With a collection of outstanding brands, Diageo is the world's leading premium drinks business. Diageo in Ireland can trace its origins and heritage to the 18th Century. The company has in recent times tackled the challenge of growing the Carlsberg brand. A series of new concepts of ground-breaking popular communications was developed, and this included the “Aon Focal” campaign, leveraging the distinctiveness of the Irish language. The approach included the hugely popular TV ad along with an outdoor campaign which featured in gaeltacht as well as other areas. The success of the campaign was carefully tracked and measured, and it led to a distinct uplift in product sales amongst target audiences.

Iarnród Éireann operates Intercity, DART and Commuter rail services, as well as rail freight services. Its Intercity fleet is the newest in Europe, and since 2003 it has been Europe’s fastest growing railway. Iarnród Éireann has had a longstanding policy of bilingualism, over and above its statutory obligations. This has been to reinforce its own brand values and to meet with customer expectations and preferences. Having established that the use of Irish in its service delivery has a strong impact on customer satisfaction, the firm seized the opportunity presented by the arrival of its new fleet of latest generation trains to upgrade all its Irish language communications.

The RTÉ Guide is part of RTÉ Publishing which is a business division within the RTÉ organisation. With a readership of 437,000, the Guide is lreland’s biggest selling and best-known magazine brand with over 45 years of magazine heritage. To address reader preferences, and in tandem with Seachtain na Gaeilge 2008, the Guide created the “Easy Irish” audio CD. A print version was distributed with the Guide and uploaded to the publication’s website. This initiative was followed up in October 2008 with the bilingual “Myths and Legends” audio CD. These promotions each achieved significant uplifts in sales of the Guide, and subsequent research pointed to a very positive customer response.

As one of Ireland’s largest investors in technology and people, Vodafone recognised the scope for leveraging the use of the Irish language in mobile telecommunications in a way which meets with the interests of its customers. An opportunity was identified to introduce predictive text in Irish, and to connect with younger audiences in particular, for whom SMS is a major means of communication. The resulting product was “Téacs”, a new application that allows users to write text messages using Irish predictive text. The supporting marketing campaign was focused on driving the adoption of the new product. The product launch achieved high levels of media coverage and was followed by significant take-up.