BrewDog - snarling and biting to success

It’s first beer was 55% alcohol an stuffed into dead animal as a marketing stunt and called “The End of History”. Derided by many but admired by the target audience this is their amazing success story of brand building with no money and lots of creativity.

Among other antics BrewDog also created the following marketing stunts:

• driven a tank down Camden High Street;
• named a beer after the heroin-and-cocaine cocktail that killed River Phoenix and John Belushi;
• projected naked images of its two founders onto the Houses of Parliament;
• brewed beer at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean;
• dropped stuffed cats from a helicopter onto the City of London;
• employed a dwarf to petition parliament for the introduction of a two-thirds pint glass;
• and released, for the royal wedding of 2011, a beer containing so-called natural aphrodisiacs such as “herbal Viagra”, chocolate and horny goat weed, which it called Royal Virility Performance

Brand straplines for BrewDog have included:

- “Ride toward anarchy”

-“In hops we trust,”

-“This is the revolution – so help me Dog,”

-“Changing the world, one glass at a time.”

-“We bleed craft beer,”

-“We blow shit up”

-“Without us, we are nothing. We are BrewDog.”

For the past four years, this has been the fastest-growing food and drinks producer in Britain, and the fastest-growing bar and restaurant operator. Since it was founded, less than nine years ago, BrewDog has grown from two employees to 580. It has opened 38 highly successful bars – bare brick, exposed ironwork, spray-painted graffiti – across the UK, from Aberdeen to Bristol and Manchester to Clerkenwell.

There are 15 more around the world: Helsinki, Tokyo, Rome, São Paulo. Last year, the company’s sales grew by more than 50%, to £45m – more than half booked abroad – BrewDog now exports to more than 50 countries. Solidly profitable every year since its inception, BrewDog’s trading profit hit £5.5m in 2015.

James Watt and Martin Dickie are the entrepreneurs who have the brains and brawn behind the brand and the product. They launched their upstart brewery in 2007, both aged 24, which they had made in a local ice-cream factory by repeatedly chilling the brew and skimming off the ice to separate the water and concentrate the alcohol (which freezes at a lower temperature).

Interestingly they believe that there is a gap in the market because the big brewers have flooded the market with light, fizzy beers which have had millions of dollars of marketing money spent on them. Campaigns like the Real Ale Campaign and various Craft Beer Campaigns (which BrewDog is) are but a toe in the water by comparison in the fight for the beer drinkers wallets. They believe that people want more even though the evidence would appear to be the contrary until they came along and disrupted the market.

They also believe in marketing other people’s beers who share the same philosophy, effectively becoming brand/sector ambassadors for the entire category of imaginative Craft Beers. Admirable but a sure way to not to maximise sales. They created what is currently the strongest can in the world a  Vietnamese coffee edition which comes in at 12.7%.

The founders seem particularly disdainful of American beers and marketing naming Budweiser and Coors as the main culprits. Both are attacked mercilessly on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight Show. Oliver would certainly have fun with 1980’s version of adverts from the same brands that BrewDog say were an inspiration to create something more substantial. 

Ironically this mainstream assault has led to various small brewers in both the UK and US creating niche beers. BrewDog continues that tradition and heritage in less refined more aggressive way aiming at a much younger, more professional audience.

Created in garages or kitchens or spare rooms, brands like Magic Rock, Camden Town, Kernel, Beavertown, BrewDog – are among some 1,420 breweries now operating in the UK alone, more than 100 times as many as there were in 1970. There is clearly a desire for this tupe of beer. Many have gone down the edgy route with exotic ingredients  such as chilli, honey, chocolate, hemp, mustard plus hip designs, guerrilla marketing and social media marketing are added into the successful mix.

After several goes at creating their signature first beer Punk IPA (they wanted to disrupt beer like punk had disrupted music) and hauling it around stores in Scotland trying to find buyers their luck changed. BrewDog won its first major contract – a weekly order to supply Tesco. BrewDog had entered four of their beers in a competition run by the supermarket chain: the prize for the winner was a place on the shelves in every one of its UK stores. In a blind tasting by a panel of people who knew something about beer BrewDog came first, second, third and fourth. The taste was everything.

Customers undoubtedly buy into the hype. Those that get offended by it or think it’s irrelevant to the drink are missing the point. They’re not the target audience and BrewDog would not be the punk brand of beers if it didn’t engage in stunts/social media and guerilla marketing, they would just be another beer trying to get cut through. Whether you believe in the hype or not it’s worked and their advocates buy into them and spread the word because of it.

BrewDog has set itself up to embody a strong brand identity: young, hip, rebellious, excellent quality, distinctive tastes, battling a mediocre status quo. In a market which is very competitive and many beers taste similar hype, social media and content marketing are critically important.

Where you don’t have millions to spend, creative and imaginative hype is all you have. Some argue that it’s only in the hype that there is an absolute, quantum gap between BrewDog and the rest. Their entire existence, basically, is marketing some would say and content marketing amplified through social media I would say.

Other beers have customers, but BrewDog has passionate fans. In 2010, the company leveraged the intensity of its supporters into a new financing model, raising crowdfunded capital without having to bend itself to financial targets set by banks or investors. 40,000 people who, in exchange for discounts in BrewDog’s bars and online shop and an invite to the annual AGM – a beer and music-fuelled knees-up attended last year by 6,000 shareholders – have spent at least £95 on two BrewDog shares in the company’s record-breaking Equity for Punks crowdfunding scheme. (The fourth round, in 2015, raised £5m in 20 days, which was what prompted Watt and Dickie to drop those stuffed “fat cats” onto the City.)

They raised £10m of new cash in 2016. It is also opening a whisky and vodka distillery and building a major new production facility in the US – its biggest export market, where Watt and Dickie are the stars of an extreme-brewing reality show called Brew Dogs, which follows the pair around America as they visit craft breweries and make beer using outlandish ingredients ranging from a lobster to the world’s hottest chilli.

Not forgetting their roots BrewDog also spend SGD$400k on start up brewers each year, effectively becoming VC’s in this niche area.

They have undoubtedly upset many people with their stunts/marketing antics but they would say that the ends justified the means. Even upsetting LGBT groups when last summer, it released No Label, the world’s first “non-binary, transgender beer” – half-lager, half-ale and brewed with hops that had “undergone a gender change”. Profits went to charities working with LGBT people, some of whom did not fully appreciate their struggle being used to sell beer.

At other times they have upset the advertising standard authority of the UK for saying in a blog about one of their products that it “let the sharp bitter finish rip you straight to the tits”, but then that’s following the how to create a rebel brand and create PR handbook well worn by brands like Paddy Power (and Donald Trump!) for example.

BrewDog have been asked to remove the word “aggressive” from their design. They did only after generating a fantastic amount of PR first.

Soon after they launched SpeedBall (the name for a combination of heroin and cocaine), gleefully labelling it a “class A strong ale” with “a vicious cocktail of active ingredients”. It was banned almost immediately, generating more publicity. BrewDog renamed it Dogma.

BrewDog’s 18% Tokyo Imperial Stout was also banned, amid shock-horror headlines about its strength – a single bottle, one tabloid noted, “contains six units of alcohol, the equivalent of THREE PINTS of normal strength beer”. In response, the company unveiled a 1.1% ale called Nanny State.

Another of it’s beers was banned, a west coast-style pale ale called Dead Pony Club used the phrase “Drink fast, live fast, sleep late and rip it up down empty streets.”

At one awards the ceremony where BrewDog were due to collect an award, an unidentified staffer from Diageo, the international drinks giant that sponsored the event, allegedly informed the organisers that no further backing would be forthcoming if the award went to BrewDog.

BrewDog were instantly removed from the winners list and the company that was declared the winner declined to collect the award after it saw BrewDog’s name already engraved on the trophy! BrewDog  took full advantage and got to denounce Diageo as “a band of dishonest hammerheads and dumb-ass corporate freaks”, and to affirm that the incident showed “just how scared and jealous the gimp-like establishment are of the craft beer revolutionaries”. Within a few hours, its Twitter hashtag #andthewinnerisnot was trending around the world.

In Watt’s book Business for Punks the advice on marketing is revealing. Since these days you “cannot control your brand, only influence people’s perceptions of it”, Watt writes, “in today’s interconnected digital world, full of savvy Gen Y consumers, every single thing you do is marketing.” Not having a budget for it is “not a problem. In fact, it’s a massive advantage.”

Traditional advertising is dead, and in any case unaffordable for a small company (“You’d be better off blow-torching your cash,” says Watt). Mass media is “as ignorant as it is irrelevant”. New media is where it’s at. People, Watt writes, “want genuine, they want quality, they want passionate, they want real, they want integrity”.

In short, he argues, in the modern era, “The only way to build a brand is to live that brand. You have to live the values and the mission, then let the customer decide.” This is, I would argue, essential for every niche brand, b2b or b2c. That’s why platforms like LinkedIn and YouTube are so important to your marketing and why you and your staff are so important to its success.

The US’s largest brewers SABMiller and Anheuser-Busch InBev have both seen the value of craft beers like BrewDog and been buying them up. The latter bought Camden Town Brewery, sold by BrewDog in their bars who promptly dropped them. In the BrewDog bar in Camden BrewDog posted a video on Twitter of a barman pulling the listing for Camden Town lager off its beer list and tossing the letters on the floor.

“We will not,” Watt declared, “sell beers made by AB InBev. And BrewDog will never sell out to some monolithic drinks giant. Not ever. Mega corporations care about costs, market share, dividends, valuations. They don’t care about beer.”

I was inspired to blog about the BrewDog brand after reading a fasntastic overview of the brand in the Guardian and add my marketing slant on to their much longer article which you can read here.