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Courvoisier launches its first global campaign in years around house parties, Dollar Shave Club rejects AI hype, and India probes Diageo and Pernod Ricard on Scotch imports.
Courvoisier is back with a bold cultural repositioning, Dollar Shave Club is turning 'good enough' into a brand platform, and a tax probe in India is putting Diageo and Pernod Ricard's most important growth market at risk.
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: Morning — we've got a strong lineup for you today.
Klara: We do. A dormant spirits brand making a loud comeback, a razor company that's turned "good enough" into a strategy, and a tax investigation in India that could shake up the entire premium Scotch market.
Marco: Three stories that get right to the heart of brand positioning and market risk.
Klara: Let's go.
Marco: Courvoisier — the cognac brand — has just launched its first global advertising campaign in years, and it's built around house parties.
Klara: So for anyone not steeped in spirits marketing, Courvoisier is a French cognac with a long, prestigious history. It's the kind of brand that used to sit comfortably in the "special occasion, expensive gift" corner of the market. But it's been largely quiet in terms of big marketing pushes for quite some time.
Marco: And going quiet is dangerous for any brand. When you stop showing up in culture — in music, in conversation, in the places people actually spend time — younger consumers just move on. They don't wait for you to come back.
Klara: So what's the campaign actually doing? It's repositioning Courvoisier as a drink for house parties. Not the Ritz. Not a jazz club. Your mate's living room on a Saturday night.
Marco: Which is a deliberate choice. The spirits industry has been wrestling with this for a while — how do you keep a brand feeling special without making it feel untouchable? Courvoisier's answer is: bring it down to earth. Make it culturally reachable. Aspirational, but in a way that feels real to a 28-year-old in Berlin or Manchester.
Klara: I think it's a smart instinct. But I'd question the execution risk. Cognac has a very specific taste profile. Putting it in a house party setting raises the question — are you actually changing who drinks it, or just changing who sees the ads?
Marco: That's the real test. Repositioning — changing how consumers see a brand — only works if the product genuinely fits the new occasion. Cognac at a house party needs to make sense in the glass, not just on a screen.
Klara: Worth watching closely.
Marco: Our next story is coming up now.
Marco: Dollar Shave Club has just launched a campaign telling people its razors are "perfectly good" — and that's the whole point.
Klara: A bit of background. Dollar Shave Club built its name on being the anti-premium option. No fancy packaging, no celebrity endorsements, no blades with seventeen layers of engineered coating. Just a decent razor at a price that doesn't make you wince. That irreverent, straight-talking identity is what got people through the door in the first place.
Marco: But the grooming market has moved in an odd direction lately. AI-enhanced shaving tech, blade systems that sound like they belong in a laboratory — the category is filling up with products that promise to revolutionise your morning routine. Dollar Shave Club's response is essentially: none of that is real, and we're not playing along.
Klara: The new campaign leans directly into "perfectly good" as a positioning. Not the best. Not the most advanced. Just reliably good, for a fair price. And the creative is deliberately self-aware — almost winking at the consumer. It's saying: we know you know this is all a bit much.
Marco: Which is a clever move when consumers are sceptical. And right now, a lot of them are. Overclaiming has been an issue across FMCG for years. When every product claims to be a breakthrough, "good enough" starts to feel refreshingly honest.
Klara: I do wonder, though, whether this can carry the brand long term. "We're not bad" is a great tactical line during a cost-of-living squeeze. But as a brand platform — the idea you build around for years — it feels thin. At some point you need something to stand for, not just something to push against.
Marco: That's the real question for any challenger brand. Anti-premium is a strong launch pad. The risk is it becomes a ceiling.
Klara: Our third story is up next.
Marco: Indian tax officials are investigating both Diageo and Pernod Ricard over how they've been classifying their Scotch whisky imports — and the financial exposure could be serious.
Klara: To understand why this matters, you need to know that India is one of the biggest and fastest-growing markets for Scotch whisky in the world. For companies like Diageo and Pernod Ricard, it's not a side market — it's central to their long-term growth plans. The catch is that India has always been a complicated place to operate. The regulatory environment — the rules, taxes, and classifications that govern how products are sold — has been a persistent headache for spirits multinationals.
Marco: What's happened now is that Indian tax authorities are looking at how bulk Scotch imports have been classified. Classification matters because it determines how much tax you owe. If the authorities decide the products were put in the wrong category, both companies could face significant back-tax bills — money owed on past imports, potentially going back years.
Klara: And this is where it gets strategically thorny. If you're a brand manager at Diageo or Pernod sitting in London or Paris, you're asking yourself: how much do we invest in building our brand in India when the commercial ground keeps shifting? Consumer-facing work — advertising, distribution, trade investment — costs real money. If regulatory uncertainty eats into your margins, those budgets come under pressure.
Marco: I'd argue you still invest. India's scale and trajectory mean walking away isn't really an option. The question is how you structure the risk.
Klara: I think that's right in theory, but it's easier to say than to do. Regulatory uncertainty doesn't just affect profits — it affects confidence. And when two global giants are caught in the same probe simultaneously, that sends a signal to the whole industry that this market plays by its own rules. That changes how boldly you plan.
Marco: Today's through-line — relevance, clarity, and market access can all disappear quietly, long before you notice the damage.
Klara: So pick one of those three for your own brand: is your positioning sharp enough to be remembered, simple enough to be trusted, and protected enough to survive a regulatory shock?