Art, Guinness, and Choice
Alex Murrell directs strategy at a Bristol, England-based branding agency. A couple weeks back, he wrote a very long meditation on the human urge toward sameness. It reprises a familiar theme, the devolution into a world serving lowest-common-denominated tastes, but comes at it from a slightly different angle. We don’t, he argues, find ourselves in a bland world of repetitive, mainstream tastes because big corporations, themselves bland and mainstream, refuse to offer anything interesting. That version of the story gets causality wrong. Corporations just give us what we want. Our world is bland and boring because that’s how we like it.
In the early 1990s, two Russian artists named Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid took the unusual step of hiring a market research firm. Their brief was simple. Understand what Americans desire most in a work of art…. Komar and Melamid then set about painting a piece that reflected the results. The pair repeated this process in a number of countries including Russia, China, France and Kenya.
Describing the work in his book Playing to the Gallery, the artist Grayson Perry said: “In nearly every country all people really wanted was a landscape with a few figures around, animals in the foreground, mainly blue.” Despite soliciting the opinions of over 11,000 people, from 11 different countries, each of the paintings looked almost exactly the same.
Murrell follows this up with example after example demonstrating this point. He does not use beer as one of those examples, but for those of you who complain there’s no choice when you walk into a taproom these days (or that the taproom itself looks mighty familiar), his piece may hold some explanatory value.
This oblique commentary on the state of beer (thanks to Stan Hieronymus for the link) seemed to synch in my brain with a piece of news that came down the pike yesterday: Diageo, the parent company of Guinness (on of my three sponsors), acknowledged it planned to mothball the large brewing kit at their Baltimore site.
That project had multiple elements when it was planned, including 1) a huge, almost theme-park like drinking and dining venue, 2) a small ten-barrel brewery to supply it, 3) a 60-bbl production brewhouse to supply Americans with US-specific products like Guinness Blonde, and a 4) barrel room to age stout. So far as I can tell, the fourth never really got off the ground, and the news yesterday concerned the third. The pub and small brewery are in great shape and will keep going forward—meaning no one will much notice the change.
It got me thinking about how human behavior, conditioned by our social nature, results in both our drive toward the same thing, but also our sudden and often inexplicable shifts away. Five years ago, when Guinness launched the Baltimore project, blonde and golden ales were having a moment. Diageo had the idea it would bring new beers to market that appealed to an American audience that was trending toward craft beer and the love of variety. In addition to Blonde, it planned to roll out other beers that they thought would be more relevant to an American audience.
It made sense, and so far as I know, was successful for a time. But a pandemic and half a decade later, and everything has shifted. Now Guinness is doing gangbusters in the UK, where it recently became the best-selling draft pour. It’s not quite that popular here, but it’s currently one of the fastest-growing large brands in the US. Five years ago, Guinness Regular was getting dragged down by a turn away from dark ales. Now it’s part of that phalanx of imported beers marching into fridges.
This is the funny thing about the shoaling tendency of human taste. For a minute we’re gangbusters on goatees and flannel shirts, and then we’re on to trucker hats, aviator glasses, and droopy mustaches. We may be natural herders, forever settling on a mutual style, but we’re also mutable. In his article, Murrell describes the “international AirBnB style” (white walls with raw wood, open shelving and bare brick) that dominates interior design now. But have a look at an old television show and you’ll see that it hasn’t always been this way. The shag carpets and avocado-green appliances of my childhood are curiously no longer popular. We are driven to admire the same things in the same moment—but only for a time. Then we shear off, looking for something new.
So if you’re unfashionable out there trying to sell that farmhouse saison, know hope. The tides of fashion may soon shift back in your direction. And, if you find yourself riding the zeitgeist and raking in dollars, do plan for a time when your lineup looks like yesterday’s goatee. And good luck predicting when the change will come, or which direction fashion will turn.