Hi, there. 

So far, we’ve had 227 (!!!) BBT readers take our year end survey. (Please take it yourself if you haven’t already.)

One of our questions on the survey is an AMA section for topics you’d like to see us cover on BBT. We’ve gotten so many great responses to this that I wanted to pull it out and put it right here up top.

Please respond to this email and let me know if you have any questions or topics you’d like us to discuss either here on the newsletter or on the podcast next year. (Or if you'd like to discuss working together in 2025.)

Okay, let’s get to it.

(I’m not sure if you’re going to read this or not.)

Well done if you’re already in year end break mode.

I hope you drink 10,000 beers have a lovely time with your family and friends. 

But if you’re still here and would like to read along, I want to talk with you about something that will help you make better branding decisions throughout 2025 — your Brand Architecture.
 

What’s your 2025 look like? 

If you're planning to:

– Launch a new brand, beer or beyond.
– Launch a new beer series.
– Open a new location.
– Acquire another brand or business.
– Sell one of your brands.
– Scale one of your brands via the Sub Brand Ladder.
– Line Extend one of your existing products.
– Rationalize your portfolio.
– Create a Co-branded product.
– Form a hospitality group. 
– Refresh your brewery's brand and packaging. 

If you are doing any of this, then you’ll be working through Brand Architecture problems. 

And if you don’t pause long enough to work through what each of these moves means to your overall model, you can end up with a tangled mess that your customers — and even your own team — may not understand. 

(Above): Brand Architecture Map for a brewery we're rebranding in Michigan. Their portfolio spans beer, spirits, cider, seltzer, RTDs, NA products and multiple locations. This map helped them think through where their parent brand should (and more importantly, should't) pull through on all of these products. 

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Why Brand Architecture is important 

If you’ve never mapped out your Brand Architecture, you’re in luck — it’s not that hard to do. And even if your Map isn’t as clean, or put together as CODO could build, having one is better than not. 

Why? Because a Brand Architecture Map will help you: 

– Understand how all of your brands, current and future, add up to build a more resilient business.
– Help you make faster decisions when bringing new products to market.
– Help you identify opportunities for new brand development and Line Extensions.
– Spot opportunities to streamline communication (and budget) efforts. 
– Future proof your new product development pipeline. 
– Protect your parent brand from cannibalization and dilution. 
– Present a more compelling, and cohesive, narrative to your fans.

Okay, you get the point. This is an important business function.

So let’s walk through how to get this out onto paper. 

Brand Architecture Mapping

Here's a quick rundown on how to map out your Brand Architecture. 

You can jump straight in the computer here, but at CODO, we like to get on a white board or a blank page — somewhere you can write big and quickly make edits. Your first few rounds of this will be messy, but that’s okay. This is all iterative. 

Step 1: List everything out 

Start by listing out all of your products. Don’t worry about the form this takes yet (e.g. a chart), just a list of product names / lines is fine for now.

– Flagship beers
– Seasonal beers
– Specialty beers 
– Rotator beer series
– And on and on — however you organize your beer portfolio.

Next, do the same thing for any Fourth Category brands you have in the mix, e.g. seltzer, RTDs, Hop Water, spirits, cannabis, hard cider.

Next, list out all of your locations, Co-branded products, special events, community partnerships and anything else that represents either an important touchpoint with your customers or a revenue stream (e.g. merch, catering, event center). 

And finally, list out any upcoming products you’ve been thinking about — new beers, NA products, different categories, locations, acquisitions, etc. 

Step 2: Group your products

Now that you have all of your products listed out, you can start to intuitively group them in a chart form. 

The form your map takes will shift based on how you organize your portfolio and brands. A Branded House portfolio might fit on one page whereas a House of Brands, or even a Branded House with a few Sub Brands in the mix might span several pages. 

That’s okay. There’s no right or wrong here. (And again, this is all iterative.)

This will be intuitive, but to get you started, think big 30k foot view categories. 

– Beer (under which you might have flagships, an IPA series, seasonals, barrel aged releases, variety packs, contract beers, etc.)
– Seltzer (individual SKUs, variety pack, etc.)
– Sprits (gin, bourbon, RTDs, NA, etc.)
– Hop Water (cores, variety pack, etc.)
– Non Alcoholic (NA Beer, Hop Water)
– Venues / Hospitality (Taprooms, Brewpubs, Catering, Event Center)
 

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We put together a template doc to help you lay this all out. If you have Illustrator, you can drop this PDF right in there and edit as needed. If not, you can print this out and go to town with a marker as well.

(Above): To reiterate an earlier point, this template probably won’t work *perfectly* for what you’ve got going on. Our goal is to give you a head start for mapping this all out.

Chop this up and make it your own, or, create your own map entirely. 

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Step 3: Specify an overarching model

Unless you know your overarching Brand Architecture model from the jump, we usually save this step for last because all the work you did in steps 1 and 2 (along with your broader Brand Strategy) will dictate the correct model(s). 

Your choices here are: Branded House, House of Brands or a Hybrid Brand. 

For what it’s worth, we rarely see our clients fall neatly into one of these buckets. Even a smaller brewery that might produce a few thousand bbl per year can have a fairly complex Architecture map (with fourth category brands, Sub Brands, Line Extensions and multiple locations).

But again, that’s why this is valuable. This process helps you wrangle everything and spot areas for improvement. 

Hit the links above to read about each of these systems and pick which ever one seems closest to what you’re trying to build. 

(Above): Read The Beyond Beer Handbook for a full rundown on this entire subject.

And if you take our year end survey, you can grab your own copy (or copies for your team) for 50% off — only a few days left.

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Wrapping up 

And I’ll leave you to it. There’s more that goes into this process, but we’ll circle back to it later in 2025 with a round 2. Or, if we sell enough copies of The Beyond Beer Handbook, we’ll include a full step-by-step guide, complete with multiple templates, in the second edition. 

For now, give this a spin and see how it shapes up. (And let me know how it goes.)

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Real quick before we break, I wanted to thank you for reading BBT this year.

This newsletter started out as an experiment — an insider report we only shared with clients — and quickly grew to become much larger that that.

After client work, BBT is one of my favorite things we work on.

CODO has a lot of exciting things on deck headed into 2025 — long overdue case studies, big speaking engagements, purchasing a building, hosting CBC in Indianapolis, our annual trends report, a revamped podcast + a brand refresh.

I’m glad you’re here following along. 

Shoot me an email if you'd like to discuss working together next year, and otherwise, have a lovely break. 

– Isaac / CODO