For marketing’s sake, Aldi’s knock-off Guinness simply must fail

Well, after working at or consulting with most large global FMCG drink businesses, I can confidently say the taste will have very little to do with commercial success. Context, including brand, forms most of a drinking experience. That’s why Guinness has thousands of quality workers driving around the country ensuring pubs chill the black stuff, and stock and wash their glasses correctly.

It’s called crossmodal correspondence. The branded experience can’t be separated from the taste. Like why drinks taste about 20% sweeter from a round glass. Like why that crap wine tasted amazing on holiday. Context, or your new favorite word. Crossmodal correspondence.

What we have here is the perfect testing ground.

If a 13% discount gets people to swap from Guinness to this private label stout – we are all out of a job. All of Guinness’s (very good) brand building was for naught.

I’m deadly serious.

Guinness is the poster child of effective marketing. From iconic emotional ads, to playing a huge role in culture and sport, to brand consistency and consumer-focused inn0.0vation (see what I did there). There is a reason that Guinness is becoming the UK’s most popular pint.

If decades of proper marketing by the industry’s best and hundreds of millions of pounds in advertising can’t stand up against a 76p discount, then what’s the point in all of this?

Granted, Aldi has done a good job of making it look similar enough to steal some of this salience and brand equity. But Aldi could only go so close as to avoid the eyes of Diageo’s lawyers.

You could argue that this is just an unfair tactic. But if Guinness doesn’t have enough pricing power as literally one of the coolest, most emotional, famous brands in the world, then who the hell does?

Now, pricing power (a brand being able to charge more) is a very dangerous marketing concept because Byron Sharp thinks it’s largely made up.

Kantar claims that 94% of a consumer’s willingness to pay more can be explained by emotional and functional differentiation. Byron thinks that’s a load of cock, reckons there’s no evidence that marketing can lower price sensitivity, and price sensitivity is usually just a function of market realities (physical availability, product quality, scarcity, etc). He also famously doesn’t think differentiation is very useful at all.

This is where marketing academics start swinging handbags. I disagree with Byron, casting aside differentiation and accepting that we can’t impact price sensitivity literally flies in the face of modern marketing. It’s one of the few key marketing tenets Les Binet, godfather of marketing effectiveness (I have a shrine to him in my room), has spent a career proving out and growing brands with.

We presented an update to Compound Creativity at Cannes together, and he included a brilliant IPA-winning case study from McCain oven chips where the brand managed to half price sensitivity. This pricing effects dramatically impacted profit compared to volume effects (selling more). That’s the thing about price, it’s often the easiest and more impactful of the 4Ps.

This is why I simply can’t accept that the 76p discount will be enough to steer people off the OG stout.

If Aldi’s Guinness knock-off succeeds, we’d all need to relearn how marketing works and throw out everything we know. Besides, Aldi is notorious for copycatting. Colin the Caterpillar (Cuthbert), Pampers (Mamia), Red Bull (Flying Power), BrewDog and even beauty products ripping off L’Oréal. Some stick, but most never really dent the originals. Price alone rarely trumps brand equity.

Of course, it’s more complicated than this. The Aldi team and its agencies are some of the world top marketers. Even with its own label, it puts proper comms plans in place because it understands that the main difference it has with the famous national-brand cousins is simply mental availability. Aldi is a powerful emotional brand, and its own label products will better from that uplift too.

It’s a stark reminder that, really, all marketers have is our brands. Aldi can create a possibly better product overnight and our own only moat is the equity and distinctiveness we build over decades. It is very compelling case for brand building in general.

Or we may find that in a cost-of-living crisis, a 76p difference is enough to blow Guinness out of the water at Aldi, and we will all have to have a long, hard think about what the hell we are getting out of bed for in the morning.

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