MARKETING / BRAND BUILDER: Guinness’s guinea pigs

Faced with a stagnating stout market, Guinness has hit the innovation trail. Two beers in the Brewhouse series are currently being trialled. Roger Brownlie reports

A dilemma arises for any brand when it’s time for a change. After many years spent building consumers’ trust, educating and even entertaining them, changing one’s tune must be handled sensitively. It is a particularly tough challenge when the brand in question is the monolithic Guinness, a brand that has prided itself in its claim to be the only choice of stout worth drinking and seemingly timeless.

But stout sales have been stagnating, even in Ireland, which has not gone unnoticed by the brand’s owner Diageo which has responded by launching brand extensions Brew 39 and Toucan Brew from the Brewhouse Series as well as Mid-Strength Guinness.

Now, it seems, there is more than one Guinness. And according to the innovations team at Guinness there is no limit to the number of “Guinnesses” that will be launched, a dramatic change in approach for the brand.

There was only one way to discover more about the brand’s intentions and that was to step through the legendary St James’s Gate in Dublin to meet the people behind the innovations. Gráinne Wafer, marketing manager for Guinness Ireland, says, “A few years ago if you went into a coffee bar and asked for a coffee you would get a black coffee with a little jug of milk. Now you get a latte, frappe cappuccino or whatever. That’s the type of environment our consumers are living in. We need to make sure we are offering choice to them. We have two of the Brewhouse series being trialled now and there will be another out in October and then April – every six months.”

Paul Norris from the innovations team at Diageo explains: “We’re giving people an opportunity to try a lot of different executions of Guinness that have been tried and formulated over many years. I think customers feel quite good about Brewhouse; it’s as though we’ve shared a secret with them. If one of the products performs extremely well then
we will have to consider what to do with it.

“We have a huge number of brews at St James’s Gate. As long as people are willing to trial these brews and give us continual research on them we’ll keep putting them out. We don’t have a fixed number in the Brewhouse series,” he says.
But that doesn’t hold true for Mid-Strength (2.8%) which is a very different beast. It is, I am assured, made from exactly the same ingredients as Guinness but with some alcohol taken out. Was it produced in response to binge drinking?

“It would be wrong of me to say we didn’t take into account what is happening in the market place,” says Norris. “There has been a huge amount of bad press around binge drinking or any excess of alcohol. Part of the Mid-Strength rationale is around providing a product into the marketplace that allows control. But that’s not the primary driver. The primary driver was choice. It just happened to come at a time when the government was saying ‘You need to have a range of products out there that allow people to choose something with lower alcohol’.

“Mid-Strength is not about trying to produce a different beer. The Brewhouse series is a different stout but Mid-Strength is Guinness, with some alcohol taken out.”

But Mid-Strength is not a full launch. It is still in the testing stage and Diageo is not ready to commit yet. “It’s a bit early to talk about whether we will stick with it,” says Norris. “The whole point of the consumer test is to understand the consumer reaction. There is a whole learning process and we have to help the consumer with that, help them realise occasions when Mid-Strength is suitable. We’d be crazy to think after nine weeks we could make a call.”

Gráinne Wafer agrees. “We approach everything with a degree of caution. By the time it’s out there we know there is significant positive consumer reaction to it. We put it out to gauge that reaction further.”

“You have to be realistic about innovation,” says Norris. “There are an awful lot of innovations that don’t work. That is the rule of the game – risk. But the risk is less than doing nothing. The biggest risk of innovation is not doing anything. People can criticise failures and that’s fine. But for people to say ‘You did nothing’, that to me is worse.” 

© db October 2006