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Diageo beats a tequila deception lawsuit and shuts its Baltimore Guinness brewery, while Nike's brand decline offers a cautionary tale for every FMCG marketer.
Diageo is making headlines twice today — for a legal win and a major brand experience closure. Plus, Nike's fall from dominance is the brand-building wake-up call FMCG marketers can't afford to ignore.
In this episode:
The FMCG Marketing Daily is a concise briefing for FMCG and CPG marketers, brand managers and CMOs, hosted by Marco & Klara. New episode every day.
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Also from Marco & Klara: The Digital Commerce Daily · The Health Marketing Daily
The essential morning briefing for brand leaders in fast-moving consumer goods. Hosted by Marco and Klara — two senior strategists with decades of experience inside global CPG companies and consultancies. Every episode covers retail media and distribution shifts, brand and competitor moves from Unilever, Coke, Nestlé, and challenger brands, and the macro and regulatory forces reshaping the category. Authoritative. Analytical. No noise. Built for brand managers, trade marketers, CMOs, and agency directors who need to stay ahead.
Marco: Three stories on the table this morning — two of them Diageo, one of them Nike, and all three worth your full attention.
Klara: A dismissed tequila lawsuit, a famous brewery closing its doors in the US, and a sportswear giant that forgot what made it great — there's a real thread running through all of this today.
Marco: Let's find it.
Marco: A New York judge has dismissed a lawsuit against Diageo over claims it misled consumers about what's actually in its tequila.
Klara: To understand why this matters, you need to know what's been happening in premium spirits. Consumers are paying more for products they believe are made a certain way — with specific ingredients, in specific places. That's created a wave of lawsuits targeting brands whose marketing language doesn't perfectly match what's in the bottle.
Marco: Diageo was caught in exactly that wave. The allegation was that its tequila marketing made claims about composition — how the product is made or what goes into it — that consumers found misleading. A judge in New York has now thrown that case out entirely. The lawsuit is gone, the legal threat is lifted, and Diageo doesn't have to touch its labelling or marketing claims across its tequila range.
Klara: And that last part is the real story. This isn't just Diageo dodging a bullet. It sets a precedent — a kind of reference point that other cases can follow. If you're a brand manager at any premium spirits company, you're watching this very closely.
Marco: The lesson I take from it is that authenticity claims — "crafted," "natural," "traditionally made" — are no longer just brand strategy territory. They're legal territory too. Your lawyers need to be in the room when you're writing copy, not just reviewing it afterwards.
Klara: I'd frame it slightly differently. I think this ruling actually gives brands a bit more breathing room than Marco suggests. The court dismissed the case, which signals that not every authenticity claim is an automatic liability.
Marco: True — but the scrutiny isn't going away. Even a dismissed case costs you time, money, and management energy. Getting the language right upfront is still the smarter move.
Klara: No argument there.
Marco: Our next story is up — let's keep moving.
Marco: Diageo is shutting down its Guinness brewery and visitor experience in Baltimore — and the decision says more about brand strategy than it does about beer.
Klara: To understand the stakes, you need to know what that site was supposed to do. The Guinness Open Gate Brewery opened in Baltimore back in 2018. It was built as an experiential hub — a physical place where American consumers, especially younger ones, could discover Guinness not as a pub staple but as a craft brand worth exploring. The idea was that getting people through the door would build the kind of emotional connection that TV adverts simply can't.
Marco: And now Diageo is closing it. The site is gone. It's part of a broader push by Diageo to cut costs and redirect marketing spend toward channels that show clearer returns. The Open Gate was expensive to run, and by all accounts it wasn't moving the needle on Guinness's wider brand numbers in the US.
Klara: I think that's a fair read — but I'd be careful about writing off experiential entirely. The problem here might not be the format. It might be the location. Baltimore is not where you go to recruit the American drinker you're after. A site in Austin or Nashville might have told a very different story.
Marco: Maybe. But I'd argue the deeper issue is scalability. A single brewery in Maryland can't carry the weight of building brand relevance across a country of 330 million people. If your flagship experience only reaches a fraction of your target audience, it's hard to justify the investment against digital channels that can reach millions for a fraction of the cost.
Klara: Which leaves Guinness with a real question — how do you stay culturally relevant in a market where you don't have deep roots, and you've just closed your most visible presence?
Marco: No easy answer to that one. Right — our third story is next.
Marco: Nike has lost its edge — and the story of how that happened is one every brand manager should have pinned to their wall.
Klara: Nike built one of the most powerful brands in history on the back of emotional storytelling — think of those performance sport campaigns that made you feel something even if you'd never run a race in your life. That kind of brand building takes years. It creates what marketers call brand equity — basically the emotional value consumers attach to your name, above and beyond the product itself.
Marco: Then Nike made a strategic pivot. Over several years, the company pulled back from wholesale — meaning it reduced the shelf space it gave to retailers like Foot Locker — and instead pushed hard into direct-to-consumer digital sales. The idea was to cut out the middleman, control the customer relationship, and take a bigger margin on every pair of trainers sold. At the same time, it scaled back the kind of big brand storytelling that had made it culturally untouchable.
Klara: And challengers walked straight through the door. On Running and Hoka took meaningful share in performance categories Nike once owned completely. These are brands that leaned into exactly what Nike stepped away from — clear product purpose, strong retail partnerships, and storytelling rooted in sport.
Marco: The BBC's framing is that this is a self-inflicted wound. I think that's right. Nike didn't lose to a better product. It lost because it treated brand equity like a savings account you can draw down indefinitely. You can't.
Klara: Though I'd note the DTC logic wasn't irrational — higher margins, more data, more control. The mistake wasn't the ambition, it was the assumption that consumers would follow without continued investment in why they cared in the first place.
Marco: And that assumption is the cautionary tale. Brand equity doesn't maintain itself. Stop feeding it, and someone else will feed their brand instead — with your former customers.
Marco: Today's thread — the brands that last are the ones that keep investing in what made them matter, even when the numbers tempt them to stop.
Klara: So look at one thing your brand has been quietly deprioritising — and ask honestly whether you can afford to keep ignoring it.