The Secret Of Succession

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But at first, Alexandre's approach to his business seemed anything but rational. To the consternation of his family, he spent large sums on enlarging his collection of plaster and wooden saints, tapestries, enamel reliquaries, and ancient chests and keys. He then announced plans for a vast Renaissance palace, a Victorian concoction of pinnacles, arcades, and vaulted halls topped by a tall spire. One end would house all his medieval folk art; the other end would be the distillery.

The "factory palace" was completed in 1876 at a cost not to be paid off for a generation. But it did the trick. The Benedictine Museum became a tourist attraction reinforcing the notion of mystery, antiquity, and piety embodied in Benedictine liqueur. One of its stained glass windows portrays Alexandre in a frock coat beneath a trumpeting angel bearing a bottle of Benedictine.

Last year 120,000 visitors trooped through the museum for a modest seven francs each (about $1.25), sipped glasses of Benedictine, and watched a 10-minute film about the product. They bought posters and postcards and listened to taped tours in eight languages. Even today, well-educated Frenchmen, after a visit to the palace, will assure you that monks in Fecamp gather herbs for the liqueur.

Even before the castle was completed, sales of the new liqueur were brisk. By 1900, Benedictine was established as one of the leading liqueurs of the Belle Epoque and had built a thriving foreign trade, which was badly damaged by the loss of the Russian market and by American Prohibition. During the Depression, the company bounced back when it launched B & B in the United States to conunter the American habit of cutting Benedictine with cheap brandies. Americans liked the excellent brandy used in the company's mixture, and B & B was soon outselling Benedictine two to one in the United States.

Postwar sales boomed, but by the early 1970s, lack of aggressive marketing had the company in the doldrums. In 1975, the board persuaded 29-year-old Alain to join the family business.

Alain's qualifications to run a liqueur company were not obvious. Raised in Paris by his divorced mother, who was a surgeon, he earned master's degrees at the elite School of Mines and the Institute of Political Science, dabbled in theater, and worked as an engineer. Surviving the competitive world of the "grandes ecoles" helped Alain quickly adapt to business; in three years he was named marketing director. He became president in 1981.

"There's a new spirit in the company since Alain took over," says a spokesman for Julius Wile Sons & Co., Benedictine's U.S. distributor. Alain built a more efficient bottling plant, created separate profit centers, and cut costs considerably by replacing the handsealed cork with screw-on caps. Then he focused his attention on marketing, particularly in the United States, where Benedictine does 45% of its business.

"We want to sell as much Benedictine in the United States as B & B, so we're repositioning Benedictine as a drink, not just for after dinner, but for any time," Alain says. "We now call Benedictine 'the near-perfect mixer,' to be served on the rocks, with soda, and in cocktails."

Pierre's second cousin, Bruno, 45, in charge of domestic operations, will soon help promote a liqueur little known in the United States: Pippermint Get (pronounced Jet), a creme de menthe that has doubled sales in France in the past three years, and promises in five years to challenge Benedictine abroad, particularly in Asia.

Export manager Bertrand Deren has succeeded in getting Benedictine into China. The liqueur is popular in the Far East, where it's promoted as an elixir and is said to restore health.

Americans, Alain maintains, trail behind Europeans in export know-how. "That's probably because your internal market is so huge," he says. "But when your market goes off, exports can help keep you on an even keel. The American tendency is to export without studying the market sufficiently."

Alain makes final decisions about export policy as he does about most management issues. His 60-year-old father, Pierre, limits his attention to financial matters and the personnel policies affecting the 300 employees. Bruno is on the board, and a younger cousin, Francois, is in charge of research. Alain rarely finds the family presence a liability.

"I think we may be more willing to take risks than mere managers," he says. "But it's important to listen to outsiders when you have a family business. We have on our board a champagne manufacturer, a financier, a personnel director of a textile firm, and a lawyer. We meet monthly and the input of these men is taken seriously."

Family tradition doesn't hurt employee relations either. As in many French industries, sons succeed fathers in many jobs at Benedictine. They've never had a strike.

France's new Socialist government could change all that, but Alain isn't worried. "The Socialists are no threat to smaller enterprises," he says. (See "French Foreign Exchange," at left.) Besides, Alain thinks that the Socialists are naive in thinking they can banish human acquisitiveness, and that they will eventually be forced out of power.

Should he prove wrong, what then?

With the typical French shrug, he says, "Benedictine could easily be made abroad." There might be a problem, though, finding a plant site near an abandoned abbey.

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