Brew, Measure, Learn - The End of Brewdog & Friends

It's been a bumpy ride for BrewDog of late. I run a subscription box platform, so it's my professional duty to subscribe to the odd sub box. I looked forward to my monthly parcel of BrewDog & Friends, but this month my delivery was followed very quickly by an email announcing its closure.

I want to stress I have precisely zero knowledge of what, why, who and how this experiment went, though as an advocate of the #BuildMeasureLearn cycle I applaud the company for trying something.

Just a few days before it was all over, I was describing BrewDog & Friends as both one of the best subscription boxes to come from a national food or beverage brand, and as a prime example of how subscription boxes tend to suck. Great concept, lousy execution.

Here's my fear.

BrewDog built. BrewDog brewed. BrewDog measured. And BrewDog learned... 100% the wrong lesson.

I've already told you the lesson I draw. Lousy execution loses every time. 80,000 people (according to the webpage) tried, and that was a failure. Let's guess that if churn (customers cancelling their subscriptions) had been super low, this dog would be dancing still, not sneaking away with its tail between its legs.

Here are three educated guesses why this experiment failed (and why the wrong lessons may have been learned).

Reason 1: There's more to brewing than collecting ingredients

BrewDog & Friends had all the ingredients of a typical subscription box, mixed together and sent out with efficiency. There was a concept, there were beers that went first or only to subscribers, there was a little booklet to add some story to the mix, there was a bit of a "reveal" moment, there were emails. Sometimes there was even a little surprise gift (though whoever designed the box obviously didn't expect that to be a thing).

What there wasn't was a sense of experience. It wasn't social. It wasn't personal. It was, basically, meh. Water. Barley. Hops. Yeast. Those are just ingredients until you do the work of a master brewer.

Like so many people and companies before them, BrewDog spent all their time doing the easy bit, and never got round to doing something truly innovative - creating an experience that people would love, would celebrate, would share.

Reason 2: Special Source ≠ Special Sauce

The core concept of BrewDog & Friends was, let's give subscription customers something they can't get anywhere else. The "& Friends" was all about bringing other brewers with some of BrewDog's passion and quirkiness into the offer, alongside special editions from BrewDog itself.

Yes. There's something to that. But...

Of all the brands out there, BrewDog surely understand that novelty isn't enough, and often it's too much.

Yes, I want to make new discoveries. No, I don't want to keep making the discovery that there are some styles and tastes I can do very happily without.

BrewDog & Friends made no attempt to be my friend. They did precisely nothing to find out my tastes, my responses, my preferences. Every month I got what every other customer got. Which means that we were all offered the certainty of disappointment, because tastes differ. And those delightful discoveries opened no doors. I couldn't so much as say Yes, loved that one, can I add a few of those next month? I couldn't say, That one's not for me, so maybe skip anything similar for a month or two.

Reason 3: Where's the story for me to tell?

There's a simple test of value. It's this: If I see the money going out of my account, do I feel smart?

To be fair, many subscription box entrepreneurs get this wrong. But BrewDog isn't a side hustle, it's a brand with reach, with reputation, with ambition, with scale. Yet, as far as I can tell, nobody ever took the trouble to think about what beer-drinkers actually value, what interests them, what they want to talk about.

So all we were left with as a story was, basically, I spent more than I would have in a supermarket to buy a pick-and-mix of beers that someone else chose without me in mind.

So maybe I was the only consumer who liked the story I got to tell. I could say, I bought this because I'm excited about the path to the experience economy opened up by subscription boxes. And no, this one doesn't deliver on that promise.

Conclusions

I'm speculating, and I could be wrong about anything, about everything. I think BrewDog have learned that subscription boxes aren't a good fit for their business (which is what inept analysis of the wrong data would "reveal"). But maybe it was a roaring success. Maybe the sub box was just an excuse to get closer to some of the "Friends" and consumers were never in their thoughts at all.

But you can learn from the disappearing dog.

Suppose you attracted 80,000 paying customers. Suppose your acquisition costs were a bit too high, and your retention was a bit too low, what would you do? Give up? Of course you wouldn't. You made something. It's not good enough. But you could make it better.

Build-Measure-Learn is powerful because it's a loop. You build. You measure. You learn. And then you use those insights to rebuild.

Sometimes you'll make it a little better, sometimes a little worse. You keep the gains, and you jettison the losses, and you keep moving forward. Just like BrewDog didn't.

My lesson from BrewDog and Friends? Simple.

If you want to be a good dog, you need to be way, way more determinedly dogged.