Prioritizing Branding and Marketing
“You’re going to have to compete with people trying to attract people to their distillery tasting room, to their winery tasting room. We’re seeing those numbers increase at similar rates to what we’re seeing in brewing.... We’re going from a country where we used to go places specifically to drink, to now a country where you can drink everywhere you go, but fewer of them are specifically about drinking.”
This nice piece by Justin Kendall captured a theme I’ve been considering a lot lately. It summarizes a speech Bart Watson, the Brewers Association’s economist, recently gave about the importance of marketing and branding for a brewery’s success. It’s something breweries and customers uniformly hate to think about, but he develops his case based on structural factors that make the conclusion inescapable: there’s too much competition to ignore branding and marketing. He notes:
11,500 brewery permits are currently filed with the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB).
Wineries and distilleries are proliferating as well, as are their tasting rooms.
The beer market is aging: We’re at peak 21- to 34-year-olds right now, but we’re going to get a lot more of 35- to 44-year-olds.” They consume beer differently and less promiscuously.
More people are going out to breweries, but people are going to fewer each year individually—because the committed core has grown to include casual fans.
Though brewery tourism is growing. Yay!
There are an increasing number of opportunities to drink wherever you are.
And nowhere in his speech, apparently, did he mention the word “seltzers.”
Beer has become a pretty amazing success story. It now generates billions of dollars and employs—well, lots of people. It has helped revitalize neighborhoods and injected fun into a night at the pub. The consequence of the success is that there are now 8,000 breweries in the country, and no human can possibly keep track of them all.
As one quick example: there’s a new brewery called Away Days located 1.4 miles from my house. It is the project of a soccer pub that champions English ales. They serve their beer on cask. There could not be a more purpose-built brewery designed to attract the attention of Jeff Alworth. And yet I still haven’t made it there—because 8000 breweries. I honestly didn’t know it existed months into its young life. There’s just too much to keep track of, and in my limited bandwidth, I have failed to keep up. In 2020, branding and marketing isn’t about being a skeezy capitalist dog hawking inferior snake oil—it’s about making sure people know you exist, or reminding them you do. If you’re not doing that, you’re probably in trouble.
Branding and marketing is hard. It requires a global perspective, one that touches on sales, marketing, product development, distribution, packaging—really, it touches every part of a brewery. Done properly, it becomes an integrative exercise that brings these pieces together. The problem is that most breweries don’t want to devote the time to such a big project, and so things proceed piecemeal, and the brand develops in a shaggy dog fashion with no strategic purpose. That means the message is muddied and lands less often with potential customers—or worse, begins to actively work against the company’s goals.
There are resources out there, and some are really cheap. There’s no way to get around investing the time in brand work, but there are ways to do it globally and thoroughly. CODO, a design company in Indianapolis, has put together a workbook that walks you through this process, along with a book laying out all the conceptual pieces. For forty bucks, you get tens of thousands of dollars of insight. It’s a great place to start and see what the process looks like. Give it a look.