Profile Guinness It may be good for us, but Irish drinkers are drinking less Guinness. Is it too late to stop the world-famous pint from going flat, asks Rosita Boland
Guinness is Good for You. Five of the most memorable words in advertising history. However, whether it's good for us or not, the Irish public has decided it doesn't like Guinness as much as it once did.
Guinness is one of the many brands owned by Diageo, the world's largest drinks company. On Thursday, the company announced its pre-tax profits for the year to June 30th, and although they were up to €3.1 billion from €2.82 billion for the same period last year, the embarrassing sting in the statistics was that sales of Guinness in Ireland had declined significantly - yet again.
Sales of our national drink have been decreasing every year for the last six years now, and this year, they were down a further 8 per cent. It's estimated that total sales of Guinness here have fallen by a quarter within the last decade. Diageo's statement on its website about the results admitted that "challenges in the Irish beer market have adversely impacted top-line growth" in its European market. Britain is now the country where Guinness is most popular. Ireland is second, followed by Nigeria, the US and Cameroon.
One of the really ironic things about the decline in the fortunes of Guinness in Ireland is how admired its advertising campaigns have always been. From the toucans of the 1940s to the penguins of 2006, the ads have regularly drawn attention and frequently been award-winners. In 2000, the "Surfer" ad with white horses rising from the waves, was named the best television commercial of all time in a Sunday Times/Channel 4 millennium poll. So here's the marketing conundrum: how can an ad campaign be so successful in its own right, while the brand it is advertising is going through the floor at home? As Guinness has famously said of itself in the past - not everything in black and white makes sense.
ARTHUR GUINNESS STARTED brewing ales at St James's Gate in Dublin in 1759. If he were alive today, he'd probably be a property developer - he managed to get an astonishing 9,000 year lease on the four-acre premises for an annual rent of £45 (€57.14). While he first focused on brewing a range of ales, he later switched to developing a porter drink. The result was Guinness.
For Diageo, the most damaging thing about the fall in sales of the black stuff in its home market is that it undermines the product internationally. It would be like the French deciding they weren't going to drink Champagne any more, yet expecting it to continue selling strongly abroad.
So how did we start falling out of love with our erstwhile national drink, when at one point in its marketing history, even pregnant women were being encouraged to drink it? One reason might be that for a very long time, there was not much of a choice when it came to placing your order at the bar. Like Henry Ford's dictum when it came to choosing the colour of your car, you could have whatever you liked - as long as it was black.
Britain, by contrast, has long had a thriving real ale industry, and many rural pubs in which customers can try out different ales rather than stick to the same one all night. The farthest you can get with experimenting with Guinness is by contrasting its palatability from one area and pub in Ireland to another: by deciding whether it is a "good pint". When abroad, however, the Irish were usually the last to order the black stuff, our palates so sensitively tuned that we generally considered Guinness outside Ireland to be about as attractive as hogwash. No, home was the one place where a pint of plain was your only man, which is why the steady slippages in sales here must be all the more alarming for Diageo.
No matter what kind of wheeze the marketing people come up with - Guinness Extra Cold, the low-alcohol Guinness Mid-Strength, Guinness Toucan Brew - younger drinkers in pubs are not being convinced. They are drinking imported bottled beers, draught lagers, alcopops and cider. Women in particular are eschewing the big dirty pints.
Another issue is that Guinness has consistently been marketed as a drink you find at its best only on draught in a pub. The near-mystic process of pulling the perfect pint - where all the elements of tilting, pouring, settling and pouring again come together in monochrome alchemy - is legendary. (Draught Guinness contains nitrogen, which does not dissolve in water, and can be put under high pressure without becoming fizzy. Hence its smooth taste and creamy head.) Whether sacred ritual or overhyped nonsense, we've been conditioned to accept that pulling a pint correctly is a big deal.
THUS, WHILE THERE are all kinds of widgets you can get to put heads on the bottled and canned variety, these products have always been rather second-class citizens in the Guinness family. You don't find tourists in Ireland, for instance, looking for their Guinness experience by buying a couple of cans to drink alone in their hotel room. What they're looking for is not just the drink, but the context - the lively pub where, Guinness in hand like a local, you might hopefully strike up conversations or hear music. We locals take the drink entirely for granted, but the Guinness Storehouse website proclaims that the Storehouse, with its visitor tour, is "Ireland's No 1 International Tourist Attraction."
Pub drinking in general has taken a hit in recent years. In the 1940s, the Guinness jingle ran: "Toucans in their tests agree, Guinness is good for you. Try some today and see what one or toucan do." In the 1970s, there was a long-running ad on RTÉ television which depicted an image of two pint glasses, car keys beside them, with the slogan "two will do". We now know all too well what "one or toucan do" to a driver who drinks. Diageo states on its website that "excessive or inappropriate [ alcohol] consumption can cause health and social problems for individuals and society". People simply don't go to a pub to drink as often as they did. Thus, while sales of wine and bottled beer to drink at home keep on rising, those of Guinness, a drink we've come to believe is best served on draught, are not.
Aside from tweaking versions of the core product, Guinness has been consistently active in trying to connect with potential consumers through sponsorship of sports and the arts. It currently sponsors the GAA hurling championship and the Cork Jazz Festival and used to sponsor the Witnness music festival, now Oxegen.
While sponsorship is a very modern concept, philanthropy is not. The Guinness family were generous to Dublin. They established, for example, the Guinness Trust and the Iveagh Trust to provide housing and related amenities for working-class people in Dublin, which continues to this day. They gave Iveagh Gardens to the State. They also gave us St Patrick's Gardens.
HOWEVER, POSSIBLY THE company's best piece of public relations - albeit in 1877 - came when Sir Arthur Edward Guinness, grandson of the famous founder, pushed an act through Parliament to make the then privately-owned St Stephen's Green open to the public once again. He later paid for laying out the Green's gardens and ponds, and the Green has since been beloved of generations of Dubliners.
We may not love the Guinness family's other legacy to us quite so much any more, but one thing is sure: there are still 8,753 years to run on the lease Uncle Arthur took out on St James's Gate.
TheGuinnessFile
What is it? Considered by many to be our national drink
Why is it in the news? Our consumption of it is in steady decline
What the company would be most likely to say Guinness is good for you
Least likely to say Try a nice glass of Sauvignon Blanc in the pub instead of a big dirty pint.
High point The clever ads
Low point The disastrous launch of the short-lived Guinness Lite. "They said it couldn't be done" ran the slogan. It couldn't