The history of GUINNESS beer is a compelling story of invention, passion and belief. Founded 246 years ago by Arthur Guinness in Dublin, Ireland, and sold in over 150 countries, the Guinness brand is recognized throughout the world. In the highly competitive global beer market, GUINNESS continues to differentiate itself through its unique taste of beer, innovative ad campaigns and creative packaging.

During 2005, Guinness introduced a new design for its premium beer that included both major changes to the shape of the bottle as well as the labelling. In order to test this new design with customers a promotional campaign was planned to take place over a period of two weeks in approximatley 50 pubs in Nigeria, the largest market for Guinness in Africa.

Over the years, Guinness has primarily used focus groups to identify customer needs and determine how its products and brand are perceived in the market place.

A new design

After being introduced to the ESP customer feedback management system developed by TouchWork, a division of the Spintelligent Group, the forward looking Guinness management team decided to use the system as part of its promotional campaign. The objective was to obtain quantitative customer feedback to validate the results obtained from focus groups.

With the wide spread use of cell phones, the Guinness team realized the potential of the ESP system to instantly capture and provide real time customer feedback using its SMS text messaging features. It also wanted to be seen as an innovator in using new technologies to further enhance customer perceptions about the company as being a leader in its space.

As part of the "BLACK GOLD PROMOTION" campaign, hostesses were located in the pubs and customers were encouraged to comment on the new design. Customers were given attractive cards that included the questions and instructions for the survey. As an incentive, a cell phone recharge voucher was offered to customers that responded to the survey.

Guinness's objectives were to obtain quantitative feedback on both the promotion as well on pricing, competitive brands and taste.

The total time to produce all materials, train staff and launch the campaign took less then two weeks.

All results and reports were stored in the ESP database and were available 24/7 on a secure website. Guinness staff could monitor and track the responses from all pubs.

Results achieved

Over the three-week period of the campaign over 80% of all customers exposed to the campaign provided a response to the survey. This exceptionally high response rate is attributed to the fact that the in-pub promoters actively encouraged customers to respond to the survey.

An extensive range of management reports were produced on the fly and could be viewed on the secure website. These showed the responses to each question in the form of bar graphs. Typical examples are shown below: