Recently, the Russell Brewing Company signed a five year sponsorship deal with the Abbotsford Entertainment and Sports Centre, home of the Abbotsford Heat. You can read the full release here. This is not a particularly unusual occurrence but it got me thinking about how many breweries miss opportunities like this. If you’ve read the truecask.com About page, then you know my background is marketing, and although I have designs to do some consulting work for the industry, I also know that withholding information is not going to help me achieve the mission objective I state on that exact same About page. As a result I have decided to post my marketing musings for those in the industry to digest, refute, and possibly execute.

No Opportunity Is Too Small

As the Russell Brewing announcement sparked this post, I figure I will start with addressing the fact that no opportunity is too small. As we know, many larger companies battle to be able to sponsor events like the NHL, NFL, MLB, NBA, UFC, etc. Microbreweries tend to avoid things like this as the financial investment is far too great. Although I would never encourage a brewery to go out and try to sponsor something above their heads, there is something to be said about having the ability to align yourself with a similarly identified brand. Back in late August I posted about the Gastown Cask Carouse. This event was not exactly enormous, however the ripple effect that came out of it for R&B Brewing is something that can not be underestimated. For the cost of four casks (you brewers know thats not a lot of money), they managed to get media coverage from that event, and the ability to directly market to the eighty hardcore beer evangelists who attended. Initially you might consider return on investment to be not overly favourable; however, once the ripples begin to spread you might be surprised. I know about five of the people who attended that event. Of those five, a couple of them have now made R&B their go-to beer and another ordered a cask for his birthday party. When you start to consider that it’s quite possible the other 75 people who attended did similar things, the ROI starts to make sense. In the end, the lesson of the day is never underestimate the power of directly touching your consumer or you will miss a fantastic opportunity.

Ideas Of Every Size

It’s important to note that this idea is scalable. Not every brewery needs to strike deals with event centers like the one Russell Brewing did with the Abbotsford Entertainment and Sports Centre. Nor does every brewery need to try and get their beer in every cask event possible, as there is something to be said for scarcity creating demand. With this in mind I will give you a couple ideas that pertain to this topic, for three different sizes of micro-brewery.

Small Micro-brewers: In this case the brewery is more than likely fairly new to market or has yet to break through that barrier of being local. Money may not be abundant, but much like with R&B Brewing, the product can replace a financial investment in the form of cash. Art shows, farmers markets, and other places macro-brewers might avoid would be great places to look for opportunities.

Small to Medium Micro-brewers: These are those breweries that have crossed that aforementioned threshold and have a little more capital to work with when it comes to marketing. Supporting things such as a beer organization like CAMRA, a larger event that aligns with your branding, or hosting your own event are all viable options at this point. A good example of this is when the New Belgium Brewing Company puts on a series of events called the Tour De Fat that align with their whole bike / beer branding. Now in this case many breweries may not have the capital to go that big, but I bet if they have similar branding they could sponsor an event like critical mass instead.

Medium to Large Micro-brewers: If a brewery has reached this point, it is probably one of the better known micro-breweries in a given region. Picture something along the lines of Southern Tier, Deschutes, or even Brooklyn. At this point these companies can touch their consumers in a similar that way Russell has. In fact, Russell has done this before, partnering with the BC Lions CFL team in order to create Lions Lager, a co-promoted brew that has quickly become the go-to game day brew for British Columbia football fans. Mirroring this would be ideal for some breweries that are looking to firmly establish themselves as the region’s most well known micro-brewer. It doesn’t just have to be tier two sports teams, but the target market of both sports franchises and micro-breweries tends to align nicely.

This is just a small taste of what a micro-brewery can do in order to compete with the big boys without having the budget to do so. I hope to make this an ongoing series of posts and look forward to being able to help the industry as a whole. This week the ideas were a little more traditional, but you can trust I will get into a lot of the social media marketing stuff I know you all want a bit more information on. If you have any questions, comments, or arguments you want to send my way, please feel free to contact me at any time; all my info is on the menu on the right hand column.

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