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He said that marketing activity such as the sponsorship of McLaren underscores this. “When customers see the brand on the side of the car and on the track signs, it gives them the reassurance that this is a ‘statusful’ brand.”

Gates said that the business had been forced to ride some bumpy economic conditions to achieve its position. In Brazil, for example, after the devaluation of the real against the dollar, Diageo was forced to raise the price of Johnnie Walker by 65% but, crucially, it did not retreat from the country.

“It was pretty scary,” said Gates. “We held our nerve and kept on marketing, building the brand. As the economy turned and grew, we really reaped the benefit.” In 1998, Diageo sold 400,000 cases of Johnnie Walker Red Label in Brazil; by last year it was shifting close to 1m.

Diageo is also changing its marketing strategy as more markets acquire a taste for scotch. The present campaign, featuring the “Keep Walking” slogan, has been running for almost 10 years. In its first few years — the time of the Keitel and Baggio ads — the same commercials were used all over the world (although few of them were screened in Britain, a fairly unimportant territory for the brand).

More recently Diageo has tailored its advertising to suit different cultures. For these purposes, the globe is divided into Asia and the rest of the world, and these two are then sub-divided into three more categories according to how long Johnnie Walker has been available. In some cases, this is quite some time: the company is fond of boasting that the brand was in 120 countries before Coca-Cola was first exported from America.

In the decade since Keep Walking was introduced, one thing has stayed constant, no matter where an ad is displayed — the refusal to employ any of the traditional imagery of Scotland that regularly features in commercials for other brands of scotch.

Before developing its first crop of ads, executives at BBH, the advertising agency that coined the slogan, spent several days going through tapes of whisky ads from around the world. Most of them featured the same motifs — the tartan and the heather or the sense of refinement that goes with drinking scotch. It was something that Diageo’s marketing men wanted to distance from Johnnie Walker.

Another notable facet of the brand’s success is the range of variants, allowing it to cater for a variety of tastes — and wallets. Diageo regards Black Label as the core of the range, but in some markets the cheaper Red variant is more popular. “Where Red Label is successful, clearly it can become a recruitment tool for Black Label down the road,” said John Wakely, a drinks-industry consultant.

The range also allows Diageo to tinker with the brand at the deluxe end. This week Johnnie Walker Blue Label George V goes on sale in Britain for the first time, where it will sell for £420 a bottle. It has already proved a success in Asia, where in some places customers can even have their bottles engraved with a personal message.

Whisky sales are booming, but pressures on the industry are mounting. Prices of raw ingredients, such as barley, have been rising — costs are expected to climb 5% this year — and with soaring demand, there is a risk that supplies could start to dwindle. The whisky used to make Black Label, for example, has to be 12 years old, so there is a finite amount available, hence the rush by many distillers to increase production to ensure there will be enough stock to meet future demand.

“It’s very difficult to get the balance right,” said an industry executive.

That is a challenge that Diageo has to meet head on. “It is vital that they continue to do a good job,” said Simon Hales, beverages analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort. “Johnnie Walker is central to the sustainability of profit growth for the group.”

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