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If you think you've heard of Michel Roux, chances are you're thinking of the wrong guy. There's a famous chef in London by the name, too, but the Michel Roux I want to talk about is the one who brought us those ubiquitous ads for Absolut vodka. You know, the ones featuring paintings of Absolut bottles in all sorts of odd contexts and styles by famous artists such as Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. This marketing campaign was the brainchild of former Absolut head Roux and continues as his legacy.
Roux lost control of the Absolut business in 1994, when it was taken over by Seagram's. But now he's trying to return to his old preeminence using a formula similar to the one that boosted Absolut's U.S. sales from fewer than 20,000 cases in 1979 to 5 million annually by the mid-1990s. In 1998, Roux quit Carillon Importers, which he had headed since 1981, and started his own spirits company, Crillon Importers. Once again using artists to do the ads, he's marketing several new drinks, including OP, a high-end vodka produced by V&S Vin and Spirit, the Swedish company that makes Absolut. His product portfolio also includes a fancy Jamaican rum called Rhum Barbancourt and a concoction of his own called Elisir du Dr. Roux (or, Dr. Roux's Elixir).
However, his most intriguing product is Absente, a diluted, less alcoholic version of absinthe, a favorite drink of 19th century artists and writers like Vincent van Gogh and Edgar Allen Poe. The original absinthe eventually was outlawed in most countries because it tended to cause brain damage. Given absinthe's history, selling a safer version of it in the U.S. has got to be quite a marketing challenge.
BIG IN JAPAN. I, for one, wish Roux, now 61, the best of luck. At Absolut, he did a lot to help out struggling artists. And what's intriguing to me is that he usually didn't bother to play it safe. Sure, some of the artists he featured were unabashedly commercial -- such as George Rodrigue, the Louisiana artist who has made a fortune painting a blue dog over and over again, varying the image only slightly from painting to painting.
Roux was often quite daring, however, giving national recognition to unknowns who badly needed a career boost. "The Absolut thing completely changed my life," says Ron English, 42, who Roux commissioned to do a vodka ad back in 1989. "Before that, I had spent five years living in dire poverty on Avenue D in Manhattan. I couldn't even get galleries to look at slides of my work."
English's Absolut ad led galleries in the U.S. and Japan to represent him. He and two other Absolut artists even went on a publicity tour of Japan, where they were treated like celebrities. "We were on all the TV shows and in all the magazines," English recalls. "They'd just put an X on the floor where they wanted us to stand and the photographers would shoot away."
NIGHTLY ROUNDS. Roux is one of those affable, French bon vivants who has managed to turn partying into a career. Born in Soyeux Charente in southwestern France, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1964 after earning a degree in hotel management, and by 1981 had worked his way up to the top job at Carillon. A classic liquor salesman, he says he used to make a nightly tour of 8 or 10 Manhattan nightspots, staying out into the wee hours night after night while always managing to put in a full day at the office.
In addition to Absolut, he was instrumental in the marketing success of such drinks as Stolichnaya Russian Vodka, Grand Marnier, and Bombay Sapphire Gin -- success he hopes to duplicate with his latest products. "I don't know if I can eat and drink like I did when I was 40 years old," he says of his current gig. "But my brain is still working."
Absolut's big break in the art world came after Roux became a regular at Andy Warhol's wild Manhattan parties -- not a scene where you would have been likely to find execs from, say, General Electric or IBM. Eventually, Roux managed to convince Warhol to do an Absolut ad -- no mean feat, since Warhol didn't drink alcohol and didn't particularly want to be associated with a liquor company (he originally had intended to do an ad for a Swedish mineral water). Victor Forbes, a friend of Roux's and editor of Fine Art magazine, says rather than drink Absolut, Warhol liked to dab it on his body as a kind of cologne.
SETTING THE TREND. Roux understood something most buttoned-down execs don't like to acknowledge. "Absolut wasn't afraid of controversy," says Ronald Feldman, a veteran art-gallery owner in lower Manhattan. "They knew that if they could get trendsetters to drink Absolut, other people would eventually follow." Through Warhol, Roux became friendly with other hot '80s artists, such as Basquiat and Keith Haring, who also did Absolut ads. Some of these artists weren't exactly role models for the nation's youth (Basquiat died in 1988 of a drug overdose), but Absolut earned enormous cachet by being closely associated with some of the hottest names in the art world.
Roux, however, leavened raw commercialism with considerable idealism. He was deeply involved in numerous charitable organizations and was one of the first marketers to unabashedly court gay consumers in an era when that was still considered risky. He also mounted marketing campaigns that gave boosts to artists, musicians, and other creative types. The Absolut Statehood ad campaign, for instance, featured one artist from each of the 50 states, many of them unknowns. Lithographs of the works were also sold, with the proceeds being given to fight AIDS. "I'm not the greatest art critic -- far from it," Roux says. "But I did what I could to help some of these [artists]."
Now, Roux is following a similar strategy with his new venture. French artist Francois Chalet has created whimsical ads for OP. And for every case sold in New York, Crillon plans to donate $12 to Citymeals on Wheels, a charity that helps feed elderly New Yorkers. To give cachet to Absente, Roux is gathering a crew of a dozen or so artists, some of whom did Absolut ads for him. Ron English did a painting of van Gogh with three faces holding a bottle of Absente, looking as if the drink has blown his mind. There are no blue dog Absente ads yet, but Roux has signed up Jim Tweedy, a Louisiana artist who paints red cats in a style similar to Rodrigue's. (Tweedy also markets everything from red cat posters to red cat plush dolls out of his gallery in the French quarter of New Orleans.)
FONDER OF ABSENTE. Of all the drinks in his portfolio, Roux believes OP has the greatest potential. A vodka flavored with spices such as fennel, caraway, and anise that are used in making the Swedish drink aquavit, OP is backed by a $2.5 million ad campaign that kicked off in July. Roux, who is marketing the drink in the U.S. for the makers of Absolut, expects to be selling 150,000 to 200,000 cases of OP annually within three years, up from fewer than 10,000 cases this year.
However, I suspect that Absente could be a surprise success. English, who is plugged into the underground art and music scene in gritty sections of Brooklyn and Jersey City, says hip young musicians are starting to hold Absente parties and are adopting the drink in droves. And as Roux knows better than anyone, what hip outsiders are drinking now sets the pace. "They'll be drinking Absente in fraternities in five years," English predicts. "This stuff really gets a party going." If that were to happen, it would be vintage Michel Roux.
Peterson is a contributing editor at BusinessWeek Online. Follow his weekly Moveable Feast column, only on BW Online Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
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