Guinness' sales had slowed and to return to growth, it needed to shift its communication approach to recruit 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.

Furthermore, 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 communications strategy and move away from top-down broadcast to social-first co-created stories.

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 collaborative 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 in partnership with our community with our distinctive rituals taking on a life of their own. 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 social had to change, moving from reinforcing an iconic, perfect, and inflexible serve, to one that celebrated more casual and fun Guinness drinking, a story we co-authored with our community. We flipped our behaviour to help lower the barriers to consumption and to deliberately make ourselves more accessible to the younger and female audiences we’d alienated.

On Instagram, we rolled out a three-pronged approach throughout 2023:

1.ORGANIC SOCIAL

We led our community with a consistent organic social - showcasing, celebrating, and reimagining rituals in culturally relevant ways. Our approach elevated these UGC trends from insider secrets into distinctive and ownable rituals.

2. GUINNFLUENCERS

We fostered a brand experience that made Guinness a personality trait by building a community of Guinnfluencers. These creators helped us drive our rituals and launch products with a new audience. With larger partnerships with creators we added scale and authenticity, and with micro-creators, we drove brand love and creativity.

3. LINKING ONLINE & OFFLINE

With the pub as our home ground, we saw an opportunity to link online and offline. Partnering with up-and-coming artists, we commissioned bespoke beer mats which were deployed in pubs nationwide. We encouraged our community to submit their own, unleashing a flurry of user-generated creativity.

See confidential below.