Interview with Mark Sandy, Global Business Brand Director, Guinness.

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Making His Mark on the Black Stuff Mark Sandys, Global Business Brand Director, Guinness, talks about the recently opened Brewhouse No. 4 at St James’ Gate, the most technologically advanced brewery in the world, and what it means for Guinness.

THE biggest stout brewery in the world was officially opened

by An Taoiseach, Enda Kenny TD, in early September.

Brewhouse No. 4 at St James’ Gate is also one of the most technologically advanced and most environmentally friendly breweries in the world.

“It is the only brewery to achieved platinum level sustainability,” boasts Mark Sandys, Global Business Brand Director for Guinness. “We are aiming to have zero waste going to landfill and to reduce the amount of water we use by 33%. We take sustainability very seriously, partly because it is an area that is going to be increasingly regulated, but also because it is something that matters to consumers. If consumers felt that we were only paying lip service to sustainability or that we were doing things that were detrimental to the environment, it would come back and hurt us.”

descendant of Arthur, who was Managing Director of Guinness back in the 1920s, which decorates one of the walls of the Guinness Storehouse: “Our beer will be created by the craft and heritage of our past, allied to the most modern science of tomorrow”.

“That has always been part of what Guinness has been about and is encapsulated in our new brewery,” Sandys explains. “We still roast all of our own barley on site; we grow the Guiness yeast on site. We buy nearly all our barley from Irish farmers. Many of the farmers and the brewers are themselves descended from families who have always worked for Guinness, so that passing down of craftsmanship, tradition and the reputation of Guinness still exists. This new brewery allows that craftsmanship a much bigger and more scientifically advanced landscape on which to use those craft techniques.”

Brewhouse No.4 is 10,000 m2 and was the largest construction project in Ireland in 2012, equating to 2m man hours. It uses state-of-the-art technology and processes to minimise energy consumption and greatly reduce environmental impact, ensuring that Diageo remains an industry leader in the area of sustainability.

Craftsmanship & Tradition As the name suggests, it is only the fourth brewery that has been opened by Guinness at St James’ Gate, the first of which was the one that Arthur Guinness himself established back in 1759.

“The site here at St James’ Gate remains the same site that Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000 year lease on 255 years ago,” Sandys smiles. “Although the nature of the site and what it is used for has changed over that time, the craftsmanship and knowledge that goes into our beers remains remarkably similar.”

He cites a quote from Rupert Guinness, a direct

Flexibility In Brewing Currently, Diageo exports more than €800m in products to over 130 countries, while the Guinness Flavour Essence, which is produced in St James’ Gate, enables further brewing of Guinness in 50 countries around the world. So what will the new Brewhouse enable them to do?

“At its most simple level, Brewhouse No. 4 creates one billion pints a year, three quarters of which are for our export markets around the world,” the Director notes. “But we can make a greater variety of different beers in this brewery. Already we make beers like Smithwick’s and Kilkenny here, but we have recently launched some smaller beers, like Guinness Dublin Porter and Guinness West Indies Porter, which were created in our pilot brewery.”

The St James’ Gate site has, for over a century, been home to an experimental brewery, which Sandys notes “really gives our brewers the opportunity to try out different flavours and different hops. With the Dublin and West Indies Porters, our brewers got their inspiration by going into the archives, finding old recipes and trying to recreate them. When they get them right, those beers transfer to the main brewery so they can be made at a commercial level. It is that ability to switch between Guinness Draught, Guinness Foreign Extra Stout and those new porters that makes the new brewery quite different from our previous ones.”

Stout Tradition of Innovation Going forward, Sandys foresees more

Guinness Dublin Porter and Guinness West Indies Porter, created in the pilot brewery at St James’ Gate.

innovation in the realm of craft stouts and porters from Guinness, thanks in the main to the fact that “the consumer is more interested in beer than has been the case over the last 20 or 30 years. They’re interested in the ingredients, the process and also in the people who make the beers as well.”

It’s not just here at home that this innovation is bearing fruit, however, as

“In 1991, the Guinness widget won the Queen’s Award for technology, and second place that year went to the Internet, so the Guinness Widget is officially a better invention than the Internet.”

they have recently launched Guinness Blonde American Lager in the US, which Sandys describes as “a fantastic drink that has more hops in it than other lagers. It’s the only lager to use the Guinness yeast, which helps to give it a bit more flavour than its competitors.”

The stout and porter market has in the past been viewed as very traditional and slow to change, with the draught pint of Guinness as we know it, complete with the 119.5 second pour, the same since 1959. However, that fact belies the amount of innovation and change that takes place throughout Guinness.

“One of the great privileges of working here is that you have access to the archives, and when you look back through those archives, you see very quickly that Guinness has a real history of innovation, of doing things first. Some of this is product innovation, such as the fact that in 1959, Guinness was the first nitrogenated beer in the world, but also in things like the Guinness Widget in Draught Guinness in a Can. In 1991, the widget won the Queen’s Award for technology, and second place that year went to the Internet, so the Guinness Widget is officially a better invention than the Internet,” he laughs.

“But even our ways of working are

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innovative,” he continues.

“The Guinness Storehouse, for example, was the first ever skyscraper to be built in Europe. This sense of doing things first has been there throughout our past and I think it’s really important for our future as well.

What that means is more innovation, trying to guess where the beer industry is going to go in future years and that is something we are actively working on with our pilot brewery in particular.”

A New Generation of Stout Drinkers One of the key challenges facing Sandys is that of opening up the stout market to a new generation of drinkers, seduced by a variety of new brews in the market. The way Guinness tackle that differs by region around the world.

Advertising, of course, plays a massive role, with the brand responsible for some of the most iconic, eye-catching and memorable campaigns over the years, from watching Michael Fassbender swim the Atlantic to the recent Sapeurs ad, starring the

above and beyond that, we are the official beer of the Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales international rugby teams, so we have a lot of activation that goes around that. The next 12 months are going to be massive in the build-up to the 2015 World Cup, so let’s hope Ireland and England can keep those markets interested by doing well in the World Cup,” he smiles.

Pictured at the launch of Brewhouse No. 4 at St James’ Gate are An Taoiseach, Enda Kenny TD (centre), with Ivan Menezes, CEO of Diageo (left), and Paul Armstrong, Diageo Supply Director – Brewing.

campaigns. It feels as if it’s coming from the home of Guinness and reasserting what we stand for as a brand.”

The brand has just launched a new campaign

“Ireland now has the highest excise duty in Europe and that is going to have a negative effect on the industry, not just on companies like Diageo, but on the hospitality trade, which accounts for 94,000 jobs, on tourism, on consumers.” sartorially elegant natives of Brazzaville, part of the Made Of More campaign.

Here at home, the latest TV ad takes the cameras inside the brewery at St James’ Gate. “It features some of the people who work here, including the brewers themselves, talking about how Guinness is made,” he reveals. “It’s probably the most Irish of all our

in Africa, called Made Of Black, working with a host of celebrities from that continent. “What was interesting was that the new generation of celebrities were less concerned about having material things to show off their wealth or status in society, but wanted to show off their achievements in creativity, whether that

was in fashion, art, dance etc,” Sandys notes. “So we took that influence into the advertising campaign. As we launched, we had selfies from 20 of those ‘influencers’ talking about what they were made of and it has been a really successful launch.

The hashtag #madeofblack has been trending on Twitter in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya since launch.”

While we are rightly proud of Guinness as an intrinsically Irish brand, it is perhaps surprising that it is not necessarily viewed that way outside of these shores.

“In the UK, the United States and Canada, which are all big markets for Guinness, it is viewed as a brand from Ireland which has a very strong integrity, but it is quite different in Africa, however, where Guinness has a very long history,” the Brand Director relates. “Guinness first appeared in Sierra Leone, for example, in the 1820s.

It benefited in the early years from the expansion in shipping in the UK and Ireland. The brewery in Nigeria, which opened in

1963, was the first Guinness brewery to be opened outside the UK and Ireland. So it has really been adopted by consumers as an African brand and they don’t really see it relating back to Ireland, to St Patrick’s Day or to rugby, which would be amongst its strongest associations here.”

Winter Warmer Vs Summer Sizzler?

Another association with “the black stuff” is that it is an autumn and winter drink, a perception which is proving hard to shift, with the result that Guinness’ share of the beer market worldwide is lowest in the summer. “However, innovations like Guinness Extra Cold in the UK have successfully fought back against that,” Sandys explains. “I think that where we create the right Guinness occasions, that’s where we can get more pints into people’s hands. A key example of that is our association with rugby.

“We have just signed up as sponsor of the Guinness Pro 12 tournament but

Amplifying Musical Talent Another high profile campaign for Guinness in Ireland in 2014 is Amplify, a massive music promotion which organised gigs in hundreds of pubs all over Ireland across five weekends.

“Amplify has got off to an incredible start,” he boasts. “We want to really support our customers all over the country, so we have created music gigs in 500 pubs around the country. We’ve had 800 bands sign up to be part of the competition. By creating these gigs with up-and-coming bands, it’s a great way of engaging with a generation of new Guinness drinkers, but also making sure that we are driving traffic into our on-trade customers.”

Amplify has replaced Arthur’s Day, which ran very successfully for five years from 2009 to 2013. Last year, however, saw something of a social media backlash against the event, but Sandys is adamant that it will be viewed as a tremendous campaign.

“We certainly see Arthur’s Day as having been a great success for the five years that it ran,” he insists. “It created some great experiences for consumers. We had a host of surprise gigs from some of the biggest bands in the world playing in local pubs. We certainly don’t feel that there was any evidence linking Guinness or Arthur’s Day to binge drinking, as was alleged in some quarters. That said, five years is a reasonable amount of time for a marketing campaign to run and by evolving it into Amplify, we’ve been

Brewhouse Facts • Brewhouse No.4 is the largest stout brewery in the world.

• 35% of global beer for Diageo is now produced at St James’ Gate.

• Three million pints are produced at St James’ Gate per day.

• One billion pints are produced per year.

• The new brewery saves an olympic sized swimming pool of water every 30 hours.

• Carbon reductions are equivalent to 4,000 cars a year.

• Zero waste to landfill brewery.

Kodaline, pictured at the launch of Guinness Amplify.

able to breathe some new life into it and, to an extent, re-purpose it so that it’s more specifically aimed at supporting our customers and ensuring that it’s spread out over a longer timeframe as well.”

The Future For Sponsorship The latest in a line of high profile sponsorships and events, Amplify is another example of the brand knowing its target audience and talking directly to them through a medium they like. Indeed, Guinness is intrinsically associated with some of the biggest sporting events in Ireland, primarily through their hurling and rugby sponsorships. Following years of rumblings at Government level about introducing a ban on alcohol sponsorship for sporting events, it would seem that common sense has prevailed.

“Having spoken to the IRFU, the FAI, Horse Racing Ireland and the GAA, all of those organisations are against any ban on alcohol sponsorship and freely admit that any such ban would be detrimental to their sport,” he reveals. “I was lucky enough to attend the Galway Races this summer and it’s the 50th year that Guinness has sponsored the event, which has enabled it to grow, as well as creating great experiences for consumers visiting. We are firm in our view that it would be detrimental to sports themselves and to consumers attending those sporting occasions, if alcohol sponsorship was not there.”

While Diageo recognises the potential dangers of misuse of alcohol, he notes, and invests considerable sums into education programmes for consumers, he is adamant that there is absolutely no link between sports sponsorship and misuse of alcohol.

Sandys is also critical of the Government’s continued excise hikes in recent years. “Ireland now has the highest excise duty in Europe and that is going to have a negative effect on the industry, not just on companies like Diageo, but on the hospitality trade, which accounts for 94,000 jobs, on tourism, on consumers.” As a result, Diageo called on the Government to reverse last year’s excise increase.

“Through a combination of direct and indirect employment, Diageo supports 20,000 jobs in Ireland, so we asked the Government to please not hamper our industry anymore,” he states.

Diageo, through the €169m investment in Brewhouse No. 4, has made a very real investment both in brewing in Dublin and Guinness in general, Sandys concludes. “Guinness is our biggest brand in Western Europe and by far Diageo’s biggest brand in Africa, so, along with the rest of our beer portfolio, it gives us the platform to launch our spirits brands, for example, in Africa. Guinness is one of the cornerstones on which the business is built. We are committed to Guinness and we are committed to the longterm growth of Guinness as this new development proves.”