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Your brand identity and packaging are crucial for standing out, building equity longterm and driving sales. But these are just one part of your brewery’s branding and marketing puzzle.

Once you’ve got these components squared away, you have to continually build your brand(s). This includes internally with your customer service and behind the scenes relationships (with distributors and retailers), and branches out from there to your social media presence, point of sale (POS) materials, merch, environmental design and more traditional channels like out of home.

A big part of all of this — of understanding what stories you should be telling — is defining your Key Messaging / Communication Pillars.

That’s a churched up way of saying which big ideas you want people to associate with your brewery’s brand.

– What do you want people to think about when they hear your brewery’s name?

– How do you want them to describe your brand to their friends?

– What big ideas and differentiators do you want them to remember (when it comes time to buy some beer)?

We’ve studied this topic for years and have often found convoluted approaches for framing these messaging and brand personality out in the wild — needlessly complicated prompts, quizzes and flow charts, all designed to help you get to the bottom of, er, you. 

In today’s BBT issue, I’m going to give you a few simple tools we (CODO) use to help our clients frame their Key Messaging Pillars. 

Let’s get to it. 

(Above): Key Messaging Pillars for Birdsmouth Beer Co.

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Part 1: How to frame your Key Messaging Pillars 

One of our favorite ways of sussing out compelling ideas in our work is to have everyone on your team answer this question: 

If you could go into someone’s head and put 3 or 4 big messages about your brand in there, what would those be?

(That’s it. Really.)

Here are some examples we’ve seen in our project work:

– We are one of Canada’s original craft breweries. 
– We are the quintessential Upper Peninsula beer brand.
– We source all of our ingredients directly from Germany. 
– We are one of San Diego’s most beloved breweries. 
– We are your go-to fridge stocker beer.
– We are the no-frills Midwest cocktail company. 
– We use tech to grow the best cannabis in Michigan.
– We are Oregon’s original craft brewery. 
– We are the iconic Wisconsin Supper Club. 
– We deliver wild Alaskan seafood directly to your door.
– We make cider from apples grown on our family farm. 
– We build our own whiskey barrels in-house at our cooperage.

Your first few attempts will likely result in dozens of ideas. Work with your team (or branding partner) to winnow this down to 3 or 4 big ideas. Why 3 to 4? Because people have limited bandwidth, so less, but better, is the goal here. 

How can you kill-or-combine your way to getting this list leaner?


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Move beyond table stakes 

It’s important to challenge yourself to think beyond table stakes when revising these messages. 

We see this come up constantly when defining brand values and Key Communication Pillars. These are the sorts of ideas that, while maybe true for your brewery, can also be claimed by (a lot of) your competition. A few examples:

– “We make high quality beer.”
– “We only use the best ingredients.”
– “We’re community-focused.”
– “We’re environmentally responsible.”

(I’m still waiting for the day a brewery hangs its hat on brewing objectively flawed beer for people they don’t like. “Flawed beer for flawed people” … is this anything?)

Again, these things (high quality beer) are likely true and should guide how you act behind closed doors. But we’re looking for true and compelling differentiators around which you can build your brand.

Once you have a grasp on these big ideas, you can start to frame out what brand personality and voice best fits your brand.

(Above): Key Communication Pillars, brand personality cues and Brand Essence write-ups for Ghost Note Brewing and Plain Spoke Cocktails.

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Part 2: How to define your Brand Personality 

Your brand personality is exactly as it sounds — this is how you carry yourself, both online and in the real world. 

This manifests most immediately in your day-to-day social media posts and in your own/on-premise customer interactions. From there, it spreads to all of your downstream touchpoints.

We help our clients sketch this out with another prompt. Ask everyone on your team:

If your brand were a person, what sort of personality traits would it have?

Here are some examples we’ve seen in our work: 

– We are wry and clever.
– We are blue collar. 
– We are experimental. 
– We are dedicated craftsmen. 
– We are outdoorsy trout bums. 
– We’re good hearted stoners.  
– We are worldly travelers. 
– We are foodies.
– We are shade tree mechanics. 
– We are busy suburban dads. 
– We are twenty something dog moms. 
– We are natural tinkerers. 

A quick process note here. In our earlier years, we phrased this question as: If your brand were a celebrity, who would it be? But we ended up dropping the celebrity qualifier because it would, like clockwork, lead to one of two possible answers. 

1. Some derivation of, “Oh, I don’t watch tv, so I have no idea.”

2. Or, someone would answer with one of the same 7 or 8 people. (It’s wild, we’ve heard this collection of people on several dozen brewery branding projects). This list included:

Bill Murray, Matthew McConaughey, Ryan Reynolds, Paul Rudd, Robert Downey Jr. (sometimes Iron Man), Ron Swanson (not Nick Offerman), Woody Harrelson and sometimes Tom Hanks

(Putting this out into the universe: If any brewery out there sees themselves as Ian McShane in Deadwood, hit me up. We should talk.)
 

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You’ll want to go through the same process of editing here as when you frame your Key Communication Pillars. And we aim to get this list down to six to eight personality traits. 

This amount gives you a cohesive foundation, but also enough room to flex and/or code switch as the channel or situation calls for. 

(Above): Brand personality and Essence write-ups for two taproom-focused breweries and a boutique hotel in New Glarus, Wisconsin. (Stay tuned for case studies on all these projects.)

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A few other questions you can tack on to this brand-as-a-person line of thinking include: 

– Is this a man or a woman? 
– How old are they? 
– What does this person do for a living?
– Do they have a sense of humor?
– What are they into? (What are they obnoxiously passionate about?)
– What is their biggest strength / weakness? 
– What kind of shoes do they wear? 
– What is their biggest pet peeve? 
– Who is their favorite band?

Note: We’ve never focused on Brand Archetypes in our Brand Strategy process, though that’s not an indictment on that approach. We’ve just found that defining your brand voice and personality by humanizing your brand in other ways to be a clear path of arriving at those same ideas.

Cody and I discussed this a while back on the BBT Podcast. That conversation start’s around the 17 minute mark, if you’d like to listen in: 

> Are Brand Archetypes Complete Bullshit?

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I’ll leave this here because at this point, we start to veer into brand voice. And this topic deserves its own issue down the line. 

So let’s wrap this up.

(Above): Key Communication Pillars for Prost Brewing.

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Wrapping up

Building a strong, differentiated brand identity mission critical for the longterm health and success of your brewery.

But remember, your brand is more than just your logo or packaging — it's the culmination of all the experiences people have with your brand and your reputation in their minds. A big part of shaping this story lies in defining your Key Messaging Pillars and crafting your overall narrative so people understand who you are, what you stand for, and why your brewery should be their go-to.

If you give this process the time it deserves, you’ll create a strong foundation for all of your marketing efforts and set yourself up to create life long fans.