Consulting

Consistent, Comprehensive, Coherent Messaging

Beginning in 2016, I began consulting with breweries to help them understand and tell their own story and turn it into effective messaging. In the scrum of daily activities, it's not always obvious to a brewery what their story is or how it connects to the things they do. Few breweries know how to integrate their complex communications so they speak with the same voice, whether the message is being sent in the form of a label, a social media post, a sell sheet, or an event. As the market becomes more chaotic and fragmented, a clear, coherent, consistent messaging approach is critical to distinguish your brand and stay in emotional contact with your customers. I can help you:

• Clarify your core Identity—your brewery’s essence and personality—and identify key themes that will create an emotional bridge to your brand;

• Create a Messaging Brief that collects approved stories, boilerplate language, consistent topics to highlight, description of flagship beer and beer lines so each member of your team stays on the same page;

• Develop a Implementation Plan to describe how the messaging will happen in each department, how it will be coordinated among departments, and who is responsible for messaging within each department; and

• Plan a Messaging Strategy for the next 12-24 months that will coordinate the stories, topics, events, new releases, projects, and collaborations to strengthen and sharpen your brand and give it salience in the marketplace.

Full Disclosure
Because I also write about the breweries I've consulted with, it's important for you to know where there's a financial relationship. Being paid by breweries creates an unavoidable conflict of interest. My relationships with breweries exists entirely in the contract to execute a messaging plan. These breweries understand that there is no ongoing relationship, and I will continue to cover them independently. (They also understand that I may be doing similar work for their competitors.) As always, you as the reader will render the final judgment. Finally, the Widmer Brothers Brewery hired me to write a book-length biography of Kurt and Rob Widmer. I completed the book at the end of 2017 and Portland State University's Ooligan Press published it as The Widmer Way in March 2019.