We’re used to drinking to celebrate festivals; now we’ve got a festival that celebrates drink. But is Arthur’s Day good for us?
IN THE FILM The Wild One, Marlon Brando, as Johnny, leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club, is asked, "What are you rebelling against?", to which he famously answers, "What have you got?"
A visitor to recession-hit, high-unemployment Ireland might get the same answer if they were to ask what we were celebrating about. While it’s not long since a glimpse of bunting around a wet field was cause enough in itself for jubilation, Ireland now has more than 600 festivals a year. From Flat Lake to the Fringe, from film to opera, from the roasting of a pig at Enniscrone’s Black Pig Festival to the crowning of a goat at Killorglin’s Puck Fair, everywhere and everything has its own festival. We plough and we bog-snorkel, and a large happy crowd attends. It’s not always clear when a championship becomes a festival or when a festival becomes a fair, but they have one thing in common: where anything is being celebrated in Ireland, there will almost certainly be drink.
Because while we’re close to having a drop-of-a-hat festival, as yet there seems to be no sign of a temperance festival. With the number of gatherings on our small island it was probably inevitable that we should see a new postmodern form of celebration emerge, so instead of just using drink to celebrate our festivals, we have now a festival to celebrate our drink: Arthur’s Day.
Arthur’s Day began in 2009 as a 250th-anniversary commemoration of the signing of the lease for the St James’s Gate brewery in 1759. That first Arthur’s Day also saw the setting up by Diageo of the Arthur Guinness Fund, designed to be a latter-day echo of the founder’s own philanthropic activity in the form of support for social entrepreneurs. Kickstarted by Diageo with an initial €2.5 million, the fund is also fed by ticket sales from the music venues and by revellers who can make contributions through social media.
Many of the socially conscious endeavours of recent years have benefited from the fund and are quick to praise it. There’s no doubt that the existence of the fund justifies what might otherwise seem an over-frivolous event to a populace that has put away its party frock.
The third annual Arthur’s Day takes place next Thursday, September 22nd, and, as before, there’s a strong musical theme. The Stereophonics and Calvin Harris are among the headline acts booked and, in a clever twist that has become the event’s trademark, many big acts will appear unannounced at small or unusual venues. In 2009 Tom Jones played a now legendary set for a crowd of 200 in the Brazen Head and Rolling Stone Ron Wood performed with his son’s band in the window of Brown Thomas.
So why does Diageo go to all this elaborate effort? Well, Arthur’s Day fits with a number of important business objectives. First, it addresses the under-25s, a demographic vital to the future of the Guinness brand. Many in this age group respect the brand while finding it forbidding, sometimes describing it with a phrase that troubles marketing people: an “acquired taste”. Anything that gets these elusive customers to put a pint of Guinness to their lips is good news for the brand.
Second, the event brings Guinness drinkers home. The summer is gone and the harvest is in and it’s time to cast off the sandals and come back to Uncle Arthur. For years Guinness has been battling the sabbatical that its drinkers take for the warmer months, traditionally to Heineken (the competition), then to Bulmer’s (the blow-in competition), and recently to an array of other drinks, some of which (Budweiser, Carlsberg) Diageo brews itself under licence. Despite Diageo’s best efforts, which usually consist of lowering the temperature of the stuff, the Irish drinking public has yet to be persuaded to drink pints of Guinness on the sun lounger.
So if some have strayed from the dark side into the light, it helps to give those prodigal sons an emphatic reminder of what they’ve been missing in the shape of a major brand celebration.
Third, Arthur’s Day demonstrates considerable support for beleaguered publicans. The event takes place in pubs and bars, starting officially at 5.59pm (or 17.59, like the date of the lease signing), and the possibility of an unexpected gig by a major act is guaranteed to bring people back into their favourite boozers that they may not have been in for a while. This leads to a much-needed sales spike as the pints flow.
Yet it’s not all about a short-term profit from one event. Rather, as Diageo itself describes, it in fluent marketing-ese, the objective of Arthur’s Day is “brand equity shift versus short-term uplift”. So far, Arthur’s Day is doing everything right for the Guinness brand, shifting its equity into new channels and new markets and creating a popular mix of old and new, of history and music. For some, Arthur’s Day is beginning to eclipse St Patrick’s Day and is already “one of the best days to be in Ireland”, a claim that may be why one industry commentator dismisses it as “for tourists”.
Until that temperance festival comes along, though, maybe we should all troop out on Thursday and raise a drink to the drink, if only in irony.
Arthur’s Day may be the nearest thing we have to Munich’s Oktoberfest. Apart, that is, from the two-week long Oktoberfest in Dublin’s Docklands that begins the same day.
Eoghan Nolan is an advertising creative director and founder of Brand Artillery
