Guinness' sales had slowed and to return to 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. and the craft that goes into pouring a Guinness ostracised other new people to the brand due to the knowledge and barriers to entry that were put in place by existing Guinness lovers.

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 strategy and move from broadcast media 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 - Tilt Tests, Singing Pints, and Shtick. This led us to our creative idea for earning attention where we reinvented rituals - showcasing, celebrating, and reimagining them in culturally relevant ways.

This came to life through our community who shared their own rituals. But we added scale and authenticity through curated influencer partnerships, inviting our community to be a part of Guinness' creative heritage 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.

Across Facebook, Instagram and X, we rolled out a three-pronged approach throughout 2023:

1. RITUALS REINVENTED

We invited drinkers to define what quality means to them, and in doing so, demystified the product to a new cohort of drinkers, making it far more accessible.

2. CO-CREATION AT THE CORE

We created a community of Guinnfluencers around our product to help us tell the story of Guinness. For the first time ever, Guinness trusted Social to lead the launch of their biggest innovation in decades - Nitrosurge.

3. MOVE AT THE SPEED OF CULTURE

We put Guinness in the cultural conversation. We confidently found our voice in live cultural moments as they unfolded, like Cillian and his dirty pint (36,000 likes), and the now infamous chip dip (87,000 likes), driving record levels of earned reach for Guinness.

See confidential section.