Marketing and Position

Yesterday we had quite a busy day racking, doing some CIP improvements, training my new secret production technician, transferring beer and getting ready to bottle today. It wasn't until quite late I found out that BrewDog and CAMRA had fallen out.

Upon learning this HardknottAnn immediately insisted on commandeering my MacBook for the purposes of writing a blog.

Last night and this morning we got carried away with discussions on twitter regarding GBBF and how beers are selected. I touched on the subject last year as it happens, and it is interesting for me to look back at what beers were actually on. I'll admit to being surprised to see that Punk IPA was there. The fact that it was on the same bar as Cumbrian beer is a little baffling.

It may be that I have a few facts wrong about various specifics regarding GBBF, but despite that I maintain that there are interesting selection influences at play. It might well be that various officials can attempt to reassure that it is all fair and transparent. The impression I am left with is very different; There is a massive disparity between local breweries who appeal to local markets and those of us who are more successful further afield.

Besides all that, the fact that BrewDog will not be at GBBF is no great surprise to me. This was a win-win situation for them in many ways. If they got their beer there in KeyKeg it would have been a result, the fact that it eventually fell through is also a result. PR win again. I seem to remember several people, including me, forecasting that this would be what would happen.

It has been pointed out to me that BrewDog are no different to any other brewery in as much as they want to sell more beer. Spot on there, we all do. What we all have to work out is if CAMRA, and indeed cask beer, are important to us or if they are more useful in opposition.

I'm still working that one out, but it appears to me that the latter might be more successful if a brewer is looking for a gap in the market. Also, it could very well be a useful marketing and positional ploy to be quite public about the fact.

The image of beer - brand image

I should really be doing an update on our Saturday Kitchen attack and further considerations for a general attack on the media for not covering beer. It's been an interesting week that's for sure, and when an activity starts to raise a few questions about its appropriateness then you know it's starting to have an effect. There have been various discussions on twitter and blogs about the whole subject and I'm going to take stock in good time. Watch for a further post soon.

Meanwhile, I like to drill deeper into these things; Why is beer seen as such an unworthy subject for many of the major media productions? The answer to this I'm sure is complex and too much for my tiny brain. Still, I do have some ideas, and I'd like to explore them further.

My friends over at Pumpclip Parade did bemuse me slightly when it started; I still bought into the "well, it's just a laugh......." argument put forward in defence of childish puns, irritating alliteration, and bawdy Viz style jokes on pumpclips. The main ringleader of Pumpclip Parade, Jeff Pickthall, had a direct attack at me because of my amusement at Wychwood branding a short time after I started writing on this blog.

Despite that on-line poke at my good character, I have remained good friends with Jeff, and he has slowly whittled away at what has turned out to be a nerdy bias towards certain things¹, like for instance the best beer can only ever be served from a cask. Or for that matter, that micro-brewed beer is inherently better than that made in a bigger brewery.

What I am very interested in is how beer can be given better stature across a broader cross section of demographics and there are a lot of things that let beer down in that respect. Branding is just one of them. The branding and image of "Real Ale" in particular is suffering with alarming contemptibility. For this reason we have avoided using "Ale" as a descriptor for our beer and will shortly be engaging in some publicity that more overtly promotes our cask beer as anything but old fashioned and stuffy "Ale"

I'm sure this will cause some shouting about how we are anti CAMRA, which is not true. What we are is pro-beer. We want all beer to succeed, and for it to do so we have to recognise that there might be some things that don't advertise beer that well.

I'll leave you with something that did amuse me, but at the same time worries me. A pumpclip by the well respected Mordue brewery. "A'l Wheat Pet" - I did laugh, out loud too. But on reflection I thought it also localised silliness, which if contained within the geeky pubs I love over in the North East might do no harm. I do think this sort of thing does have a continual and indelible subliminal impact on quality food and drink writers, newspaper editors or broadcast producers alike.

This pumpclip stirred something in my brain. It started to irritate me, despite the NE accent and dialect being my favourite regional vocal sound. I tweeted the image for the attention of @Pumpclip parade as I thought, despite Mordue's good branding image, it was just on the wrong side of the line for the overall good of beer. I got a couple of replies suggesting that it was generally clever and amusing, suggesting perhaps I overreacted. An interesting debate to have, where does the line exist? After all, I used to like Goblins, especially if they mocked lager drinkers, but not now, partly because I've found that given the right lager, I drink it.

In summary, the wider world thinks beer is either mass produced lager for drunken hooligans or "Real Ale" of invariably poor quality, brewed by good people with the right intentions, but with little flair or imagination, doing things on a shoe string, in sheds, for old fashioned, penny pinching, poor joke loving, deliberately fashion snubbing, anti-commerce ageing hippies². Perhaps it is no wonder beer doesn't appear on the TV.

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¹He has failed to convince me that ketchup is a good accompaniment for double fried chips any more than anyone could convince me that shandy is a worthy beer cocktail, but there you go.

²and I realised, I probably fit into some of those descriptions too.

Branding

Some time ago I posed the question about what I should call my new brewery. As it happens we've been unable to find a brand name that I like better than Hardknott. Couple that with the fact that this name is already recognised it would seem that it will continue to be the name we will use.

Despite this we recognise the need for brand identity that will engage the drinker. As we intend to explore both the local cask market and the wider specialist bottled market the image we produce should be sympathetic to this broad audience. We are working with people to achieve some imagery that will hopefully manage to do this.

Dredgy has a post about bottle labels. I suspect I will go back to the comments on this post several times as we progress down the road of brand design. What I find interesting more than anything is that there is always some disagreement about what constitutes good or bad design. There is a wide range of branding from the ultra-traditional right through to the edgy in-your-face style of the more progressive people. All gain both praise and criticism from various quarters.

This puts me into a bit of a problem, and one that I believe stifles many small breweries. The problem is one of putting the brand image into the hands of somebody else who might not really understand the image that is being portrayed. How much to insist that a designer, who in turn assures that he knows what he is doing, should jolly well listen to what you are trying to tell him you want.

This does result in too many breweries designing their own pump clips, with various degrees of success. The worst designs make their way onto Pump Clip Parade, where Jeff Pickthall makes a concerted effort to shame offenders into reconsidering their style. Having said that, when the beer sells perfectly well without professional input into the process then there can often be a demand to consider more stainless steel by way of investment rather then being concerned about generating a market that can't be supplied anyway.

We have grasped the nettle and have engaged a small studio to come up with some imagery that will eventually translate into a logo, bottle labels and pump clips. The first iteration was promising and the following conversations encouraging. Let's hope that the second iteration, due to me early in the week, will fire up my imagination; after-all, my first new beer is in the fermenter as we speak and it'll need a new pump clip ready for it's launch at some new outlets.

Despite my continuing concern about the ability of global resources to match our desire for a growing economy; for my modest brewery to be viable I do need to generate new markets so that I can make a little bit more money to enable me to buy some more stainless steel. So far, things are more-or-less going to plan.