Remembering Red Bull’s Dietrich Mateschitz

I was lucky to spend a lot of time with Dietrich Mateschitz after Red Bull had initially flopped in the UK in the 1990s and he has shaped my thinking about marketing, innovation and business for the 25+ years since…

At the time, Dietrich was a nobody. A weird Austrian wandering around London in a funny hat with a brand that had lost a pile of money and was going nowhere.

But he had a conviction, clear from the first time I met him, that he was on a mission to do something very special.

I can’t do justice to what I learnt from Dietrich in a post, but if I had to summarise the most important thing I took from him it would be this:

Be prepared to sacrifice everything – even the things you desperately want like sales, market share and recognition – if they mean doing anything that undermines the brand you are building.

Dietrich knew where he was going even when everyone else mocked him. He was prepared to play the long game and do it right. That repeatedly cost him in the short term, but I think he had the last laugh 😉

Btw, Dietrich loved flying. The line ‘Red Bull gives you wings’ had deep roots. In some of my pics below I am in a vintage plane he is piloting through the Alps, in another, it’s a private jet he flew back to Saltzburg after F1 practice at Silverstone. Being onboard was occasionally terrifying but utterly exhilarating (like most things to do with Red Bull at the time!).

He was, I believe, the best brand builder we’ve ever seen and may his own wings now be eternal.