Brand Marketing: Guinness

Who: Guinness
Home Base: Dublin, Ireland
Year Founded: 1759

When Guinness set out to replace its outmoded visitors' center in Dublin, Ireland, the celebrated brewer knew that it wanted to build more than just a shrine to stout. Sure, capturing the company's colorful 243-year history and serving the millions of thirsty pilgrims who travel to the holy mecca of Irish beer were important. But it was even more important to set the stage for the future: to use an ultramodern facility to breathe life into an aging brand, to reconnect an old company with young (and skeptical) customers, and to use the past to prepare employees for what comes next.

That was the design brief behind Guinness Storehouse, which opened in late 2000. Storehouse features exhibits that recount the company's history and explain how the black stuff is made. But the facility also has conference rooms and a training center for employees, an art gallery, restaurants, cafés, bars, and event space. Housed in an imposing seven-story brick building that was erected in 1904, Storehouse serves as a giant mixing bowl for tourists, Guinness employees, and thirsty Dubliners. It represents best practice in the experience economy -- and a reimagination of how a company can connect with its core constituencies.

"Guinness as a brand is all about community. It's about bringing people together and sharing stories," says Ralph Ardill, director of marketing and strategic planning at Imagination Ltd., the edgy London design firm that helped create the structure. "And Guinness stout is a great social catalyst." In designing Storehouse, Imagination tried to re-create the magic of a pub full of strangers getting to know one another. "It isn't a corporate cathedral for worshiping Guinness," Ardill says. "It's a place for interaction among tourists who are traveling around Ireland, for the people who live there, and for new Guinness employees who are undergoing training."

Talk about a mixed-use space. Bartenders from all across Ireland come to Storehouse's specially designed, publike classrooms to learn "how to pour the perfect pint," says Mary Clarke, the facility's head of sales and marketing. Groups within the St. James's Gate Brewery complex, which Sir Arthur Guinness began building in 1759, use Storehouse for meetings and training. "We did a lot of sessions about how the changeover to the Euro would affect us," Clarke says. Even genealogical researchers descend upon Storehouse's archives, looking for information about ancestors who once lived in Dublin. (The Guinness archives are a good place to start, since so many Dubliners have worked for the company over the years.)

Storehouse is also the physical manifestation of a serious marketing challenge: to reconnect Guinness with younger drinkers in Ireland. While the brand has conquered the world (the stout is brewed in 50 countries and sells an estimated 10 million glasses a day), Guinness has gone a bit flat at home. In the second half of 2001, sales of Guinness in Ireland actually fell by 3%. Why the slip? Because Guinness, like so many other well-loved but old-fashioned products, had come to be perceived as the choice of the senior set. Ireland's twentysomethings were switching to lighter drinks: lagers such as Heineken or high-intensity cocktails such as vodka with Red Bull.

Part of the solution, Guinness executives felt, was to make Storehouse a magnet for the Dublin pub-and-club-crawling crowd. After dark, there are special events that attract both locals and executives: awards ceremonies, concerts, corporate parties, fashion shows, and gallery openings. "We hung our first art show in December 2001," Clarke says proudly, "and 600 people turned up for the opening." The evening events make Storehouse a kind of community center. And by bringing people in their twenties and thirties to the brewery, the events help Guinness connect with the brand's future. "Guinness Storehouse is a way to get in touch with a new generation," says Ardill, "to help young people reevaluate Guinness." And to rediscover Guinness's history. Clive Brownlee, the company's assistant managing director for Guinness Ireland, worked closely with the designers to ensure that the facility's focus on the future also reveled in the past.

Guinness Storehouse is located in what had been an old abandoned fermentation plant within the main Guinness brewing complex in a gritty, industrial part of Dublin. The building's design is like a candy with a chocolate shell and a creamy filling: It has tradition on the outside, tomorrow on the inside. A brick exterior gives way to a modern glass-and-steel interior that is illuminated by a dramatic combination of natural and artificial light. When sightseers arrive, they climb a short, narrow set of stairs before emerging into a cavernous atrium. It's shaped roughly like a pint glass, with a circular pub, the Gravity Bar, at the top that glows white at night -- like the suds atop a freshly poured Guinness. Set into the floor is the contract that Sir Arthur Guinness himself signed for the brewery site -- a 9,000-year lease for the price of just 45 Irish punts a year.