Craft Beer and Branding
It’s been a long time coming, but Weyerbacher’s new brand is almost completely rolled out (two and a half years in the making). It’s been a long process, but the end result is something that they can be really proud of. In the next couple of weeks, I’m going to walk through some of the process, successes and failures that we had throughout the long slog of taking Weyerbacher from the 1990s to now.
The Beginning
Weyerbacher has three key players. Dan, Chris and Chris (President, Head Brewer and Head of Production). In order to really develop the brand, we had to get all three of their views (sometimes very disparate views) on the same page so that we could have some form of consensus for approvals and direction. We started in the fall of 2010 (October 28th, to be exact) with a meeting to discuss the current state of the brand, where each person thought we were and what we thought the general public thought of Weyerbacher. To get to know where you want to go, you need to know where you are and where you’ve been. That may seem like common sense, but even with only 3 people as part of the process, there can be very differing view points (and there were a few).
Where are we?
A lot of the things that came out of the initial discussions left us feeling like we had a lot of room to grow from a brand perspective (of course we knew this, but it’s helpful to define it as well). Weyerbacher, as a brand, is a respected small brewery that makes bold and innovative beers that challenge style boundaries and create incredible experiences through beer. That’s a great brand. Except the visual portion of the brand had not kept up with the physical brand. All of this great beer was packaged in dated materials with a logo that was deeply in need of re-design.
Next steps
We defined where we are, now we need to define where we want to go and what we want to be. To be continued…