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Dietrich Mateschitz, the man who gave wings to Red Bull

By Noah Miller

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The Austrian businessman was born in Sankt Marein im Murztal, Styria on the 20th of May 1944 in a family of Croatian ancestry and his parents worked as primary school teachers. They separated when he was still a young child and this led him to mistrust the idea of marriage from this early age.

He took ten years to graduate the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration and he received a marketing degree at the age of 28, beginning his work career at Unilever where he was marketing detergents. After a while he moved to the Blendax cosmetics company where he had to travel a lot through the world and while travelling to Thailand for work he discovered the Krating Daeng drink that would later become Red Bull.

The drink was popular in Asia and was manufactured by a company called T.C. Pharmaceuticals that was founded by Chaleo Yoovidhya in 1976 who he contacted immediately. He created Red Bull GmbH in 1984 through a collaboration with Chaleo and Chalerm Yoovidhya, launching it in Austria in 1987 and then into the rest of the world.

Chaleo and Dietrich both invested half a million dollars to start the new company and got 49% of the company, with the rest 2% going to Yoovidhya’s son and Dietrich received the president chair. The first product released had a silver and blue can that nobody seemed to notice, but the marketing skills of Dietrich came into effect and he came up with the concept of an energy drink starting a marketing campaign. He became a sponsor of a competition called Flugtag where people tried to fly with homemade flying machines and noticing the good response of marketing efforts in sports he focused on this field with famous athletes from various disciplines being contracted.

Another approach was to advertise Red Bull as working great as a replacement for alcohol for parties and the aggressive marketing paid results, making the drink highly popular in Austria and by 1992 they started selling it in Slovenia and Hungary. Five fears after this the continent of America was reached and soon the entire world knew what Red Bull was, making Dietrich and Chaleo enter the Forbes billionaire chart with a worth of 10.1 billion dollars for the first and 9.9 billion for the latter at the moment when this article was written.

Aside from his career Dietrich also holds a pilot’s license and flies a Falcon 900 or a Piper Super Cub monoplane, while also owning an extensive collection of historic aircrafts. In 2004 he bought the Formula One team of Jaguar and renamed it Red Bull Racing. A year later he brought the driver Gerhard Berger and bought the Minardi team renaming it Scuderia Toro Rosso. This combination led to the victory in the Formula 1 Constructors Championship and Drivers Championship in 2010 which they held for four years in a row.

Between 2006 and 2011 he owned a NASCAR team called Team Red Bull in the Spring Cup Series and the K&N Pro Series East but his main focus remained Formula One, buying the A1-Ring circuit which was also renamed the Red Bull Ring hosting one of the rounds of the 2011 DTM season. Under the name of the company he bought the Austrian football club SV Austria Salzburg and the MetroStars club in America, renaming both of them after the energy drink. He also founded Red Bull Brasil in Campinas, Brazil and the RB Leipzig football club in Germany and is the owner of the EHC Munich (now Red Bull Munich) ice hockey team.

When compared to other companies, the amount of money invested in branding is what sets Red Bull apart from the rest, and the large list above shows their orientation. Coca-Cola for example spends roughly 9 percent of their revenue into marketing, while in the year 2004 Mateschitz spent 30%, meaning around 600 million dollars focusing in the field of sports.

Dietrich wanted to create an Avionautik Akademie as a joint venture with the Austrian Army in the Zeltweg region, adding his own hangar and old planes into the project, but the project is still under development. His passion for flying made him hold an annual fundraiser for the Taurus Foundation led by him that helps injured stunt professionals and he sponsors the World Stunt Awards.

His main residence is in Fuschl am See, Austria but he is also bought the Laucala Island in Fiji, paying seven million pounds for it to the Forbes family in 2003. It has turquoise lagoons, green mountains, amazing panoramas and a surface of 3000 acres from which 600 are cultivated with coconuts. Once he bought the island it went through extensive renovations and it is now considered one of the most beautiful islands in the world, opening to guests in 2009 with an array of 25 exotic residences.

The Austrian Red Bull headquarters are also in Fuschl am See in a complex shaped like two “volcano” structures sitting in the middle of a lake and Dietrich has one of his hangars here as well with some of his historic planes and helicopters.

Always trying to think ahead, the Red Bull company of today transformed into a media company, since marketing was a core part of the brand and thus it produces a lot of high-end action sports and youth culture media on the web, films, print, music and TV. Thus the Red Bull Media House is a natural extension of the main kernel to better define what Dietrich calls the World of Red Bull and its brand philosophy. The goal is to establish a global media network that would create and distribute high quality content for its partners and channels to reinforce the brand.

Mateschitz said that “when we first started, we said there is no existing market for Red Bull. But Red Bull will create it” and this is exactly what happened with the ingenious leadership and insight of Dietrich, with hundreds of energy drinks trying to follow in the footsteps of the first one but always staying under the winds of the bull.

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About Noah Miller

Noah is a professional journalist who has been specializing in the jewelry and watches industry since the early 2010s. He’s been contributing to Luxatic for more than eight years now, and he's also a contributor to well known publications like GQ, Esquire or Town & Country, and many watch and jewelry blogs. Learn more about Luxatic's Editorial Process.

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