Lion

I'm Brittany Rigby, managing editor at Little Black Book, and each episode I sit down with creative thinkers, marketers, and makers to discuss how the world's most creative brands use audio to make people think, feel, and act.

Today, I'm joined by Simon Rich, creative and strategy lead across the beer portfolio at Lion.

Welcome, Simon.

Good afternoon.

Thank you very much.

Simon, I'm going to start with you.

What are your ambitions at Lion at the moment? Where is the brand at in this moment in time and what are you most focused on?

When you say the brand, I work across two core brands.

when you came on board, what was it sort of, how much has that sort of process, well, that new structure, how much of that was underway in terms of transitioning to like a more of a family-owned structure? And yeah, was there much that you needed to, like when you came in, were you like, this is what still needs to change? Had it already sort of started happening or?

So, you know, Brian had sold in the early 2000s and prior to Accolade had been like Nathan and You know, Lion Nathan had very much run it as an amazing business and Accolade came in and through, you know, different ownership structures.

And there's nothing – there's no negative or positive.

It's just different.

If you want to pour that sweet little beer into the glass or if we're going to have it by the bottle.

Now, the beers that we are drinking today are from Panhead, which have been bought out by Lion Breweries.

A long time

ago.

Okay, look at us now.

We've already made your questions more efficient.

so i i and i i think i can answer a couple of these things as to where you want to go with some of the things you should focus on so one yeah not every measure weighs the same the second thing is not every measure uh you should track has the same influence or or has would change your behavior this is going to make sense in about 10 minutes So there are things that we call at 0.16, we got them from Lion.

At 0.16, and this isn't a 0.16 thing, this is a terminology everywhere, is the difference between a lead versus a lag measure.

And then media is where you control the budget and control where, why and how you spend that money.

So I've spent nine years doing media, specifically leading media strategy for some of Australia's largest businesses, like the more recently Lion, which is beer, and KFC, which is chicken.

So doing the world of service, selling fried chicken and beer.

And I've fallen in love with advertising.

And it was awesome to come back.

I mean, Lion Nathan at the time engaged with us and I managed to get around some pubs and what have you and do some speeches and that at the end of the year.

I think that was more like 96 or somewhere around there.

And I've been really fortunate to actually get back to New Zealand basically, you know, every second week for the last 20 years with courtesy of Sky's commentary back in the day or some work with the Warriors now.

And so you've got to think when you're thinking about HR solutions and you're thinking about the reality or the context, understanding what that looks like for those guys is really important.

It was interesting because James Hardy and Lion were both using the same lean four by four approach.

methodology in terms of efficiency and and you know running process lines really well and so when I went to James Hardy I'd already been exposed to the same methodology and so I could kind of go oh I get this I get this right what we did in both organizations we actually took that through not just manufacturing but into the other parts of the organization to help with thinking about systems processes efficiency ways of working standard operating procedures yeah When I went to ARN, none of that thinking existed and so I was able to take some of those concepts and tweak them a bit and then use them to actually do a lot of influencing around, hang on guys, if we think about our business right now, we think about the way the work gets done.

Yeah.

I think you can often make assumptions, you know, for example, people who are in a blue collar, you know, workplace environment want this or don't want that or can do this or can't do that.

You know, a good example would be at James Hardy when I first talked about using the human synergistics tools for culture work, the immediate response was, oh, is that too complicated? Because the tool does have a lot of data and analytics behind it.

Is that too complex for factory workers in the Philippines to wrap their head around or is that going to resonate with the people in the Carroll Park James Hardy warehouse? And my answer then was, well, actually I've seen it work at Lion.

They used it for 15 years.

And Lyon doing the run-throughs with the non-playing players, which would be an unusual experience for him.

We're conditioned to watching them do those run-throughs on the outfield with They had Sam Harper and Josh Inglis and Lion going through their paces as the ground was being looked at over and over because there were wet patches out there.

No doubt they had to take that time to let it blow through.

Luckily, this is the Windy City and the wind blew through and it meant that we got on because if it didn't blow, they weren't getting on.