By Tom May
Guinness has a new campaign out, and before you’ve even looked at it, you may be wondering why the design press always gives this brand so much attention. Well, the answer has some quite deep historical roots.
The Irish stout brand actually didn’t advertise at all for the first 170 years of its history. Its strict philosophy was that the quality of the beer alone should do the talking. After the end of the First World War, though, a slump in sales meant the family that owned the company finally relented. However, they instituted an equally strict rule: the advertising had to be of the exact same exceptional quality as the beer itself.
That tradition has led to a long and illustrated history for Guinness advertising, and it continues today in the form of LoVely. Delivered by and AMV BBDO, this new out-of-home campaign takes the brand’s harp, which has been on its bottle for over 160 years, and incorporates it into its typography.
The idea is simple, yet brilliant. Take the word “Lovely,” swap the “v” for the harp mark, and feature it everywhere across the entire brand mix. Once you’ve seen it in action, it feels as if it might always have been there. As George Hackforth-Jones, global creative director at AMV BBDO, puts it: “Sometimes the best ideas are right in front of you.”
It’s a great lesson for anyone working with a heritage brand, where the constant dilemma is where to draw the line between modernising (and risk alienating your audience) and being conservative (which risks losing the younger generation coming up).
Context over redesign
The ‘LoVely’ strategy charts a clever middle course: extending a heritage asset without over-explaining it. While Guinness hasn’t redesigned its harp, it has found a new context for the one it already has; a real case of having your cake and eating it.
In this light, the key to making this strategy work is restraint. The harp hasn’t been forced or distorted into the lettering in any way: its natural silhouette already resembles a “v” closely enough that it feels natural, not engineered. It’s a good principle to follow for any heritage brand extension: finding what’s already hiding in an asset is always better than trying to come up with something new.
There’s also a call back to “Lovely Day for a Guinness,” the brand’s long-running ad platform which originated in the 1930s and which was revived last year. As Stephen O’Kelly, global brand director for Guinness at Diageo, puts it: “LoVely gives new life to one of our most famous advertising lines, refreshing Guinness’ brand heritage in a way that is timeless, contemporary and relevant across markets and channels.”
The photography, too, is executed well. Shot by Dan Burn-Forti and Peter Franklyn Banks, the campaign leans on tightly cropped, authentic-feeling slices of life: muddy wellies at a festival, an arm slung round another’s shoulders at a football match, a can nestling under a poncho in the rain.
That broad, everyday approach means the same visual language can stretch from, say, Guinness’s sponsorship of the Electric Picnic festival in County Laois, Ireland, to its partnership with the Premier League in England, without them ever feeling like different campaigns.
Strategic challenge
That kind of breadth is a strategic challenge for any global brand, and it’s one that a lot of campaigns fail to solve. ‘LoVely’ succeeds by keeping its visual system loose enough to absorb very different settings, while the harp-as-“v” device stays constant across every application, giving the whole campaign an easily recognisable through-line.
‘LoVely’ has launched first in Ireland and Great Britain across high-impact out-of-home and digital out-of-home formats, with wider expansion into Africa and Asia-Pacific to follow. Its goal, from what I can tell from the press materials, isn’t to reinvent what’s already trusted, but to find the one small shift that can bring new people in.
Brands often spend large amounts of time and money on designing a new logo. But Guinness didn’t need a new symbol. It just needed to notice the “v” that had been hiding in its harp all along.