Val Smith, founder of the IWSR, passed away in May at the age of 88. Val founded his own marketing and market research agency in 1966, after a long period at the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson and spells in the army and at Cambridge University. One of his earliest clients, Bass Charrington Brewers, seeking to understand the alcohol market in 14 Western countries commissioned Val and his team to do the initial research.
So effective was this work that it became an essential annual survey. As costs rose, Bass suggested that the service be syndicated and in 1972 the International Wine & Spirit Record (now IWSR Drinks Market Analsyis) was born.
Both the industry and the IWSR have changed dramatically since then, and it is fair to say that Val played a major role in that industry transformation. To appreciate that contribution, you must consider the state and availability of wine and spirits research back in 1971, when Val began collecting it.
Asked in an interview about the state of market research at that stage, Val said: “Well, there was virtually none. It was non-existent except for the ex-factory figures. Obviously, the governments published import/export figures, but they were not very accurate, and a surprising number of governments actually refused to let you access them if you were a foreigner from another country. There were some production figures, but really for very few countries.” Essentially, the industry was flying in the dark.
“When you started looking at Germany or France or Italy, you really found a complete lack of brand information,” explained Val. “[At first] very few were inclined to share information. It really took several visits for them to become relatively relaxed. It’s the same situation when you open any country: they suspect that you are working for the country’s revenue service and they are not at all keen on sharing, but very slowly, over time, they realise that it makes sense to pool information, because it saves a lot of money. I don’t think there was any country where it was easy to go and get information.”
Initially, the service relied on desktop research, but it soon became clear that the only really effective way to quantify the drinks market, due to the wide range of complicating factors, was to visit the countries to talk to those operating in the market, the real experts, to find out what was actually happening on the ground.
From 1990 onwards, this unique approach became even more essential as vast tracts of the world became accessible to international exports, including China, India and Central and Eastern Europe, among others, and where virtually no official data or previous research existed on the alcohol market.
It was around the 1990s that Val and the IWSR started to get worldwide coverage. “We started doing duty free for the first time in 1987,” he said. “That obviously brought in more markets — but [at first] what we were measuring mostly was Europe, because Europe was about 65% of all duty free.”
This led Val, over the course of almost 40 years of travel, to visit well over 115 countries, producing the first IWSR, and indeed first ever, reports on the alcohol markets in many of these countries. That he succeeded in often very difficult circumstances was down to his immense charm, high intelligence and enormous curiosity about people, countries and their culture. Fluent in four major European languages, Val had enough knowledge of a further 15 or so to be able to navigate most places in the world.
Over the almost 50 years of the IWSR, his travels and wide-ranging meetings gave Val a unique global perspective on the drinks industry — not to mention an encyclopaedic knowledge of the brands, companies and people involved in the sector, which he was happy to draw on in a stream of anecdotes or insight, all the better if shared with good food, fine drink and good company.
