sport”. “My job is to create an environment for the team and the extended team of agencies to feel an absence of fear when creating work and to be able to move quickly and to be empowered. The command-and-control environment that existed for many years doesn’t exist today.”

His advice comes in three parts: “Understand what makes your brand distinct”; “Stay absolutely true to those and find creative ways to tell your story”; and “Remember, what you do is as important as how you communicate.”