Situation:

In a cluttered beer category, Guinness was losing ‘salience’ and was seen as' traditional’ an ‘old man beer brand’, drunk in winter, on St Patrick's Day or during the rugby. As a result, our target audience (LPA-35) had less of a connection with Guinness, particularly during the summer. We had to show that perception wasn’t reality.

The Brief:

To create a culture-first creative campaign during summer to shift perceptions and grow brand love amongst LPA-35.

Objectives:

Become the no.1 talked about beer brand during key drinking occasions, particularly the summer period

Increase brand love by 8pp

Unlock new media opportunities for Guinness outside of its traditional narrative

Shift perceptions amongst younger audiences through greater cultural impact scoring an increase of 10% across relevancy and brand perception.

Ensure all earned stories had over 70% key message inclusion

To celebrate Guinness’ rich connection with West Africa, we partnered with a label that could tell this story credibly with us and turn heads amongst this audience. Labrum founder Foday is a UK immigrant from Sierra Leone, Guinness lover and one of the most exciting names in menswear today.

Together we paid homage to those who immigrated and brought their Guinness drinking traditions with them, reminding them of home.

Inspired by his memories of Freetown, gathered enjoying Guinness around street tables, the two brands reimagined their shared history through a storytelling fashion print and campaign that exploded across channels and grabbed our target’s attention.

The coveted collection was captured in a short film and made an unexpected appearance at Labrum’s SS24 show, the first time a beer brand appeared on the catwalk. Impact was deepened by workshops for emerging fashion designers to create their own designs, ensuring community approval.

A powerful insight, Guinness was a beer that reminded the West African diaspora of home.

A simple message, hero the West African diasporas’ experience of the brand and pay homage to those who had brought their Guinness traditions with them.

We engineered our strategy around our end goal. To drive Guinness reappraisal amongst our target and unlock coverage in the last places you’d expect to see it, hype and fashion titles.

To do this, we needed to supercharge our message and create multichannel campaign assets that would resonate with the fashion community, tapping into Labrum’s network of West African creatives.

Each channel had a role to play in communicating our insight. A 30s film was posted across owned/partner channels to capture attention, building intrigue and hype as the lookbook was seeded to targeted fashion and lifestyle press to land visually-led storytelling.

We had 35 days of Summer left to get our story out into the world.

First, we seeded the collection to high-profile talent and Guinness lovers for them to wear and get their fans amped for launch.

Then, we gave media, creators, friends of Guinness and Labrum’s high profile network the chance celebrate the partnership with a pint and traditional Sierra Leonean checkers at the official launch party at Labrum’s store.

From here the social and media frenzy began. Social chatter from the night, allowed us to gain further traction from press, garnering quality national coverage labelling Guinness as a ‘fashion icon’ and the brand that ‘rose from pub bore to flavour of the year’.

Our showstopper PR moment was seeing the collection go down the catwalk at Labrum’s London Fashion Week show, resulting in Vogue coverage and sample requests from Solange Knowles and the President of Sierra Leone.

Media Outputs:

Reach of 1.2M with coverage across national, fashion and consumer press like Vogue and Hypebeast

2.4M visibility of content

90% key campaign message inclusion

56% search increase in ‘Guinness’ between pre-launch (start of August) and post-coverage going live (9 August)

20K accounts reached (vs 15k benchmark)

Target Audience Outcomes:

Using the bespoke Diageo Cultural Measurement framework designed to ensure that a target audience is consulted pre and post a campaign to benchmark culturally relevant success beyond PR results - we saw the following results:

An increase of 11.4% in authenticity, 7.2% in relevance and 4.6% in appeal of Guinness amongst the campaign’s target audience.

(Source: Diageo Cultural Measurement Framework)

Business Outcomes:

Sales: Summer 2023 we sold 51.1m pints which was 5.6m more than previous year

Share: In the On Trade we grew share by 0.9% taking us to 7.2% share of beer. Our highest ever over Summer. And in the Off Trade by 0.5% taking us to 3.1% share of beer

Consumer: We had uplift in brand love by 11pp and increased our spontaneous awareness from 23% to 24.4%, and penetration 6.6% to 6.7%.