The Globalization of Guinness: Marketing Taste, Transferring Technology

2.1 Export Infrastructures in the Age of High Empire

Of the thousands of Guinness agents working in the United Kingdom, only about 30 exported internationally, and for a perishable product like beer, the conditions of shipping, storage, and sales required careful attention to ensure quality. On his visit to India, Haines declared the stout to be “first rate,” but often he and Shand lamented the poor quality of Guinness served in overseas markets. Lengthy voyages through the tropics to Australia and, before the opening of the Panama Canal, to San Francisco often left the beer “quite flat,” “very acid and unpalatable,” or “tasting of the wood.”^[15] Beer also suffered from time spent in bonded warehouses pending excise payments and during overland transport. Meanwhile, packaging and inferior corks resulted in losses of 10 percent or more. Some of the worst problems lay in the lack of care by bartenders, especially in tied houses that sought to promote their own stouts over imported Guinness. Shand concluded: “The ignorance displayed by most Dealers in regard to our Stout is astonishing. Missionary work is necessary.”^[16] Bottlers such as the Liverpool firm of W. E. Johnson & Co., developed protocols to avoid common problems such as “overripeness” by re-bottling in the morning and then corking in the afternoon. In response to complaints that the head took too long to fall, bartenders were encouraged to stand the bottle in ice for a couple of hours before pouring; Guinness devoted decades of missionary work convincing customers that a long head was a desirable feature.^[17]

Despite the cachet of authenticity around the genuine Dublin stout, Guinness, contended with informal policies of import substitution within settler colonies. Historian Malcolm Purinton has described attempts by South African Breweries and Ohlsson Brewery to market local beer in the Cape Colony using tied houses and patriotic language. “Under the adverse conditions existing, I consider it wonderful the way our Stout continues to be sold, while all other imported Beers have practically ceased to exist,” Arthur Shand reported from Durban, South Africa, in 1906.^[18] In contrast, J. C. Haines wrote disdainfully of “country beer” in India. One local brand, Meakin’s stout, reportedly “had no condition or body, and tasted like mere coloured water,” while a rival, the Dyers brewery at Lucknow, India, “runs to the other extreme, being a thick, luscious caramel-flavoured liquor, resembling a bad description of London stout.” He concluded, “Indian breweries have little or no civil trade. They all brew under the protection of the government.”^[19]

Worse still were cases of fraud and trademark violations, which occupied considerable attention from Guinness’s world travelers. Already in the 1860s, less than a decade after Bass had created the red triangle label, it had spawned forgeries in markets from Rio de Janeiro to Rotterdam. Many of the imitations were crude, but a particularly skillful label printed in Hamburg continued to reappear for the better part of a decade.^[20] One of Shand’s first duties for Guinness was traveling across United States filing lawsuits against imitators from New York to Minnesota and San Francisco. In a particularly brazen case, the Castlemaine Brewery of Queensland declared its stout to be the “Guinness of Australia” and sought to register the harp trademark as its own. Shand filed suit and the local brewer withdrew its application, but had the agent not happened to be passing through, the local trademark would have gained legal standing. Even more common were the small-time frauds of refilling and recorking empty bottles of Guinness by “ill-intentioned bar tenders.”^[21]

2.2 Local Marketing

Although European colonists often considered beer as a mark of distinction separating themselves from indigenous peoples, brewers such as Guinness and Bass welcomed native customers. Latin American elites gained a particular fondness for beer, the sociologist Gilberto Freyre explained. “Importing English beer into eighteenth-century Brazil was strictly forbidden hence it was considered the greatest luxury.”^[22] After independence, in 1822, beer was sold in stores along Rua da Alfândega near the Rio de Janeiro Customs House. Spanish American patriot leaders including Simón Bolívar, Francisco de Miranda, and José María Fagoaga spent time in exile in London, and some 5,000 British veterans of the Napoleonic wars served in the liberating armies, often settling afterwards. Likewise, in Mexico, cosmopolitan elites organized politically through York and Scottish masonic lodges (for liberals and conservatives, respectively), and they drank ale and porter (blanca and colorado, although the latter term usually translates as red).^[23] In India, European beer appealed at first to those with ties to the British such as Sepoy troops and Lascar sailors. The modernist movement known as Young Bengal adopted European customs to liberate themselves from generational and caste restrictions within Indian society. A leader of the group, poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt, converted to Christianity in 1843, married a Eurasian woman, and declared himself to be “wading to liberalism through tumblers of beer.”^[24]

By the end of the century, native merchants, especially those outside the Hindu and Muslim majorities, introduced European beer more widely through Indian society. Much of this commerce was handled by Parsis, descendants of Persian Zoroastrians who took refuge in India, such as H. J. Rustomjee of Karachi. By 1880, he was importing Guinness, Youngers, and Coopers, along with various brands of whiskey. After touring their main office and three retail bazaars in 1900, Guinness traveler J. C. Haines declared: “Their ‘Godown’ is the finest in India.”^[25] Rustomjee & Co. also distributed beer and other European goods to so-called “refreshment rooms” along the railroad lines as well as through the interior provinces from Delhi to Northwestern India. Their local knowledge was invaluable for advertising novel products; lacquered trays with the Guinness harp trademark were considered far more effective than billboards at the time, perhaps because of parallels between the trays and indigenous cultures of serving food. Rustomjee apologized to Haines that the 1899 arrival in Karachi of a teetotal regiment, “The Prince of Wales’ Own,” had caused Guinness sales to drop by half, but his success in building the native market ensured that sales did not fall even further.^[26]

Egypt offered another rising market for European beer, despite the restrictions of Islam. Historian Omar Foda attributes this taste to the modernization policies of nineteenth-century Ottoman reformer, Muhammad ‘Ali. Particularly after the arrival of the British in 1882, Western-oriented urban professionals drank alcohol to distinguish themselves from traditionalist shayks and peasants. Haines estimated that native consumers accounted for 60 percent of the market for Guinness in Cairo and 80 percent in Alexandria. He also described the drinking cultures in local cafes. “The peculiar habit exists of serving small pieces of bread, biscuit, cheese, meat, etc., with each bottle. In one case I saw three Arabs thus engaged, one was eating an orange between sips of stout, and the others little morsels of cheese.”^[27] Nor were consumers limited to modernizing urbanites, for many peasants began to exchange their homebrewed buza for European beer. A postal clerk and social critic named Muhammad ‘Umar complained about heavy drinking among the poor, particularly at mulids, Muslim saint’s day celebrations. The most prominent such fair, dedicated to twelfth-century mystic Ahmad al-Badawi, drew hundreds of thousands of devotees each year to his tomb in the town of Tanta, which was singled-out by Shand as an important market. Many pilgrims sought the saint’s blessing to cure physical ailments, or in the case of women, to ensure fertility, and so a pint of Guinness made a natural accompaniment to the toasted chickpeas customarily eaten during the celebration.^[28]

Native markets for Guinness continued to grow in the early twentieth century. Demand from the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia was second only to Australia, and the company created Chinese language labels for sale in the Malay states. A board memo from 1927 observed that “the trade is almost entirely a native one.”^[29] Wholesalers such as the Bhen Bark firm of Bangkok sought to bypass bottling agents and approached Guinness directly, foreshadowing the company’s eventual control over marketing. In West Africa, where local consumption of European liquor dated to the early modern Atlantic slave trade, beer was introduced in the nineteenth century with the shift to African agricultural commodities like palm oil. As elsewhere, German lager beers quickly swept the market, prompting a British colonial official to complain that “the trade appears to have been allowed to pass almost unchallenged into foreign hands.”^[30] On a visit in 1927, Guinness executive R. E. Goddard gave a more nuanced description of the market. Even on the coast, there were few bars or hotels, and consumers drank directly in the stores of firms like the Niger Co. and La Société commerciale de l’Ouest africain. In Nigeria, many locals considered Guinness to be good for virility and nursing mothers, while stout found little demand in the neighboring colony of Cameroon, where French tonic wines had captured the medicinal market. In Sierra Leone, Goddard found the market to be fickle, switching between lager, stout, tonic wine, and gin. The customer “gets occasional whims, so they tell me, for no apparent reason, and for a period drinks one thing and then just as suddenly switches over to another.”^[31]

Beer became a global commodity in the nineteenth century, as British and Irish brewers began supplying imperial agents abroad and ultimately ended up with a following among indigenous peoples. Even as the light, sparkling taste of lager beers displaced heavier British pale ales, Guinness Stout retained a market among both settlers and indigenous people alike for its supposed beneficial health properties. And while the transfer of brewing technology allowed settler colonies to produce local versions of beer and thereby substitute for imports, Guinness preserved an aura of authenticity and perhaps a distinctive taste as well. Despite European control of imperial shipping and ports, native dealers provided essential distribution networks, especially in the interior. In India, for example, bazaar dealers competed fiercely for urban markets, then made up for losses by selling at inflated rates to consumers in the upcountry. Historian Rajat Kanta Ray observed: “Only the bazaar could ‘deliver’ the goods from the bottom to the top by virtue of complex financial arrangements that interlocked its own numerous successive layers.”^[32] Such local knowledge and connections became even more essential for increasing global markets after World War II.

3.1 Technology Transfers and Overseas Brewing

Overseas production was not entirely new for Guinness, which had already established brewing ventures in England and the United States. In 1933, the company began construction of a factory at Park Royal, west of London, to supply the English market, which was importing a million barrels annually from Dublin. Standardization was always paramount, and the company chose to forego the numerous improvements in brewery design rather than risk changing the taste. As a result, the Park Royal facility was modeled on the Dublin number 2 brewhouse, which had been designed in 1879. To further ensure uniform quality, brewers began gradually, mixing small amounts of beer from Park Royal with larger volumes imported from St. James Gate. As the English facility improved its output, brewers gradually reduced the percentage of Dublin stout until it was finally eliminated entirely. The success at Park Royal encouraged Guinness to move into its next biggest overseas market, the United States, following World War II. The brewery opened in Long Island City, New York, in 1949, but selling stout to a lager consuming public proved difficult. To make matters worse, giant Midwestern shipping brewers Pabst, Schlitz, and Anheuser Busch were opening factories of their own in the Northeast, spawning brutal price wars with established regional firms Ballantine, Schaeffer, and Rheingold. Five bruising years later, Guinness closed the shop.^[35]

Guinness Exports Limited, founded in 1950 to manage overseas sales and distribution, stationed a representative in Nigeria, but perhaps chastened by the American experience, the company delayed plans for local brewing. It was only in 1960 when Nigerian Breweries Limited announced plans for its own stout, to be named for the Biblical strongman Samson, did Guinness finally take the plunge. Even then, it established Guinness Nigeria Limited as a joint venture with Unilever’s African marketing subsidiary, which had been a major distributor of Guinness and also held a stake in Nigerian Breweries. The choice of an experienced local partner proved wise, and in 1963, the factory opened in Ikeja, a suburb of the capital Lagos. Perhaps the biggest challenge was not shortages of raw materials, which had to be sourced locally, or other forms of bureaucratic interference by local officials but rather the technological challenges of brewing a Foreign Extra Stout that matched the product from St. James Gate. To ensure a proper flora for fermentation, brewers inoculated the vats with material from Dublin. Inspired by the Park Royal model, the company developed a system of brewing a high gravity beer with low hop levels that could be mixed with locally produced beer. Aged before leaving Dublin to develop lactic acid, it “was originally known as ‘acid beer’, which was alright for internal use, but for several obvious reasons AHH [Arthur Hughes, overseas trade director] did not like this as a name for sending it to Nigeria, and the term ‘matured beer’ was substituted.”^[36]

The success of brewing in Nigeria led Guinness to expand its overseas operations rapidly. The next factory was built in Malaysia (1965), followed by Cameroon (1970), Ghana (1971), and Jamaica (1973). Guinness also entered agreements for contract brewing with SAB for Southern Africa (1964), South Australia Brewing in Adelaide (1964), Labatt’s in Canada (1965), and East African Breweries (1966). A planned brewery in Bahia, Brazil never opened due to disputes with the local partner and the disappearance of equipment enroute from São Paulo. When Guinness withdrew from the project, the chief engineer was arrested for taking the blueprints with him. Even with reliable partners, Guinness managers learned to navigate geopolitical crises; in reflecting on the company’s success building market share during the Nigerian Civil War of 1966-1970, D. Harper ended his list of future tasks: “Buy a new prayer mat.”^[37]

The mixture of mature beer from Ireland provided no guarantee that the final product would meet company standards, and overseas brewers regularly sent samples for review to St. James Gate. The tasting notes, on file in the company archive, provide a catalog of quality control failures: “Aromatic, harsh, caramelly,” “Sickly, aromatic, unclean,” “Horrid,” “Yeasty,” “Overseas,” and perhaps most damning of all, “Not Guinness.” Perhaps colored by prejudice that true Guinness could only be brewed in Dublin, the comments did at times convey a grudging approval: “Much improved. I did not recognize it as overseas.”^[38] Such successes were all the more satisfying given the difficulty of obtaining adequate raw materials. Nigerian import controls forced brewers to malt local sorghum and wheat instead of barley. Even with refrigeration, the tropical climate took a toll on equipment such as the aluminum-clad water mains used at a rival brewery.

“The effect reminds one of popular television science fiction,” observed engineer J. H. D. Hughes. “It is not water-tight and I have a suspicion that its main effect may be to conceal from the eye the horrors that are going on behind.”^[39]

3.2 Advertising in a Postcolonial Era

Building overseas markets for Guinness also involved significant local knowledge and investment. To coordinate sales and advertising, the company had begun to consolidate the agents already in the late nineteenth century, followed by the large bottlers in the early twentieth century. The first national campaign in Britain began in 1929 with newspaper advertisements proclaiming that “Guinness is Good for You.” In the 1930s and 1940s, artist John Gilroy produced a variety of memorable advertising posters. One featured a worker casually hoisting a steel beam on his shoulder over the caption “Guinness for Strength.” A series of zoo-themed images followed with a hapless keeper exclaiming, “My Goodness, My Guinness!” while trying to recover a pint that was being pilfered by sea lions, ostriches, and especially toucans. Already in the 1920s the company displayed an awareness of the need to tailor promotions to specific cultural values, by distributing a grab-bag of novelties. The company shipped puzzles and pocket watches to India and Southeast Asia, menu cards to Java, and cigarette cases to Canada and Australia.^[40]

The company’s exports rose more than tenfold in the 1940s and 1950s, mostly in Africa and Southeast Asia. Commodity chains expanded from the coastal cities into the interior along both traditional river routes and newly built road and rail networks. Many Africans used their service in Allied armies during World War II to demand equal rights, including access to European beer that they had tasted while in uniform. The Nigerian petroleum boom of the 1950s created demand for beer among thirsty oil workers. Historian Justin Willis observed that in Africa European beer represented “the communion wine of responsible modernity.”^[41] In Guinness’s West African tour of 1949, executives sought to survey market conditions, while insisting that “Advertising should at all times be addressed to the African.”^[42] The legacy of independent bottlers impeded the effort to create a unified identity for Guinness, since brand marks like the Boar’s Head held greater recognition for African consumers than the Irish harp trademark, particularly in interior markets. Executives recommended a gradual transition, moving the brand mark to a less prominent place on the neck, to avoid confusing customers. Nevertheless, local merchants and petty traders made effective use of poster advertisements and showcards. The visitors concluded optimistically that “even the lowest class of wage earner can afford at least one Reputed Pint per week.”^[43] Company representatives estimated that half of African consumers considered Guinness to be medicine, while the other half drank it for strength and taste. Only 10 percent of consumers were thought to be women. Taste preferences and drinking cultures varied across the region. In Sierra Leone, consumers had a “decidedly dry palate” and took their Guinness neat. Residents of the Gold Coast were more likely to mix stout with beer, “half-and-half,” while many Nigerians added palm wine as an economy measure.^[44]

Despite the company’s insistence on tailoring ads to local populations, they were not always successful. One such misplaced promotion came through a consignment of Leprechaun novelties sent out in the 1960s. A Kenyan settler colonist, Eric Keartland, wrote to complain that the charm had brought him nothing but bad luck, losing at cards and plagued by trade union activism from the native workers in his factory. His housekeeper considered the charm to be “Bwana Mbaya (bad boss)” and refused to clean anywhere near it. The Guinness sales manager commiserated with the run of bad luck, promised to look for a “wee psychiatrist,” and recommended placating the leprechaun with a nightly tuck of Guinness from the bottom of an empty glass.^[45] More sympathetic to the native population were efforts to adapt the advertising posters replacing a British worker hoisting a steel beam with a black man carrying a tree trunk. The tagline was changed from “Guinness for Strength” to “Guinness Gives you Power,” thereby alluding to a sense of masculine potency, although the image might have seemed condescending to Nigerian oil workers. Nevertheless, the company continued to refine its message, hiring a marketing research firm in the 1970s to conduct surveys of potential customers in Nigeria and Benin before launching local advertising campaigns.^[46]

By the end of the century, Guinness had developed more nuanced portrayals of African masculinity for advertisements aimed not at the working classes but at a more aspirational black middle class. A campaign launched in 1999 by the marketing agency of Saatchi and Saatchi centered around action hero Michael Power, whose last name recalled Guinness’s longstanding African promotions. Filmed in Nigeria by a pan-African crew and starring London-born and Jamaica-raised actor Cleveland Mitchell, the ads were a bargain compared to the €60 million paid by Heineken for the sponsorship rights to the James Bond spy franchise. Power worked not as a secret agent for authoritarian regimes, but rather as a reporter solving the problems of ordinary people and uncovering elite corruption. In one spot, a power outage threatened to cancel a music festival until he called in a fleet of taxis, who used their headlights to illuminate the party. The short ads proved so successful that Guinness commissioned a feature film, Critical Assignment (2003), with product placements, including a Guinness delivery truck that conveniently stopped the villains from escaping. Wearing black Armani suits, Power defied the image of the traditional Big Man and offered a modern ideal for urban Africans.^[47]