Just a couple of notes to add to the gazelle's excellent writeup:
The Wine and Spirits merchant, Gilbey's of Ireland, came up with Bailey's Irish Cream in 1974, as a way of shifting more Irish Whiskey. Mixing whiskey with cream and various other ingredients proved a successful wheeze, and the drink is now one of the world's best-selling liqueurs. It has been combined with Häagen-Dazs ice cream to form a popular ice cream flavour, and a cheesecake flavoured with the liqueur is a common sight on dessert menus in restaurants worldwide.
Rampant consolidation in the drinks industry means that the Baileys (sic) brand is now owned by Diageo, whose brand portfolio also includes Guinness, Red Stripe, Blossom Hill, Glen Ellen and Burger King, as well as those brands mentioned above by the gazelle. A measure of the drink's success is that Baileys is one of only eight brands from Diageo's mind-bogglingly large portfolio which have been chosen as global priority brands by the company. In other words, these are brands which Diageo will attempt to flog to every man, woman and, if they could get away with it, child in the world. Their other brands will of course be promoted, but on a more localised basis.
The story of how Baileys came to be part of the same group as Guinness also has the potential to cause boggling of the mind. When Baileys was first created, Gilbey's was already part of the GrandMet group, which acquired International Distillers & Vintners in 1972. IDV was the group formed from Gilbey's 1962 merger with United Wine Traders. When GrandMet merged with Guinness in 1997, United Distillers & Vintners (UDV) was created, a business unit which combined the businesses of IDV with Guinness's United Distillers (UD). UD itself had been created through the 1987 merger of the Distillers Company (DCL) and Arthur Bell & Sons. Did you catch all that? Did I mention LVMH?
One of Baileys' recent marketing initiatives was to create a Baileys visitor centre, called ICON, at Leopardstown racecourse in Dublin. No doubt the idea was to emulate the success of the Guinness Hop Store, the visitor centre attached to Guinness's St James's Gate brewery. However, its out of town location and, it must be said, general aura of crapness, put paid to this enterprise, and the centre closed down within a couple of years. Moreover, while Guinness has over two centuries of history with which to fill its tourist attraction, "The Baileys Experience" had less than three decades, and tourists found it wasn't worth the trip to suburban Dublin to learn that their favourite tipple was dreamed up as a simple marketing gimmick to shift more uisce beatha.