People of Suntory Global Spirits: Sarah Coury

People of Suntory Global Spirits: Sarah Coury

Sarah Coury’s path to Brand Director for On The Rocks has been anything but traditional, but each step of her journey helped shape how she approaches brand building today.

Before joining Suntory Global Spirits, Sarah worked in the arts, taught through Teach for America and eventually moved into consulting. Even as the environments changed, she found herself continually drawn toward work that combined creativity, storytelling and problem solving.

“I joined Suntory Global Spirits because I wanted to work at a place with iconic brands. I saw Commercial Strategy as a great entry point where eventually I could move into a brand marketing role.

I’m very fortunate to have had sponsors along the way. From Paula Halbert and Betsy Griffin, who approached me about the Marketing Strategy opportunity knowing it was a step toward brand marketing, to Carlo Coppola, Carol Robert and Daniel May, who gave me developmental opportunities to prove I could be a brand director before ultimately moving into that role officially with On The Rocks.”

Today, Sarah is helping guide On The Rocks through a period of continued growth and evolution. While her responsibilities have changed and grown over time, Sarah says one thing has remained constant throughout her experience at SGS.

“I feel truly grateful to have worked with some amazing people while at SGS. It’s the people who craft our brands, tell our brand stories and make sure those same brands are available to consumers.

What I love about my role now is getting to play a part at each stage of that process, whether that’s developing our innovation pipeline, creating new programming to connect with consumers or working with our commercial partners to ensure excellent execution.

We work in an industry where we sell to a distributor, who sells to a customer, who sells to a consumer and at every single point along that chain someone must find our brand desirable. The only way we do that is by developing a deep understanding of both our consumer and the market, then applying those learnings together as a team.”

Looking back on her journey so far, Sarah believes growth comes from combining long-term thinking with ownership, trust and a willingness to keep learning.

“Display a true sense of ownership beyond the day-to-day activities assigned to you, develop long-term relationships with both internal colleagues and external partners and look for win-win opportunities. Those are the behaviors that lay a foundation for trust while also building your own sense of empowerment to execute against.”

Watch our video interview to hear more from Sarah about balancing creativity and business thinking, bringing your full self to work and the experiences that continue to shape her journey at SGS, like an exciting On The Rocks campaign filmed in Colombia earlier this year.