Arthurs Marketing Coup.

Arthurs Marketing Coup.
Celebrating 250 years of brewing Guinness from Dublin, Diageo garnered the ultimate marketing coup yesterday. Gigs, toasts to “Martha”, leader advertising and various “events” marked the 250th anniversary of the signing of a 9,000 year lease by the man himself using one hundred quid that he got as a legacy from his Godfather. Mario Puzo himself couldn’t have dreamed up the dynasty that arose from those beginnings. It’s notable that he switched to brewing porter in subsequent years rather than the original Ale which he had started manufacturing in Leixlip in 1750. Otherwise we could all be toasting the anniversary with a pint of Smithwicks – perish the thought!

Anyway, the brilliance that is Guinness marketing down the years continues – and hats off to the current team who have almost certainly engineered the biggest marketing cut through of the current year.

The Triumph of Product over Message

The battle for customers in the mobile telecoms market continues to consume vast amounts of marketing €. Vodafone is pumping millions into its “Mission Red” ATL and “With Compliments” BTL campaigns while Meteor has recently launched “nocatch.ie” which looks like it will gobble up market share for them. No doubt these campaigns have deep customer insights, expert market segmentation and brilliantly executed communications program at their core. But who’s winning?
Well, after 15 years of loyalty I’ve just moved from Vodafone to O2. Why? The iPhone. Plain and simple, this device is the most advanced yet easy to use mobile phone ever. End of story. And having moved to O2, I now find that the network coverage is better, the customer service experience superior and the web site easier to navigate. I can’t say how good these things are with Meteor – they don’t have the iPhone either so I didn’t consider them. And I’m spending about €20 more per month on my mobile bills than I did before. But I don’t mind, because I love the iPhone and I’m happy to spend that €20 just to have it. I was in a Car Phone Warehouse store recently and the manager told me there are fights breaking out at some stores when iPhone stocks become available, such is the demand. This for a product that was launched in June. Apple made 1 million of them for the launch and apparently could have sold 6 million.
So, no matter how good your marketing is you’ve got to start with inspiring products and a great service proposition to back them up. Simple eh? One would have thought so – but nothing in this world is that easy as everybody knows...