Guinness: one of the largest and most recognisable brands in the world. After years of planning and building, having spent piles and piles of money, Guinness has finally opened its new tourist attraction and brand showpiece in the prime real estate that is Covent Garden, London.
And its just been pointed out to them by a food critic (the lovely Grace Dent) in The Guardian how they’ve managed to balls it up.
It’s spread out over multiple locations that aren’t connected, so it becomes a bit of a Duke of Edinburgh orienteering challenge to move from one to the other. And then, even when you’re inside, somehow, Diageo seem to have forgotten to apply any of Guinness’s incredibly well known brand codes (especially in the restaurants), so it feels like you could be anywhere. And they have generally failed to maximise the brand and product across the site and experience in any meaningful way.
That they don’t actually brew any Guinness there is a terrible mistake. No matter the cost, regardless of the small quantities they could produce or the inefficiencies of the scale, they should have made sure they were brewing some; otherwise there’s not a lot of difference to being in any old pub.
Punters clearly feel the same way, too. The original Storehouse in Dublin is a constant top five on my wife, Siobhán’s, ‘Things to do in Dublin’ tour for friends (and she doesn’t even like Guinness!), and it comes in with a strong 4.3/5 on TripAdvisor. The London version is scraping in at a flat 3.
When you go to a brand experience like this, you want to feel like you couldn’t possibly be anywhere else and that it’s the purest expression of the brand (think how hard Disney go on this with their parks, for example). Anything else is both a disappointment and huge missed marketing opportunity.
As a brand it should always be dialled up. You must be unmistakably and unashamedly you.
— Know your audience
