Dublin, 1759; London, 1997.

Diageo is a name from 1997, but the businesses behind it are much older. The International Directory of Company Histories, in its 1999 entry on Diageo, begins the story with the brewer Arthur Guinness, who in 1759 leased an old brewery at St James’s Gate in Dublin together with a mill, storehouse, stable, house and malthouses. Within a few years, the directory says, ale and table beer were coming out of the new works, and the company built a trade with pubs in the towns around Dublin.

The Guinness name went on to cover far more than stout. The same entry says the company named its Harp lager after the harp on the traditional Guinness label, and that in the 1980s Guinness bought the Distillers Company, which brought it Scotch and gin names including Johnnie Walker, Gordon’s and Tanqueray. By the 1990s the Guinness group was a brewer and a distiller under one family surname, and the harp of the stout label sat beside a striding whisky figure in the same portfolio.

The second partner had a very different history. Grand Metropolitan, the directory says, had its roots in the early 1930s, in the property investments of its founder Maxwell Joseph, and grew into a hotel business before it moved into branded food, restaurants, pubs, breweries and distilling in the 1970s. The last of its hotels were sold in the late 1980s. By early 1997, under chairman George Bull and chief executive John McGrath, GrandMet had narrowed its packaged-food business to a core of international brands: Pillsbury, Green Giant, Häagen-Dazs and Old El Paso.

In May 1997, according to the directory, Guinness and Grand Metropolitan announced that they would merge to form a new company, tentatively called GMG Brands. The working title simply stacked the initials of the two partners. Seven months later the merger was complete, and Wikipedia records that shares in the combined company began trading on the London Stock Exchange on 17 December 1997. By then the working title had gone, and the new group had a name that belonged to neither side.

Every day, everywhere.

The name was the work of the London branding consultancy Wolff Olins. In a case study kept on its website in the early 2010s, the agency said it worked closely with Anthony Greener of Guinness and John McGrath of Grand Metropolitan, and that the new business needed a sense of purpose broader than Guinness’s associations with beer and Grand Metropolitan’s with hotels. Wolff Olins says it shaped a vision of “everyday pleasure everywhere”, and from that vision defined a set of corporate values, a new name and a brand expression.

The word itself is built from two classical roots. Wolff Olins says the name combines “everyday”, from the Latin dies, meaning day, and “everywhere”, from the Greek root geo, meaning world. The International Directory of Company Histories gave the same reading in 1999, deriving the name from the Latin for day and the Greek for world, and it quoted the company’s explanation that the name was meant to convey that “every day, all around the world, millions of people enjoy our brands.” Wikipedia glosses the Greek root as “earth” rather than world.

Wolff Olins later wrote that it created Diageo in 1997, and it quoted Greener on why a new name mattered: it made the point that this was a new company, not two old companies joined together, which he said was important for investors and employees. The working title GMG Brands kept both partners visible in its initials; Diageo kept neither. Guinness, a family surname, and Grand Metropolitan, a name from the hotel trade, both stepped back behind the new word.

The leadership of the new company was shared. The directory says Bull and Greener were named co-chairmen of Diageo, while McGrath became its chief executive. Wikipedia adds the name of Philip Yea, from the Guinness side, among the executives who created the company. The name, the values and the brand expression arrived together, as one package, at the moment two boardrooms became one.

Partners, a name and its roots.

A corporate identity has a different job from a product brand. A product name speaks to the person holding the bottle or the device; a parent name speaks to investors, employees, suppliers and regulators, and it often has to stretch across trades that look nothing alike. A group that sells spirits and beer, or a maker whose catalogue runs from printers to ceramics, needs a name that does not tie it to a single shelf.

That is why parent names tend to fall into a few patterns. Some are contractions of an older, longer name, keeping the sound of a founding place or material while dropping the literal description. Some are the joined surnames of founders or the shortened names of two merged companies. Others are coined from scratch, built from fragments of words in another language so that they carry a mood rather than a meaning, and so that they can be registered as trademarks in many countries at once.

The visual system follows the same logic. A group mark is usually quieter than the marks it owns: a wordmark, a simple symbol, a restrained colour, designed to sit on an annual report, a factory sign and a business card without competing with the product names underneath.

A name above the brands.

At its founding, the International Directory of Company Histories says, Diageo had its main businesses in United Distillers & Vintners, which combined the spirits units of the two partners; Pillsbury; Guinness; and Burger King. A cake-mix maker and a burger chain sat beside a Dublin brewery and a list of Scotch whiskies, and the name had to stretch across all of them. Wolff Olins’s case study frames the new name as broader than beer or hotels, and as being about everyday pleasure.

The portfolio soon narrowed. Wikipedia says Diageo sold the Pillsbury Company to General Mills in July 2000 and sold Burger King in December 2002, and the Wolff Olins case study notes the same two sales as steps towards a sharper focus on drinks. In 2001, Wikipedia adds, Diageo bought the Canadian business Seagram in a joint venture with the French group Pernod Ricard. The name chosen in 1997 for a food-and-drinks group stayed in place when the group became a drinks company.

The corporate name and the brand names work at different levels. Guinness still carries its harp, and Johnnie Walker its striding man; Diageo is the name of the owner. Wolff Olins says its 1997 work for the new company covered corporate values, a name and a brand expression.

Diageo plc is headquartered in London, Wikipedia says, and is listed in London and, through depositary receipts, in New York. Its story as a name begins in a single year: an announcement in May 1997, a working title, a coined word from Wolff Olins and the start of trading in December.

For a design guide, Diageo shows how a merger can be given a name with no surname, no place and no product in it, so that older brands keep their own marks underneath. Compare Guinness, the Dublin stout with its harp, and Johnnie Walker, the whisky with its striding man, and AB InBev, for another drinks group. For this guide we use dawn, clay and slate with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Diageo’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.