Innovation meets insight: Diageo on the value of ‘future back’ thinking
Chief innovation officer Mark Sandys and global consumer planning director Giles Hedger on leading tribes, new eras and brand building’s “double manoeuvre”.
Mark Sandys may have spent close to 30 years at Diageo, but when he assumed the role of chief innovation officer in 2022, the first person he talked to was “relative newbie” global consumer planning director, Giles Hedger who joined in 2021.
The pair spent the first three months into Sandys’ new role “going broad”, talking to a variety of people internally, as well as investors, customers like Tesco and Sainsbury’s and distributors in the US. They assessed the consumer planning agenda in its broadest sense, with a view to developing a roadmap for future growth.
At the time, Hedger’s team was building a new framework – the Foresight System – as a shared source of insight. This “vast genome project” runs across several hundred million data points to offer the “most comprehensive view” of how people socialise across Diageo’s priority markets.
