14 November 2007
New Guinness Designs? Genius!
This morning, I received an email from the marketing folks at Guinness (one of my favourite alcoholic beverages) displaying an image of a Guinness can sporting a colourful new design, as shown here:
We decided to ask the best whizzes in graphic design to think of a fresh modern look for GUINNESS® beer, something more 2007 than 1759. Here's what they came up with.
To celebrate our new packaging, you could win a GUINNESS® fridge and a year's supply of the black stuff to share with your mates. You can also check out the rest of the GUINNESS® designs.
[Here’s a copy of the email on the web.]
To be honest, I was pretty annoyed when I read that email. I thought that once again, some imbecile of a marketing manager had gone one step too far and messed up a perfectly good brand by trying to make it all modern and trendy. I mean, it’s not like Guinness doesn’t already have a strong brand with an excellent image, so why would some mental marketeer want to go and spoil that for the sake of trying to justify their job!?
However, lucky for them, I actually clicked through from the email (partially because of pure rage) to this page, where I was shown five designs from the “new range of GUINNESS® packaging” including the one from the email for GNS Designer Draught (which looks suspiciously like the London 2012 logo) and iGNS (very similar in style to an iPod). The page goes on to explain how they’d commissioned a “fresh modern look for GUINNESS®” but then realised that “good things don't always come to those who wait.”
Absolutely brilliant! Not only did those clever marketing executives at Guinness get me to click through to their site, but they also took the piss out of the utterly shit London 2012 logo in the process. Double points! And they impressed me so much that I decided to blog about their campaign, promoting their brand even more! TRIPLE POINTS!!!
Pure genius. Pure Guinness!
P.S. I’m still a little bit annoyed with Guinness for not making their Surger cans a bit more widely available and the fact that I couldn’t get my hands on any of their Guinness Marmite. Although they’re now selling Guinness Red at my nearest pub, so they get a few points back for that...
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