Guinness Hit a Marketing Home Run
One company that has got its marketing bang on the money in the last few months is Guinness. The last two promotions i’ve been aware of have really demonstrating that whoever is now running the show knows the three elements that makes any marketing campaign.
1. Know your customer
2. Know your customers life time worth to the company.
3. Know your customers expectations of perception.
In Guinness’s case they had a particularly hard challenge, in my opinion, as they needed a perception re-adjustment to reposition the brand to a changing market place.
Several weeks ago Guinness hit their first home run by offering free branded poker kits. They made it simple to get and did complete risk reversal. They even beat customer expectations with a few free samples of their products, well timed apart, so that frequency was brought into effect. This way the brand was constantly in the homes of potential clients and when the poker kit was in use the brand was re-inforced with the product in a comfort situation – Their homes. Possibly the best product placement done in years.
Then the next phase of their marketing, this evening, in one of Dublins better bars i was impressed to see the Guiness promo team out in force, with another well thought out promotion. To create a habit you have to use repetition and with tonight starting off a three consecutive week promotion, where each week customers much buy a guinness (there by not devaluing the brand) to get a reward, which changes each week. This week they severed Gourmet burgers, with special guinness brand mustard. I think if you partake all three weeks you get a hoody; again re-enforcing the repetition to create a habit.
So i take my hat off to the Marketeers behind the concepts, its rare marketing guru’s get praise, usually they just get buckets of money.