Guinness Found a New Brand Idea Inside One Word
AMV BBDO swapped the V in "Lovely" for the Guinness harp — a design device pulled out of a line the brand has been running since the 1930s.
The cheapest brand ideas are the ones already sitting in your own archive. Guinness has just found one inside a single word.
Unveiled on Friday, LoVely takes "Lovely Day for a Guinness" — a line with roots in the brand's 1930s advertising — and replaces the V with the harp. That is the whole idea. It is also, unusually for a global design device, immediately legible in any market where the word appears.
The platform was created by AMV BBDO and first ran in an outdoor campaign in Ireland over the summer before being pulled up into a flexible system that can flex across occasions, markets and the various "Lovely Day" executions the brand keeps in rotation.
What makes it work commercially is compression. Most global identity projects hand markets a toolkit and hope for discipline; this hands them a substitution rule. The harp is already the trademarked asset — the design device simply gives it somewhere new to live, inside copy rather than beside it.
It also continues a good run for Diageo's most valuable brand, which has spent the last few years converting heritage into distinctiveness rather than nostalgia. The 1930s line is not being revived; it is being used as raw material.
The risk is ubiquity. A device this easy to apply tends to end up on everything, and the harp earns its power partly from restraint.
BRNDWIRE Staff
Newsroom, BRNDWIRE. Covering campaigns for strategists and marketers worldwide.
