Pernod Ricard North America reviews

Place is a bit of a joke. Some of the people are almost insultingly stupid. Company has some really misguided missions/brands. Pay is way below market levels for non-marketing roles. The nicety of the corporate culture gets in the way of making the right decisions. Upper level management is European only. Upper level management also each send their departments in different direction because of poor communication between the individuals. There are some great employees, but they have a habit of leaving. There is a reason that the company has a very high turn over rate and so many openings. I feel bad throwing HR under the bus because they are deep in over their heads that they are destined to fail, but in many ways they sum up the rest of the company. They are ineffective but nice enough people whose only purpose is fill out a corporate cog, but ending up slowing down the functional part of the machine. There are a lot of issues but lets not get carried away. If you want a dynamic career this is not the place for you. If you want to stay in middle management for a long time and do nothing than you have a promising future at Pernod Ricard USA.

It used to be a paternalistic company with strong values but it is fast changing. Patrick Ricard would have never conducted the recent reorganizations just to address the comments of some Wall Street analysts who compared the fixed costs of Pernod to Diageo’s. They’ve let go so many great people and talent go, just because this was the advice of their management consultants. The company is losing touch with its culture. There is definitely a glass ceiling if you are not French and don’t belong to the boy’s club. In the US, almost all of the senior management is European in key functions like Marketing and HR. The fact that they can only trust expats is a real shame in itself. The culture of the company is very internally focused – They spend so much resources just for internal convincing. Most of their senior leaders would not even have the skills set to be hired as a brand manager at their competitors. Very weak marketing and innovation culture. Again, they are good at buying brands not building brands. The only historical brands they have built themselves are now constantly declining (Ricard, Suze, etc). Result, Pernod Ricard USA is constantly losing market share. ’m not even talking about the Absolut fiasco and what they have done with this brand that they overly paid for a month before the 2008 crisis. They react and they follow, instead of innovating. Some examples of this: - Launching an ultra premium Absolut vodka (Absolut Elyx) years after that market had grown - Launching Avion tequila after Patron has developed the market. - In Cognac and Champagne, they truly have an inferiority complex to LVMH and it does not seem to go away. Their internal global innovation hub called BIG is a real joke. Nothing has come out of there except some BS press releases and expensive buzz videos. The emperor has no clothes!