Summary

CONTEXT Singapore celebrates several huge seasonal occasions as a proud multicultural nation. Chinese New Year, Diwali and Christmas are just three where brands spend disproportionately to capture consumer attention. But what do you do when your brand celebrates a different seasonal occasion? More specifically, what do you do when your brand owns a paltry 1% market share, and you’re mandated by your global leaders to celebrate an irrelevant seasonal occasion in your market? This is the problem Guinness faced for St. Patrick’s Day in 2019. PROBLEM Westerners have relevant reasons to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day - typically they or a friend has some ancestry. This link doesn’t exist in Singapore so the task on paper was fairly simple: Link the National Day of Ireland with Singapore and its Asian inhabitants 11,290km away… We interrogated potential links between Singapore, Singaporeans, Ireland and St. Patrick. We unearthed interesting facts but nothing strong enough to drive disproportionality. Reality dawned: there was no relevance between the National Day of Ireland and Singaporeans. THE INSIGHT Then the ‘aha!’ moment arrived. Within the working team the project was called “Saint Pats” and we had said it many times before someone noticed this was the relevance we were looking for. We realised we needed to shift the conversation from ‘Global St. Patrick’ to ‘Local Patrick’. From that came our simple, relevant, powerful and humorous creative idea. THE CREATIVE IDEA Don’t celebrate the mythical Irish Pat of the past, celebrate the real Singaporean Pats you know now! We used linkedin to identify as many local Pats as possible, and targeted them with digital content and personal invites to the event. We let them know this was all about celebrating them! We also targeted ‘famous-within-their industry’ Pats and used them as influencers and pushed content out via their feeds. RESULTS BUSINESS RESULTS: A whopping 6% YoY increase on like-for-like sales - doubling our KPI! (In a flat category). MARKETING RESULTS: Over 80% of main event attendees were Singaporeans - 30% more than our KPI! COMMUNICATIONS RESULTS: Our targeting of famous Pats gained us equivalent value of SGD$1m, and reach of over 17m people in earned media (in a population of 5.5m people), meaning it was impossible for Singaporeans to escape a new seasonal occasion to celebrate! RECOGNITION: The campaign won the only Singapore-based GOLD APAC Effie in 2020. It has also won a WARC Prize for Asian Strategy too. Alongside that it has won 3 MARKIES and has also been included in the WARC ‘Anatomy of Effectiveness in Asia’ report as an example of excellence.

Please tell us how the work was designed / adapted for a single country / region / market

The adaptation for Singapore was the core source of stress and excitement for the campaign! Picture the scene: You are told by your global overlords you must activate the global ‘ownable’ seasonal event - St. Patrick’s Day. But the global platform they give you is totally irrelevant to a nation of Singaporeans who have no link to Ireland, to St. Patrick or to the occasion. We had to approach the challenge in a different way, in order to appeal to our local audience. And that ‘different way’ was to confront the reality that there is no coveted local insight to find. Only the uncomfortable truth: there is no link. So if there is no link, work to the real truth and be confident: if we can’t celebrate the mythical Pat, celebrate all the real Pats around us! And in Singapore, there are lots!