"They Buy It for the Package"

Yesterday I posted excerpts from an interview I did with Wayfinder’s Kevin Davey. As is so often the case when I do interviews, a brewer will say something that strikes a chord, but is off the topic at hand. The quote I want to discuss in this post came from the topic of positioning and marketing a beer. We were discussing the recognition he’s getting as the inventor of cold IPA. He is humbled by the attention (though he added “I’m a little sore that we didn’t win a bunch of medals for our lagers at GABF and that people didn’t know about Wayfinder for that first, but oh, well”), and that sent us into a discussion of how small breweries have to pay attention to marketing.

It’s not a topic brewers discuss publicly that often. It almost seems like marketing tarnishes the purity of brewing with the baseness of its commercial concerns. Marketing isn’t why we like beer, I get it. But viewed a different way, marketing is just the mechanism breweries use to guide people to their cans. Working brewers all have examples of certain beers they loved and were proud of that weren’t supported and ended up dying on the vine. They would have loved a clever marketer to help customers find those beers and love them, too. Kevin has been in the industry a long time, so I wasn’t surprised by what he said next.

“I think about what Budweiser has done and how they were successful,” he began. And really, when talking about marketing, it’s mandatory to look at what breweries were doing in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. Those companies flat out knew how to sell beer. He continued:

“I remember reading an article about August Busch III saying that drinkability is the seventh beer in the six-pack. Even in our marketing thing at Siebel, they said nobody goes to the store and buys your beer for the beer. They buy it for the package. They come back and buy it for the beer. If the beer is good, they’ll come back and buy it. They have no way of drinking it at the grocery store. You have to think about that. You can’t just put yourself out there with no marketing and no identity. And then when you do have something good, you want to make sure people want to have more of it.”

In that post yesterday, I argued that I don’t think cold IPA is a style, not really. But I think cold IPA is an absolutely brilliant marketing term, and I admire Kevin for finding it. He wanted to communicate to the customer something essential that would guide their hand to his beer and deliver on the promise of those two words. When I first asked Kevin about cold IPA and what it meant, he said, in his booming voice, “It tastes cold!” It may not be accurate from a technical standpoint (it’s fermented warm), and it may not communicate anything specific about the beer, but in that manner of the old marketing whizzes, it speaks to buyers and actually conveys what he wants to convey.

“I think a lot of people get stuck on the name. I ask them, ‘Well, what would you want me to name it?’ They’re like warm IPL. And I’m like, ‘who the f*** wants to drink a warm IPL?’ Nobody wants to drink a warm IPL.” He thought back to the way Bud. “So when I think of some of the marketing, they’d say ‘Bold! Cold! Filtered-smooth!’”

Hard to argue with the beer or the logic of the name cold IPA. You make a great beer, make sure people find it.