Guinness Quality Text Program
Mobile "Rate Your Pint" Program: 9/2008-12/2008

OBJECTIVE: To create a new way to engage consumers with brand Guinness as well as educate the consumer about aquality pint. In addition to the consumer’s objective, Guinness wanted to educate the retailer on the importance of Quality to their bottom line while creating healthy competition within markets.

OVERVIEW: The strategic approach to this campaign was to build awareness for the Guinness brand with interactive mobile marketing while educating consumers on what makes a pint a “Quality Pint”. The program allowed a non-invasive way to tell the establishment how much they enjoyed or disliked the pint they were poured.

While the consumer rates the pint, the bar is measured against its peers creating a competitive environment amongst markets. Each time a consumer texted the word “GREAT” to the short code “88500” they were asked a series of quality questions and then entered in a sweepstakes in which eleven winners received a trip to Dublin to tour the Guinness Brewery during the company’s 250th anniversary.

POS materials were placed to educated consumers on the anatomy of a Guinness pint and provided a clear explanation of the 10 point rating system. Guinnessmobile.com showed rankings in real time and branded weekly reports were sent to retailers and wholesalers.

Participating accounts for the Quality Text Program in NYC, Guinness’s number one market, put up a +7.4% and significantly outpaced the non-participating accounts.The non-participating accounts were down in that same time period in the neighborhood of -4%.That is a 11.4% swing in the largest market in the country. We have seen similar trends in most of my other markets as well.

This campaign illustrates the ability of mobile to engage consumers and establishment staff creating a fun interactive way topromote loyalty, awareness of the brand and importance to quality when pouring a pint of Guinness.

MARKET: Northeast, Midwest and Southeast

RESULTS: This program was executed during the holiday season in November and December . During this two month period there were 62,578 completed entries. That’s 1.22 pints rated per minute during operational hours of all participating retailers. to There were 36,866 unique entries, of these Guinness achieved an opt-in ratio of 62%, with 22,732 people asking to receive future alerts. The above numbers were achieved with limited advertising through POS in retail accounts.