The Marketing Origins of the Guinness Book of World Records
A fast bird, an angry hunter, and beer
What is the fastest game bird in the world?
That was the question that led to the creation of what we now know as the Guinness Book of World Records. It is one of the longest and most recognisable branding elements in advertising history. And it was created due to a bird.
In 1951, the managing director of Guinness Brewery, Sir Hugh Beaver, was on a European hunting expedition. Beaver wasn’t having much success and continually missed his target. Frustrated, he claimed that the game bird must be the fastest bird in the world. He asked his companions if that was, in fact, true, but none could answer.
This was 47 years before Google, and even before anyone could ask Jeeves, so information was hard to find. Searching records after their hunt failed to yield an answer.
For months, Beaver thought about the lack of an answer to his question. During his research, he found that there wasn’t much recording of any similar achievements — the fastest, the tallest, the fattest, and so on.
In 1954, Beaver was thinking of a marketing campaign way to promote his beer, when the question from three years earlier came to him. He could collect a book of records and push it in pubs as a way of settling arguments or quizzing each other. It was the perfect value add to his product.
The Book of Records
Beaver enlisted the help of journalist twins Norris and Ross McWhirter to compile as many records as they could. The twins worked 90-hour weeks for three months to research and then collected enough records to fill 198 pages.
In 1955, the first Guinness Book of Records was produced. They printed 1,000 copies and handed them out for free as a promotional item to all pubs in the UK and Ireland that stocked Guinness. Beaver also had the ingenious idea of a waterproof cover so people could drink (and often spill) their Guinness on the book. He wanted it to be used by the drinkers of his product so they could engage with the brand.
The timing was perfect, people were interested in world records, as the world had become fixated on breaking the…
