Antoinette Drumm

The Path

Market discipline sits at the center of Antoinette Drumm’s remit as Managing Director, Middle East and North Africa of Diageo. The role is one of regional scale, but the frame she puts on it is narrower and more exacting: keep the trade safer, more regulated, and still protect the conditions that make the brand matter. In her own terms, that means working toward quality, authenticity, and consumer trust as operating standards, not slogans.

The Work Today

Trade regulation and brand stewardship are the two poles of the work Antoinette Drumm describes. On one side is the need for a safer, more regulated environment; on the other is the need to preserve what gives Guinness its pull in the market. The balance she sets out is practical: protect the market without sanding off the brand’s character. That is the language of a regional operator thinking about how a major label lives in public, and how trust is built around it. Guinness, in Drumm’s telling, is also a social object. She describes it as a brand that brings people together, which places community connection alongside commercial scale. The point is not sentimentality, but recognition of what the brand already does in market: it gathers people, and it does so in a way that can be amplified without losing its core identity. The work, then, is to keep that identity legible while making the surrounding environment more orderly and credible.

In Their Words “Guinness has always been about bringing people together, and there’s something truly magical about seeing that spirit celebrated on such a big scale.” “Through this agreement, we aim to create a safer and more regulated environment where quality, authenticity, and consumer trust prevail.”