Murphy's Irish Stout - 'One brand's weakness, another brand's strength'

Campaign to position Murphy's Irish stout as an alternative to Guinness with its 80% share. By 1993 Murphy's had had some success, but future looked uncertain; distribution was difficult and brand was beginning to face delisting.
Agency: Bartle Bogle HegartyAuthor: Giselle Okin

Murphy's Irish stout - one brand's weakness, another brand's strength

INTRODUCTION

Guinness is one of the UK's most famous and most successful brands.

With many great advertising campaigns to support it over the years, almost ubiquitous distribution and a huge market share of 80%, Guinness had created what might be called a ‘consumer monopoly' in drinkers' minds.

This paper aims to demonstrate how, with clear strategic thinking, Murphy's advertising was able to identify Guinness' hidden weaknesses and exploit them with Murphy's relative and potential strengths.

This resulted in a fresh segmentation...

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands