WILDGEESE: EMIGRANT BUSINESS LEADERS ON OPPORTUNITIES ABROAD: Maurice Doyle, Group marketing director, William Grant Sons, UK

“I THINK I’ve got one of the best jobs in the world,” says Maurice Doyle. As the marketer behind such brands as Glenfiddich, Tullamore Dew and Hendrick’s Gin, many would agree.

Joining premium spirits company William Grant Sons in 2009 as group marketing director, Doyle, from Bray, Co Wicklow, had already clocked up more than 20 years of experience marketing everything from fabric softener to rum. It was a career trajectory that started across the pond.

Graduating with an economics and social studies degree from Trinity College in 1987, Doyle says the jobs market for new graduates was similar to what it is now – “pretty dire”.

Always curious about brands and consumers but with few marketing jobs at home, he applied to marketing powerhouse Proctor Gamble in Britain.

“Staying in Ireland was never really an option,” he says. “We all knew we were going to have to leave. Pretty much most of my contemporaries in college left and went further afield, so it felt very normal.”

Bagging a spot on PG’s milk round scheme, Doyle found himself stationed in Newcastle in the north of England devising marketing strategies for brands such as Lenor, Fairy and Dreft.

“It was a great experience,” he says of his five years with the company regarded as the grandfather of brand marketing. “They are legendary in terms of training marketers, it was a really good grounding.”

He fell in love with Newcastle too. “It was a very easy place to be, a very easy transition from Ireland,” he recalls, “and it’s left me with a love of Newcastle Football Club, but we all have our crosses to bear.”

Jumping ship to drinks company Bacardi in 1992, he says the brand at the time had found itself in a rut. “It was the biggest brand in the world for really educated people who drank spirits and Coke, but it was becoming seen as the drink your parents would drink,” explains Doyle.

“There’s always a generational thing within alcohol that you don’t really want to be perceived as the brand that your parents would drink.”

Describing it as “the Jeremy- Clarkson-wearing-Levis factor”, he says: “Once you start getting people with middle-aged spread starting to wear cool clothes, they become less cool to an 18-24 year old.”

But a new brand extension called Bacardi Breezer, launched by him in 1994 and designed as a more contemporary expression of the brand, was to turn things around, becoming seven times as big as the Bacardi rum brand.

A move to Amsterdam followed where he spent four years overseeing marketing for Bacardi rum in Europe and the Middle East.

While in the UK sales were split almost evenly between bars and supermarkets, in markets like Spain, 90 per cent of the Bacardi sold was in bars – there the spirit measure was 2½ times that of Britain. Meanwhile, in Russia and parts of eastern Europe, the brand was virtually unknown.

Having moved back to Britain in 2006, Doyle was asked to head up a new business unit for Bacardi overseeing its retail sales in airports around the world.

Doyle moved to Scottish drinks manufacturer William Grant Sons in 2009, inspired by what he calls its ambition “to create something different in the world of spirits”.

With a portfolio of premium and super-premium brands, Doyle says while the family-owned business might be smaller than the Diageos or Pernod Ricards of this world, it is very clear about its positioning. “We’re not going to win by trying to out-Diageo Diageo. We have to be William Grant at our very best,” he says.

Distilling Glenfiddich, Balvanie and Grant’s scotch whiskies, the company was keen to diversify and in 2010, bought the Tullamore Dew brand from CC.

Tullamore Dew along with its non-scotch brands such as Hendrick’s Gin and Sailor Jerry rum, are now marketed out of Dublin with the company employing 80 here.

William Grant Sons has also taken over the Tullamore Dew Heritage Centre in Offaly, and will reopen it in 2012.

“We’re very confident we will grow the brand in the markets where it has always been strong, like the Czech republic and Germany, but also in markets like the UK, US, Ireland and France, the top four Irish whiskey markets in the world, where the brand has been under-representative.”

To graduates following in his footsteps, Doyle encourages them to embrace the opportunity to go abroad.

“It’s much easier now than it was in 1987 to feel connected to what’s happening back home,” he says. “You can have those links and feel proud to be Irish but still be abroad. It’s a great opportunity. The mindset needs to be ‘go out and embrace it’.”