Guinness' sales had slowed and for Guinness' growth, it needed to shift its marketing to penetrate new, younger, and more diverse audiences that it had alienated over time.

Women in particular felt disenfranchised from the brand as it was steeped in masculine connotations. The aura surrounding the Guinness serve was ostracising the younger audience we wanted to reach. We knew we needed a creative approach that acted as an open invitation to the brand.

We found that our target audience (25-34 year olds) were spending 170 minutes per day on vs 109 on TV. (Warc, 2023). According to IAB, the majority of this time was spent with user-generated and influencer content as opposed to branded content. So we had to adapt our media strategy and move from linear to social first.

As of 2022, the Instagram account @ShitLondonGuinness had significantly more followers than the official Guinness GB account. This made us realise we needed to adopt a more authentic and relaxed style to resonate with our audiences.

We reimagined our Irish Charm for a new generation by becoming open, playful, and more accessible.

Social listening showed our community was less concerned with perfect pints, preferring to get creative with our product to demonstrate quality. This led us to our creative idea for earning attention where we reinvented rituals - showcasing, celebrating, and reimagining them in culturally relevant ways.

We brought rituals to life through user-generated content, influencers, earned and organic formats, making quality fun and engaging to our audience for the first time ever.

We needed to shift the demographic of drinkers away from 45+ males who made up the majority of our drinker base towards a more diverse, female and younger adults with a focus on LPA-34 year-olds.

Knowing that social media dominated their media consumption (WARC, 2023), we had to adopt social as our lead channel, representing a huge shift to the brand, which had traditionally been built on linear channels. As part of the authenticity journey, we connected with real Guinness drinkers as opposed to celebrity influencers to demonstrate the product.

The way we used media had to change, to move from reinforcing an iconic, perfect, and inflexible serve, to one that celebrated more casual and fun Guinness drinking. We flipped our media behaviour to help lower the barriers to consumption and to deliberately make us more accessible to the younger and female audiences who we’d alienated.

1/ FROM ORGANIC TO EARNED

We couldn’t just focus on existing drinkers, we had to tell our story to future audiences. We pivoted from an organic social strategy to an earned strategy, readjusting tactics and metrics accordingly. Our approach focused on telling our story to new audiences. We concentrated on driving user-generated content and formats with earned potential (Instagram and X). A simple but powerful change that helped shift our communications from being focused on loyalty to penetration.

2/ FROM INFLUENCERS TO GUINN-FLUENCERS

For the first time ever, Guinness trusted social creators to launch a critical product innovation in Nitrosurge. From May to October, we worked with a selection of creators to bring the at-home Guinness experience to life on Instagram.

3/ FROM SCHEDULED TO SPONTANEOUS

We built a flexible media approach, enabling our real-time newsroom to meet the community

where they are, embedding Guinness in the cultural conversation.

See confidential section.