October 17, 2024 | 12:00am
Possibly the funniest, most rando example of Don Papa fans popping up around the world comes from Corsica, where the brand’s first global marketing manager, Jo-Ann Ramos, tells us about this Corsican biker’s club that calls itself “Don Papa” and serves up initiation shots of the local rum to new members.
“Somebody shared this on our IG a few months back, and it’s amazing,” says Ramos, who’s taken over the global marketing of Don Papa for Diageo Global Retail, which acquired the Filipino brand for €260 million in 2023.
The superfans aren’t just Corsican; you find them in Germany, the Czech Republic, France (where French nurses are reportedly big fans).
“We love these stories — we call the superfans ‘Dons,’” says Ramos. “In the Netherlands, they build shrine-like displays in their homes, collect the art-covered canisters of every rum expression. If it’s not a shrine, it’s them immortalizing the label or logo as body tattoos, wallpaper, even car paint.”
Before joining Don Papa in 2021, Ramos was a multi-awarded marketing professional, helping bring in multinational giants like Cadbury, Boehringer Ingelheim and Samsung before heading up marketing, brand communications and PR for Starbucks Philippines.
Now she’s kind of doing the reverse: taking a Filipino brand global, as it joins Diageo’s impressive roster of spirits (Johnnie Walker, Captain Morgan, Singleton, Smirnoff, Baileys, Crown Royal).
At the start, Don Papa relied on small-batch production in Bacolod, Negros, run by a tight group including founders Stephen Carroll (of Rémy Cointreau) and husband and wife Andrew Garcia and Monica Garcia (the couple still remain as consultants for the company). But with the hefty capital infusion from Diageo, all that is changing. “Our production has never been more consistent and our business here in the Philippines alone has grown significantly since being acquired and supported by Diageo,” says Ramos.
The larger goal: to win over markets in Canada, the UK, Southeast Asia (“We just signed a contract for distribution in Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam”), Europe and Eastern Europe. For Ramos, it’s all about storytelling.
“These guys, they love dark spirits, dark rums, and they love stories,” she says of the European market. “They see the really interesting bottle—we lure them in with the tarsiers, the characters — and then they taste it, and they’re surprised such a great-tasting rum comes from the Philippines.”
Don Papa has always relied on a colorful, art-driven approach. Their earliest artist-designed bottles now fetch hefty sums from online collectors. It’s no wonder they partnered with Art Fair PH to sponsor artist residencies around the country. If art is part of the package, colorful stories must follow.
Kind of like pitching a Hollywood script. “Exactly, it’s always a pitch,” says Ramos. “It’s always about telling people, ‘This is what it is.’”
Still, that can be challenging because Don Papa doesn’t have a fixed marketing image. For many established Diageo brands, “there’s a put-together equation that makes it work: put this in the market, you know that at some point it’s going to work. But for Don Papa, you never know what to expect, because we look at ourselves and always think of different ways to market the brand,” she says. “That’s how contrarian the brand is.”
That may be why it appeals to fans as diverse as bikers and art lovers to French nurses and foodies from the UK.
It also requires nimble storytelling. “It’s not just saying ‘We’re a Filipino brand,’” says Jo-Ann. “The moment you say that, you get boxed in and stereotyped — ‘Okay, there’s a Filipino brand, it’s very tribal, very Asian…’ It’s really how do we tell the stories about Filipino culture in an interesting way that doesn’t make it seem too exclusive to Filipinos and Asians?”
She thinks it’s the richness of local heritage that keep all these markets curious — and hooked. “So instead of us customizing our stories to these markets, we find ourselves followed by them because, to them, their discovery of Don Papa and our culture is enough to want to stay tuned.”
You can almost see those European bikers lining up to do shots, singing, “One hundred bottles of Don Papa rum on the wall, one hundred bottles of rum…”
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