Guinness

Patience is an increasingly unfashionable quality.

We live in a world that has become rather good at removing the wait.
Food arrives quickly. Messages arrive instantly. Films begin when we want them to.

Guinness, on the other hand, has spent much of its extraordinary life asking us to wait.

My professional relationship with beer and stout goes back a long way. Through GPL in Africa, we worked extensively across the SAB portfolio, which became SABMiller and eventually became part of AB InBev. It is, by some distance, the largest and longest-standing client relationship of the original GPL business in Africa.

Amongst the mandates the agency held over the years was an innovation portfolio. So much of great beer branding is about
discovering — or sometimes creating — the things that surround the liquid.

A place. A provenance. A shape. A way of pouring it. A way of drinking it. A social occasion. A story. A ritual.

These things give beer and stout brands dimension. They provide little pieces of proprietary behaviour that eventually become part of the brand itself.

And Guinness has an almost unfair number of them.

The colour. The harp. The typography. The extraordinary creamy head.
The pour. And, critically, the wait.

Most brand managers would give their right arm to own just one genuinely distinctive consumer ritual. Guinness owns a moment when the bartender actually stops pouring your beer. The pint is three-quarters poured, allowed to settle, and only then completed. 

You wait.

This potential inconvenience became critical brand theatre.

“Good things come to those who wait.”

Few advertising propositions have been so beautifully connected to an actual product truth.
And the idea of waiting goes back rather further than the pour and the advertising.

On 31 December 1759, Arthur Guinness signed the lease
on the brewery at St James's Gate in Dublin. The term of the lease was 9,000 years.

Nine thousand.

There is long-term thinking, and then there is Arthur Guinness.

More than 260 years later, Guinness still brews at St James's Gate. Yes, they now own that property and much around it. But viewed through the wonderful lens of brand history, the 9,000-year lease feels almost prophetic. Guinness was quite literally founded on the long view.

Interestingly, Guinness existed for around 170 years before it officially advertised.
When it eventually did, in 1929, one of its earliest propositions became one of the most famous advertising lines of the twentieth century:

“Guinness is Good for You.”

I was brought up with the residual belief that Guinness was somehow nourishing. Strong. Full of goodness. Full of iron.

Nowadays, suggesting that an alcoholic drink is “good for you” belongs firmly to another era. But great brands leave cultural sediment.

In the 2015 film Legend, Tom Hardy plays both Reggie and Ronnie Kray, the notorious London gangster twins. In one particularly menacing pub scene, Reggie calmly pours himself a Guinness while the threat of violence hangs in the room. He doesn't rush. He pours. He waits. He allows it to settle. And then he finishes the pour. The ritual draws out the tension precisely because everyone else, including the audience, is waiting for something rather less civilised to happen.

Then Reggie announces:

“Look at that. Full of iron, that is.”

A piece of dialogue with almost a century of brand memory behind it.

Another Guinness moment I recall clearly is from 1999. I was an impressionable young advertising man in my early thirties when Guinness gave us Surfer. Created by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO and directed by Jonathan Glazer, Surfer took the simple idea of waiting for a pint and turned it into something mythological.

Shot in a flattened black and white, it captures a Polynesian surfer waiting for the ultimate wave.
When it finally arrives, the sea erupts around him into a visual cascade of powerful white horses within the structure of the breaking wave, with Leftfield's Phat Planet pounding underneath it.

Menacingly intense.

At the end of the commercial, one single pint of Guinness and the line:

“Good things come to those who wait.”

It won pretty much every advertising award imaginable and is still viewed today as one of the greatest advertisements of all time.

I remember how it made me feel. There was something different about Guinness.
It was dark, menacing, certainly unique, something that showed strength and the confidence found in someone who is prepared to wait.

Fast-forward another decade or so, and that strength and confidence continue to serve Guinness.

The beer category has not stood still. Craft brewing exploded. Microbreweries appeared everywhere. IPAs became fashionable.
Small-batch became desirable. Beer lists began reading like wine lists.

The temptation for a 250-year-old beer brand could easily have been to chase all of this. To become younger, more artisanal, more whatever happened to be fashionable at the time.

Guinness largely remained Guinness.

My son Martin belongs to a different generation from mine in his attitude towards alcohol. He has sidestepped it. Yet he was genuinely delighted
when he discovered there was a Guinness 0.0.

He represents a group of people with no interest in joining the alcohol category but who are enthusiastic about participating in Guinness.
The pint still looks like Guinness, pours like Guinness, settles like Guinness, waits like Guinness and, importantly, tastes like Guinness.

Guinness 0.0 has become Great Britain's number-one non-alcoholic beer by retail sales value.

No dilution of a heritage brand. Purely an extension of it.

Netflix's House of Guinness, created by Steven Knight, replays the story of the Guinness dynasty in a six-hour-and-50-minute branding spectacle, spread across eight episodes of thrilling history. A branding tour de force, capturing almost every dimension of the brand in five-star entertainment, joining the likes of cinematic brand storytelling such as Ridley Scott's House of Gucci in 2021 and Michael Mann's Ferrari in 2023.

Very few brands get to this point.

It requires an intense accumulation of history, mythology, characters and meaning for a brand's story to take
such flight and live amongst us in modern storytelling.

The recipe for this is surely time, passion, belief, vision and discipline, with no particular bias towards any one of these ingredients.
I know the Guinness story from the outside looking in, but, in the same way as I continue to point out in the best branding practices
I have ever experienced, there is a discipline of restraint in what could perhaps be described as Guinness's brand genealogy.

It is almost as though there is a special safe somewhere in the CEO's office, kept under lock and key, with a document inside that announces the brand's “thou shalt nots.” And as company marketing leads come and go and make their contributions, there are just some things they will never touch.

I have used this analogy in board meetings when having to convince members that, whilst reporting to shareholders, brand equity has the ongoing potential to be an “it” rather than a calculation. And that there are aspects of the “it” that are absolute blueprints, kept under lock and key and safeguarded against the headwinds of commercial imperatives.

Guinness teaches us that this thinking is not wrong.

Someday, I am looking forward to writing about some of the
world's once-greatest brands that lost the plot. I know that, in that writing, there will inevitably be references to those brands that show
how it is done right.

And Guinness will certainly be one of them.

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