Moment 106 - Marketing Principles That Made Brewdog Billions: James Watt

00:02Going to your marketing thesis, because this is really what's defined BrewDog in the eye of the consumer. In the eye of someone like me that doesn't honestly drink beer, but knows about the brand and considers it to be a famous brand and watched it on LinkedIn and social media over the years, build its sort of acclaim. What is your like your principles that underline your marketing thesis? Because your marketing thesis is very, very different to pretty much nearly all brands in this country there's maybe a 0.1 percent that maybe you've copied or that have been inspired or that you know chicken and egg i don't know who came first but it's a very unique thesis towards marketing what underpins it we've got two very simple tests that we apply to everything that we do from a marketing perspective so the first test is would or could another business do this thing and if the answer is yes we've got to seriously consider why we're doing it the second test is, if I spend a pound on this, is it going to give me a 10 extra turn compared to how a competitor would spend that pound? So we are in an industry dominated by global behemoths of businesses who are hundreds of times our size. And we're closing that gap and we want to close

01:07that gap, but we only close that gap by making our market and our communications, everything we do work so much more effectively than theirs. If our market is only as effective as theirs, we don't close that gap and we lose so the two tests are could or would another company do this and is it going to give me a 10 extra turn versus how my competitor would spend that money and if i'm thinking about how to get a drive a better return on marketing you know and then i think about what you've done i see well we've got to be probably bolder to win share of voice we've got to try and win headlines in more extreme ways because nobody's going to be writing about you for for the fun of it if you're a smaller sort of challenge challenge brand and the second thing I think is kind of we've got to do that on new platforms.

01:47We can't fight out on TV or in newspapers because those are where you kind of throw huge amounts of money and you get a return. So new platforms and new approaches. And that's very much kind of signifies what I've seen from BrewDog. Very, very bold. Very bold and intentionally bold and especially bold in our early years when we had no budget whatsoever. So the challenge was how can we get our name out there with no money at all? so we had to do things that were intentionally provocative that were on the edge and sometimes we can exhaust that edge as well but that enabled us to get our name our message our business out there with no budget at all so we have driven a tank through the streets of london we've thrown taxidermy cats out of a helicopter over the bank of england we've put vladimir putin in the front of a beer label so we've done a lot of things low budget high impact but we've tried to make it that everything we do ties back and is underpinned by what we're passionate about so does so there has to be a connection there so does this reinforce what we believe in what we're trying to do as a company because otherwise it's just hollow and it's fake and it's false so how does this reinforce

02:50the kind of core beliefs that drive this business which is trying to build an return of business and a huge passion for fantastic beer one of the more extreme things i saw the vladimir thing uh what else have i seen i think to be fair i think i've seen it all because i'm obviously a marketeer so and running a marketing company and seeking inspiration from lots of different brands and seeing what they're doing and the impact it's having, especially on social media, which is my battleground. The thing I read about more recently was that you put in a complaint about your own beer, which triggered press. We did. So this was all the way back in 2008. And we had a few running battles with a few bigger players. One of them was the Portmure Group. So the Portmure Group was an industry still as an industry regulator and for me it is a thinly veiled cartel funded by the big drinks businesses who've got a vested interest in making sure that small businesses are not successful and there was a few rulings at the park that were just so so silly and frivolous that we wanted to make a statement so we complained about one of our own beers to make a meta statement about how silly the process is and how essentially corrupt it was as an organization funded by the

03:57big beer companies big drinks businesses who've got a vested interest making sure the small ones are not successful how's that like so you make a beer that is really high in avb is that was that the correct term it was yes we made a beer we made a beer called tokyo 18 now if you looked at the newspaper headlines in the uk when we launched that beer you would have thought that i was single-handedly responsible for the downfall of western civilization by making an 18 beer we had it in the sun binge drinking blame this man with like a cut out of my head in a bottle of Tokyo that took a bit of explaining to my very religious grandmother but that's another story but everything we did with that beer was we just made a thousand bottles it was very expensive it was for connoisseurs it was for aficionados and we want to elevate the status of beer and I think the more someone can understand and appreciate something the less likely they are to abuse it and we make expensive products for people who love love fantastic beer so it was to kind of make a statement of you've got all these big companies doing very cheap alcohol that's likely to be abused trying to ban products of this company that's looking to elevate the status

05:01increase education awareness around beer and lead people to appreciate and enjoy beer in a more elevated way and when you see yourself in the sun with a cardboard cut out of your face is that kind of swings in roundabouts is that good in from a marketing perspective is that a good outcome because you were trying to get headline you complained about your own beer yeah you were trying to get headlines so is that job done i think in that one to a certain extent it was it was job done and to kind of show you how odd things were about back then so this was kind of 2009 2010 when we were starting to get momentum and the beer scene was starting to change so the big companies had it their own way for way too long and things were starting to change there was a award ceremony in scotland in 2010 um put together by the bii the british and keepers institute and we got a heads up before the award ceremony hey guys you're going to win the award for scottish bar operator of the year so you guys better come to the come to the award ceremony so we went there we booked a table they were just about to announce i was like halfway up to the stage to get the award and they announced a different company i was like okay but then the

06:07other company didn't want to take the award because our name was engraved in the trophy it's like well we don't want it so the next day i spoke to the person that organized the award ceremony i was like what what happened like you told us we were going to win and he was like well diageo one of the world's biggest drinks companies they were the main sponsor they told me five minutes before we're due to give it to you if they gave it to you guys they was going to pull all future sponsorship you're joking so we felt we didn't have an option so we put this online it blew up it was trending on twitter globally that day diageo issued us a formal apology about the whole thing and that apology was kind of broadcast news but it just showed back then how the dynamic in the beer industry was changing and how the big beer companies and big drinks companies were acting towards that change of which the part was one manifestation of it did you take that personally i took that as a sign that we're doing the right thing so i think unless other businesses are copying you or trying to knock you then you're not doing well enough so unless you're doing something that's worthy of people copying it and like a lot of people moan

07:12oh i'm being copied it's like unless you're being copied you need to up your game and you need to do better unless your competitors are trying to knock you down you're not enough enough of a threat to your competition so i took that as a sign that we're on the right track we're doing the right thing let's keep going the the other extreme marketing thing that i saw which was um when i first read i thought this is fucking hilarious is the elvis estate tried to copyright infringe you for calling your US beer, which I think is your most popular US beer.

07:39It is Elvis Juice. Elvis Juice. They sent you a copyright statement, just sort of like a, basically a notice that you're violating the copyright. Yes. And you responded with some Elvis rhyme. We did. And on the LinkedIn post that I saw, it said you changed your name to Elvis. Yeah. Then the BBC come out and say that didn't happen. Yeah. What is the truth in this one? Did you change your name to Elvis? Yeah, we did. And just to go kind of back in the story, so Elvis sent um not Elvis himself um Elvis's estate sent us a letter saying we couldn't use the name Elvis in a beer and if we did we had to pay them a license fee for every can case and bottle of beer that we sold so what myself and Martin did we changed our names to Elvis and we sent them a letter back saying that they couldn't use our name on their music and they had to pay us a license fee for every time they played one of one of Elvis's songs um got a huge amount of publicity at the time we were both Elvis for a few weeks and then we changed our names back so the BBC attacked us on that as they as they have on many things however the BBC misunderstood the Scottish procedure for changing the name so they said we didn't change your name by deed poll

08:46that's not a Scottish thing in Scotland you need an official declaration to change your name which we did so what's that just signing a piece of paper you sign an official declaration piece of paper and that counts as a name change in Scotland and you don't even have to send it to anybody don't have to send it to anyone Scotland so we met the Scottish requirements which is what we said we did but yeah my grandmother was very unhappy and she insisted i change my name back to back to james brew dogs marketing has been so bold and it's been so standout and in terms of how hard you've in terms of the return on every dollar you've spent it's it seems to have been a pretty astounding return per dollar spent because you've done these like big viral activations a lot of them are like um uh parodies or they're like taking the piss of big corporations or they're sticking it to the man in various ways or going at the you know the incumbents in the industry some of them though that they the even the example you gave there of they're complaining about your own beer with the portmortis yeah obviously the complaint wasn't real yeah because it was you because it was me what is the line between between like truth in when you're doing

09:45these stunts and virality and uh untruth for you and where where do you play are you willing to to do something that is from a marketing perspective that is not necessarily true like complain about your own beer if you believe it'll help reach the outcome which is to stick it to the portman group yeah well i think with that one it wasn't necessarily untrue because afterwards we said we made this complaint so it was us who disclosed the fact that we made the complaint so you were true okay and we disclosed that to just show how ridiculous the system the system was so if we hadn't said it was us that complained about it then i would accept that was being a bit dishonest but the fact that we came out and we said hey the system fundamentally doesn't work and we wanted to expose that by making this complaint was what we intended to do there. When we first started talking about marketing one of the things you said was we made a lot of mistakes. Yeah. Took things too far. Yeah. What did you take too far? In hindsight now. Now that you're a big global brand and everyone is you know looking back at all the steps when you weren't so big. Yeah. I think the mistakes that we've made in marketing is when we've tried to do something which is on the edge

10:52which is controversial, which needs explaining. So if you look at the thing in its totality, then it is potentially a positive thing. But if you only see a snapshot of it, then your takeaway from that could be negative. So I think a lot of the mistakes that we made from a market perspective, and we did some amazing things, but we did make some mistakes, was when we got too clever with the concept and the intention behind it, which was genuine, got lost so a famous example of one of the stakes that we we made in marketing and for international women's day we wanted to highlight highlight the gender pay gap and this was a project that was put together by some of the fantastic women we've got in our business and we made a beer called pink ipa that we would get sell 21 cheaper to women to highlight the gender pay gap which was something that we felt passionate about and then the proceeds from sale of that beer went to charities which help women and women's pay in the workplace and these kind of things. But then what happened was people just saw pink IPA and it looked like we were, it was, the beard itself was a parody of products which market themselves towards women, but then it just looked like another product that

11:57marketed themselves to our women. And if anyone like dug into it and understood, okay, this is to highlight the gender pay gap and they're doing some good with the money and they're taking a cause, people just saw the pink IPA. They saw the image and came to the conclusion that we're just doing the thing that we were going to fight against and that was a kiki learning that people just see a snapshot of a thing so you need to make sure that all of the message that you want to land is in that snapshot because a lot of people's not going to dig deeper into what it is what i got from that was that like you've got to create a marketing campaign where the context is sort of can't be separated can't be separated exactly because it will be separated if it can be exactly 100 percent