Morning. 

This week (August 15, to be exact) marks the 2 year publishing anniversary of CODO’s latest book, The Beyond Beer Handbook.

As a refresher, this book captures everything Cody and I learned from 2.5 years of client work and research into Brand Architecture. Part book, part quiz, and part choose-your-own-adventure-style novel, this is a purpose-built tool for helping you expand your brewery’s portfolio and build a more resilient business.

Here are some fun metrics:

– We’ve sold ~500 copies. These aren't NYT best seller numbers, but I’m confident this is the best selling book on beer and beverage Brand Architecture in the world. It helps that this is the only beer and beverage Brand Architecture book in the world.

– Our Beverage Extension Assessment Tool (B.E.A.T.) has been downloaded 4,300+ times.

– The BBH site itself has welcomed more than 42,000 unique visitors. (This sounds impressive until you revisit that sales figure.)

– And Cody and I have traveled all over the country to speak about Brand Architecture at 7 brewers conferences, culminating with a presentation at CBC this past April in Las Vegas.

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These numbers are fun to share, but that’s not my aim here. Instead, I want to talk about what we got wrong in The Beyond Beer Handbook (BBH). Or at least, what we’ve learned in the 2 years since publishing BBH.

Here are a handful of things I wish we’d known and/or done differently back when we were writing this book back in 2021.

1

We should have expanded the book’s scope

When we wrote The Beyond Beer Handbook, CODO had spent 2.5 years helping breweries launch beyond beer / fourth category beverages (seltzers, RTDs, distilleries, coffees, etc.). We handled this work every single day over that period. 

So this was the lens through which we wrote The Beyond Beer Handbook: How can your brewery launch a new XYZ? 

It was very product based.

If I had it to do over again, I would change the book’s title and slightly shift the focus to be less about launching a specific product, and be more about how you can use Brand Architecture to work through a variety of more challenging business decisions. 

We still help breweries position, brand and launch new products today. But more often than not, we’re hired to solve deeper problems than how to position a new beyond beer brand.

Here are a handful of problems we’ve helped clients navigate over the last year:

– Our brewery just purchased another brewery. We want to keep a few of their core brands, but aren’t sure how to (or how not to) position these within our portfolio.

– We just acquired another brewery primarily for their taproom. Should we keep their brand in place and run this as a bar, or bring it under our brewery’s brand, or rebrand it entirely, or…? 

– We’ve built a healthy portfolio of brands (House of Brands). When should our corporate brand be publicly-visible? When does this become necessary and/or advantageous?

– We want to launch a light beer brand, but aren’t sure if it makes sense to tie it to our brewery’s parent brand. 

– We’re getting into the cannabis industry and aren’t sure how much separation we should put between our parent brand and this new line.

– Our Legacy Brewery has always had a monolithic Branded House model (e.g. XYZ Brewing Pale Ale, XYZ Brewing Pilsner). We’re considering introducing fanciful names as a first step toward building a few Sub Brands but still aren’t sure if this is the right move. 

– Our best selling Hazy IPA is an insane growth engine. We’ve got a few ideas for Line Extensions but are terrified that we’ll kill our golden goose. How can we safely extend this brand?

– We’ve been approached by someone who wants to invest in one of our core brands. We’re open to this idea but aren’t sure how to approach this from a branding perspective.

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I could keep going here, but you get my point. 

Brand Architecture is a framework for growing your business, and I think our laser focus on using it as a tool for launching fourth category products in BBH sells its value short. 

(Above): Our work with Fernson Brewing is a good example of a brewery shifting away from a Monolithic Brand House and embracing Sub Brands. 

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2

We should have spent more time explaining how your brewery can (and should) develop a Brand Architecture Map 

A Brand Architecture Map is a 30k foot view of all the brands, products and services your brewery offers. 

This can help you intuitively group specific products into lines, retire or shift other brands, and identify new extension target category opportunities. It also helps you call out how specific brands should look and feel, how they’re merchandised, how they're positioned and how they rise above category canon.

We didn't spend enough time on this in BBH, and I can’t for the life of me understand how this happened. 

(Let’s just blame Cody on this one.)

3

Brand Architecture is an invaluable tool for future proofing your portfolio 

Another compelling reason to build a Brand Architecture Map is that it can guide your new product development (NPD) and innovation pipeline over the coming years. 

We first heard this idea when rebranding Good George Brewing out of New Zealand. 

Now, this isn’t revelatory — this is how Brand Architecture has been used for years in CPG branding. But CODO is seeing more dedicated engagements where we’re helping breweries get a lay of the land as far as their current portfolio sits as a means of mapping out other segments and categories a brewery can explore. Or to our bullet list from above, how you can roll a potential acquisition into the fold, how you can spin out and scale a Sub Brand, where it could make sense to co-brand, or line extend, etc. 

This shrinks the timeline it takes to go from initial idea to product launch because you’ve already done the leg work on which categories make sense to explore and how your brewery might release (name, brand and position) a new product in that segment, should you decide to do so. 

This idea wasn’t an oversight from when we wrote BBH. It was just something we hadn’t run into in our project work up to that point. 

(Above): We developed a comprehensive Brand Architecture Map for New Zealand's Good George Brewing specifically to help map out their future NPD work. Read more about this rebrand here.

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4

Sub / Endorsed Brands are a clutch tool for safely expanding your brewery’s brand 

An important part of our thesis in BBH was that literature on Brand Architecture tends to fall into one of two camps. 

The first camp presents Brand Architecture as a simple binary decision (e.g. you’re either a Branded House or a House of Brands. Done. Go to market!). 

The second camp is geared more toward multinational conglomerate portfolio strategy (e.g. how should Unilever release a new shampoo that won’t compete with its 12 other shampoo brands?). This is the type of overly-complicated stuff that gets MBAs excited — verticals, creating divisions, determining diversified vs. focused-value propositions, intrinsic vs. extrinsic benefits, co-drivers, token endorsements, shadow drivers (oooh, mysterious), varying levels of brand equity and so forth. It is cumbersome and overly-complicated. 

But between these two poles — overly-simple, and overly-complex — lies a nuanced set of strategies you can use to launch any new brand.  

Sub / Endorsed Brands, in particular, have a lot of utility in CPG brand building, and this is why you’re seeing so much of this in beer branding and portfolio moves today. 

The thing we left out of BBH was how to actually build a Sub Brand. (Here again, this wasn’t so much an omission as it was Cody and I not having enough experience on this front in those early days.)

We remedied this by putting out our Sub Brand Summer series last year. This series introduced our “Sub Brand Ladder” concept which outlines how can your brewery go from initial idea to building a platform and scaling a Sub Brand to the point where it becomes its own living breathing brand, entirely separate from your parent brand.

Here are those links in case you want a refresher:

– Part 1: Sub Brands: So hot right now  +  Podcast

– Part 2: Sub Brands vs. Endorsed Brands  +  Podcast 

– Part 3: How to scale the Sub Brand Ladder  +  Podcast 

We’re wrapping up several great projects on this front and plan to share case studies over the coming year, so stay tuned for more on this topic if you’re interested. 

5 

We didn’t spend enough time on the House of Brands / Hybrid Brand models 

When we wrote BBH, we mostly saw the House of Brands model used amongst larger beer and Bev Alc groups. e.g. ABI, Boston Beer Company, Artisanal Brewing Ventures, Diageo, etc.

This dynamic changed almost overnight as we began seeing our smaller brewery clients create joint ventures (JVs), acquire other breweries and brands, spin out and grow Sub Brands, launch new standalone brands and in many cases, become (accidental) Hospitality Groups. 

So a House of Brands architecture is not limited to huge (100M+ revenue) concerns only. 

And building on this, we first introduced the Hybrid Brand concept (which is every bit as nuanced as a Brand Extension, Endorsed Brand, or any other Brand Architecture tool) at the end of BBH. It’s actually in the concluding chapter.

As a refresher, a Hybrid Brand model is basically the acknowledgement that over time, your brewery will naturally end up using a variety of Brand Architecture models in concert. So there’s no clean one-and-done system here.

And to introduce this concept in the last few pages of the book and then walk away was shortsighted. (Again, I blame Cody.)

Like a lot of the things we’ve discussed here, this concept is more relevant to breweries today than it was when we published BBH, and we're just now learning this.

Over the coming years, I see almost every brewery in the country employing a Hybrid Brand Architecture model as their business organically ebbs and flows into beer and beyond.

We’ll put out more content on this idea, including a fun case study, early next year. 

(Above): We helped Virginia Beer Co. build the Cold Drinking Beer brand specifically to travel to further afield markets where their parent brand might not have as much traction.

Read about this entire process here.

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Wrapping up

There are several other small things we’ve learned over the last few years of project work, but this list captures all the big ticket items. 

And I suspect that I could write another issue like this 2 years from today. Or, if we sell a few hundred more books (here's your code!), maybe we'll put out an expanded second edition. 

Either way, Brand Architecture is a fascinating subject, and I believe any brewery who’s aspiring to grow their business should read up on it.

For some actionable takeaways, here are a few things your team could think about as we head into the end of the year. 

1. Read BBH. I know we just spent an entire issue telling you about what we got wrong or omitted from the book, but it is still a perfect foundational read on Brand Architecture.

2. Create a Brand Architecture map for your brewery and revisit it annually. This will help you understand where your brand(s) sit today as well as other categories you could explore in the coming years.

3. The 7th person to email me with the subject line “Doppelbock” wins a free copy of The Beyond Beer Handbook.

4. I want you to continually fight for, and defend, your parent brand. It’s fun to launch new products, and locations and extensions to grow your business. But it’s also easy to dilute and undermine your core positioning if you’re not careful. 

Read up on Brand Architecture and grow your brand, but make sure you’re protecting your parent brand along the way.