On June 18, I got to participate in an attempt to break a Guinness World Record for the most number of people gathered to eat dim sum. We succeeded, and set a new record with 830 eaters, beating the one set by Australia in 2019, by 66 people.
What started as a free marketing tool used in pubs for Guinness beers in 1955, has become the primary source for verifying records of individual and institutional achievements. As a child, I grew up reading the Guinness Book of World Records. We had the book at home and I would look through the grainy black and white photos of oddities like the person with “the most limbs” and “the longest fingernails” with awe. It wasn’t until I participated in this record breaking attempt, that I heard so many other people claiming the same childhood experience. This is a company that has learned how to evolve and reinvent itself. It’s a testament to the Guinness World Records brand.
Nowadays, Guinness World Records makes the bulk of their money from aspiring record breakers who pay sizable fees to organize events for publicity. What the organizers of this dim sum event, Seattle’s Chinatown International District Business Improvement Area, paid to Guinness seems nominal compared to all the media coverage and word-of-mouth buzz the event drew. Within a week of registration opening, 1000 people registered for the event and an additional 700 opted to waitlist.
Some criticize Guinness for making money by leveraging its brand this way. I see it as an example of a company being inventive when its book sale revenue, its primary source, dried up. Reinvention takes a lot of curiosity. I understand this personally because my family publishes a Vietnamese newspaper. We, along with many other small print newspapers, are in major decline because we haven’t been able to reinvent ourselves.
Moreover, Guinness is meeting a genuine need for event-based marketing that engages real people. I am extremely proud to claim I helped break a world record and that I, and the 829 other participants, were in this together.
By finding ways to stay relevant, Guinness World Records has been able to stay in business, despite technology changes, while staying true to who they are at their core.
What stories of reinvention at the institutional or individual level have you heard of?
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Best,
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