Hi, there.

Today, I want to talk about Endorsed Brands.

This is an imminently useful strategy for launching new brands when you, A) want the brand to stand more or less on its own, while B) still maintaining some connection with your parent brand.

We advise our clients to go this route regularly both with new beer brands and when launching Fourth Category products. 

And the idea for this issue actually came from a current project where we’re helping a brewery release an RTD brand. Our client agreed that an Endorsement would work well, but wasn’t sure how much of an endorsement would be best. 

So let’s explore that topic today: The varying levels of endorsement your brewery can use when positioning, branding and launching new products.

Let’s get some quick definitions and guard rails in place here:

A Sub Brand is connected closely to your parent brand — think of it as a little extra spice given to separate each product from one another within your overall portfolio. A Sub Brand still carries the same values that intuitively link it to the parent brand, but targets a specific audience with further defined attributes and benefits that might not be offered by the parent brand alone. 

An Endorsed Brand is built to stand mostly on its own, but with some sort of endorsement—an assurance of quality, trust and credibility—from your established parent brand. An Endorsed Brand leverages the mind share and reputation of your parent brand while insulating.

The difference between these two approaches can be tough to pin down visually. Indeed, they both leverage your parent brand to varying degrees and they both aim to build a platform for future growth. 

But the real difference is in how you’re positioning this product relative to your parent brand, and which brand, product or parent serves as the Purchasing Driver.

A Purchasing Driver ( or, the role of your parent brand in your Brand Architecture )

A purchasing driver is the primary reason someone buys a product. 

To our definitions above: 

– Will someone buy this product because it is explicitly from your brewery? If so, your parent brand is the main purchasing driver. In this case, you’re building a Sub Brand.

– Or, will someone buy this new product because of its own specific style or brand (and the fact that it’s produced by your brewery is either a nice bonus or doesn’t factor into their decision at all)? In this case, your new brand is the main purchasing driver. Here, you’re building an Endorsed Brand.

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Now that you’ve got a lay of the land, let’s look at the varying levels of endorsement you may consider on your next product. 

(Above): We're focusing on the middle of the Beverage Brand Architecture Continuum today, specifically, the nuanced areas between Sub and Endorsed Brands.

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Strong endorsement 

A strong Endorsement includes your brewery’s primary identity (logo) locked up, more or less at the same size as your product brand on pack. 

Looking at the examples below, you can see why this can be confused for a Sub brand. 

But again, which product acts as the main purchasing driver? In this case, and all Endorsed Brands, the new brand itself is the primary driver. And your parent brand is in the mix to lend credibility and recognition for folks who are already aware of your brand. 

(Above): Strong Endorsements feature the parent brand almost locked up with the new brand name.

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Text-only endorsement 

A text-only endorsement is exactly as it sounds. In this case, you’re not featuring your primary logo, but you are still including a somewhat prominent mention of your parent brand name on pack.

This can show up with a handful of different expressions to show provenance, including: 

– Made by…

– Brewed by… 

– From your friends at …

– An XYZ Brewing joint

One note here: Leaving your brewery’s name off your main panel and tucking it over on the admin panel (so over by the TTB warning label: e.g. Brewed & Canned by XYZ Brewing) doesn’t count as an Endorsement. No one reads this section, and if you truly wanted to obfuscate who made this product, you would just create a new Hold Co / LLC and list that name here anyway. 

So if anything, this would be a Shadow Endorsement. More on this in a sec.

Token endorsement

A token Endorsement usually features an in-the-know icon. So not your primary mark, but either an important icon, or some other important element from your Modular Brand Identity System that people will recognize. This is usually an indication of how big your team thinks a brand can become on its own more so than a measure to protect your parent brand’s positioning.

This is a nice approach when you want a new product to stand completely on its own but still tacitly target your parent brand’s existing customers. 

The Cidergeist example below also uses a Brand Architecture tactic called Linked Naming, so, RhinGEIST, CiderGEIST. This is a fun way to launch follow-on extensions and is common in CPG branding (Nespresso, Nescafe, etc.).

The Shadow Endorsement 

A Shadow Endorsement is where you have zero mention of your parent brand on the new brand’s packaging, but you still feature the product brand in your parent brand’s broader marketing. 

In this approach, the connection to the parent brand is more subtle and obfuscated, known mainly to those who are in the know.

We see this a lot in our hospitality group work, usually in the form of creating loyalty networks that work across all of a groups concepts. (See an example of this below.)

For what it’s worth, we see a lot of breweries end up doing this, whether on purpose or accidentally. 

No matter how much we discuss needing to separate a new product from your brewery’s portfolio, given enough time, the new brand will end up creeping into your main Instagram feed. Plus it’ll (likely) be served in your taproom. So this isn’t the end of the world, provided that doing this makes sense and is still in line with why you chose to develop an entirely new brand (with no tie to your parent brand) in the first place. 

> Read more here: https://beyondbeerbook.com/chapter/shadow-endorsements/

A final point 

Before wrapping up here, I want to mention that nothing we covered today is set in stone. This means you can launch a new product with a Strong Endorsement and gradually phase that out to more of a Token Endorsement (or, dropping th connection to your parent brand entirely) over time, as needed. 

This is similar to our thinking on Sub Brands and scaling the Sub Brand Ladder.

Wrapping up 

Thanks for reading today. 

The 9th (and 21st to give our international readers a shot) person who responds to this email with the subject line Token wins a free copy of The Beyond Beer Handbook.

There are a lot of nuances between Sub and Endorsed Brands. And as we’ve discussed here, even more nuances within Endorsed Brands themselves. The best approach — with the right amount of your parent brand and the right amount of your new product brand in the mix — will depend on your parent brand’s positioning, your intended audience and the long term vision for your overall portfolio. 

And if you get this right, you’re in a great position to build your brand.