by Pádraic Gilligan, Co-founder, SoolNua Consulting

When Pat and I started Delaney Marketing Consultants (DMC, for short!), one of our main competitors still wrote out RFP responses in longhand and snail-mailed them to the client. It sounds like something out of Dickens (or, indeed, the contemporary legal profession) but it’s 100% true and, while I won’t name the company, I can confirm it is still very much in business.

This came to mind as I read Jancis Robinson’s intriguing piece in the FT on how radically the wine business has changed over her decades writing about it. What, I wondered, has changed in the DMC business since Pat and I opened “Ireland’s leading DMC” in 1994, when we were neither “leading” nor, truth be known, a real DMC?

Big red ledgers, I suspect, are no longer used to track an RFP from enquiry to confirmation (or loss), delivery and reconciliation. But that’s how we did it. I still have the ledger, Gerard’s pencil marks carried forward across rows and rows and rows of entries. In fairness, unlike an Excel file, it opened immediately, needed neither power nor broadband and was never encrypted by a colleague with a password nobody could remember!

All client communication was by fax, and each evening you checked the machine had a fat enough roll of thermal paper, as enquiries came in overnight from North America and, if the roll ran out, you got half the request! Responses took weeks, not days (and certainly not hours), each one bespoke, even if golf and costumed Irish dancers were essential inclusions.

Suppliers were trickier still. Hotels had fax machines but most others did not, so you phoned the enquiry through and noted on file, as proof of confirmation, who you spoke with and when. You can imagine how that played out when somebody’s mother took the call because her chauffeur son was “out on a job”.

Enquiries were guarded like the third secret of Fatima. You never revealed your client’s name to anyone, least of all a hotel, because in those twilight days before global sales offices, rooms were still booked through the DMC, at a commissionable rate. As hotels joined global chains or built their own sales teams, the incentive houses booked direct and that lucrative revenue vanished. No Irish DMC has parked their Rolls-Royce on Fitzwilliam Square since, a feat last achieved, as it happens, by the CEO who wrote his responses in longhand!

You needed an office then, too. It signified repute, solidity, success, and housed the vast archive of supplier collateral that, along with endless fam trips, kept you in the know. Local knowledge and connections were your core value proposition, your métier, your raison d’être.

Men wore suits and ties; women dressed as if for a wedding. DMCs wielded real power, buying room blocks and being treated by hotels as clients. On site inspections the GM always showed up, deferring discreetly to the DMC. Pricing was never mentioned in front of the client, who never saw a menu price, and nothing was line item: a gala dinner was simply £150 per person, “inclusive of return transfers, welcome cocktail and canapés, 5-course dinner with half bottle of wine, cordials, 4-piece dance band and speciality entertainment”.

If the DMC was a power-player, the incentive house client was a living God, and some acted accordingly. Wives or partners came on site inspections, entirely comped of course. I still recall the fall-out when I invoiced a client who, having spent five full days being driven around the country with his girlfriend, told me he’d gone with a cheaper DMC. Charging for a site inspection was “simply outrageous” and who did we think we were? In fairness, some buyers, at the time, were obnoxious, arrogant pricks.

As procurement displaced relationships as the final decision-maker, many of us bemoaned the “good old days” when it was all about people, not process. How could a ten-year relationship, with all its orbiting intangibles, be trumped by form-filling?

How, indeed?

Yeats comes to mind, as he so often does. In “September 1913” he dismissed his fellow Dubliners as shopkeepers who would “add the halfpence to the pence”, and concluded that “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone”. Three years later, in “Easter, 1916”, he looked again at those same clerks and counter-hands and found them “changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.”

Some of us from the nineties will gravitate to the “terrible”, wondering how there’s any joy, or margin, left in a business where as much as 80% of the budget goes on air and accommodation, and where the swing to ersatz, all-inclusive resorts leaves little for the destination itself.

Others, and on most days I count myself among them, will find some beauty in it. Line-item pricing killed the £150 gala dinner whose true cost was known only to God and the DMC. Procurement ended the five-day site inspection with a girlfriend in the back seat. Nobody dresses for a wedding to meet a sales manager, enquiries arrive whole, and the answer to “who did you speak to?” is no longer “his mother”. The business Pat and I started in was more charming; the one inhabited by the next generation is more transparent, more accountable and, I’d venture, more honest.

But the ledger has its revenge. The fax roll that ran out overnight is now the inbox that never stops filling. Gerard’s pencil marks are a CRM nobody updates, guarded by a password nobody remembers. Fatima-like secrecy survives as the NDA and the procurement portal. The living God hasn’t been dethroned, merely relocated to procurement: maybe he leaves the girlfriend at home but still expects the site inspection to be free? And the bespoke response, once weeks in the making, now takes hours, is drafted in part by a large language model and features, with remarkable regularity, a whiskey tasting and a trad session. The competitor who wrote in longhand at least had to mean every word.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Alphonse Karr wrote it in 1849, after another revolution that promised to change everything. Some things are lost and gone forever, the red ledger and the Rolls-Royce among them, and I won’t mourn the arrogant buyer or the hidden menu price. What remains is the thing we grandly called our raison d’être: knowing a place and the people in it. Knowing which GM will show up. Knowing whose mother answers the phone, and whether she can be trusted with the pick-up time. No portal has yet found a way to procure that.

Winemakers, I suspect, understand this better than we do. As Jancis Robinson points out in her article, methods, markets and fashions change but the vineyard stays where it is. They call it terroir. Destinations have it too.

Meanwhile, that competitor is still in business. Thirty years of disruption, and nobody has managed to disrupt them. I can’t decide whether that’s the most reassuring thing I know about this industry or the most alarming.