Constellation Brands, Inc. Barclays 19th Annual Global Consumer Conference

The company's evolved a great deal in the five-plus years I've been on the board. When I joined, we had a strategy I think we executed very well of taking the brands that we had with enormous distribution and awareness runway and just executing very single-mindedly against that. That opportunity still exists in parts of our portfolio, then in parts of our portfolio that have matured into brands that, take Corona for example. We have pretty much full distribution. We have great awareness. There's a different playbook for growing a brand like that.

As I've gotten into the business a little bit and applied a bit more thought to, okay, what's the nuance behind managing this portfolio that has some more mature brands, has some very high growth brands, has some incredible assets like in our route to market and our marketing ability, it really is to develop distinct capabilities. So we'll continue to be a brand scaler, and I think we're one of the best in the world at that, and we have the track record to prove it, and you can see Modelo's still got a lot of room to go. You can see Pacifico coming up right behind that, and you can see Victoria.

But we have to be excellent at taking the things that we've scaled and continuing to drive saliency and relevance, continuing to find the granular pockets of growth, activating in those areas that really speak to consumers. Then I think there is a third pillar, which is there is some stuff that's new to the world, and you've seen us put, of late, some newer products out there, some innovation. That, again, is a different skill set and a different playbook, and I think we need to hone in on that as well.

Yeah, sure. It really starts with the consumer and understanding everything about the consumer, how they're thinking, what are they looking for in those need state occasions, then choosing those need state occasions where we want to participate. Today's consumer is moving across category, I think, more than they ever have. They've always moved across category. I'm not sure people are ever just singularly one thing, but they're moving across category more than they have. Our customer, our distributor, is moving across category more than they ever have, and it's going to be critical we remain relevant with both of those. So really understanding in that need state, what is the competitive set? What are the choices that they're making? Then how do we best play against that across our portfolio? We have a portfolio of products. Right? Pick an occasion, and we don't have to participate in every single occasion.

We can be choiceful. But you pick an occasion, and with my portfolio, how do I best want to win that occasion? I think a great example of that is Pacifico, which is really leaning into an active, adventure, sports, lifestyle type occasion. I was just out with our distributors in California, looking at some of our activation around the World Cup surfing championship, and you could see just how seamlessly it fit into that occasion. That becomes more of an occasion thing where that consumer may choose beer, they may choose something else, and how do we win more of those occasions is the thinking.

I think as we get into next financial year, and already we're seeing some of the early work around our brand activation, it's going to have more of that consumer focus lens around occasion, which in turn creates different lanes for our brands and allows us maybe to go harder to foster at some of the opportunities we have.

They definitely have distinct personalities. I think given our success, it is sometimes easy for us to default to, "Here is the way we build a Mexican brewed beer in market X." If you do that too much, it can start to look similar. What can you take from that skill set and apply consistently over and over again? Then where do you need to create distinction? This is not revolution, it is evolution. It is really just tweaking that a little bit to make sure that there is distinction, that we can access more occasions than we might have if we just had sort of the very strict blinders on.