Market your beer

I was curious to hear what someone who works with breweries rather than in them would think about craft beer culture. I called Isaac Arthur, co-founder of Indianapolis-based CODO Design.

Over the past 10 years, CODO has worked with nearly 50 craft breweries, and their core services include branding, package design, website design, and environmental design. Their work is often featured on different websites that feature craft beer package and brand design. They even created their own branding guide for craft breweries.

“We love beer.” he laughs. ”We bonded in college over this new thing called craft beer. Before that we drank shitty beer. We love it. We also love the people generally.”

“Even though we have 170 breweries in Indiana, we’re still like the 25th largest per capita in the country. Then you have a lot of new people opening up who make shit beer and have shit branding. We need more commerce, we need more economic growth.”

He tells me that one thing that might help is getting beer drinkers to know what they're drinking.

“You need the beer drinking populous to be more educated. I’ll have a beer with a non beer drinker, and they don’t know when it’s good or not good. Craft beer is so novel, and so many people want to support local breweries that they overlook quality.”

He shifts to describing what he thinks breweries could be better at:

“This is anecdotal, but more people need to start to invest in marketing and branding. You’re seeing everywhere across the board that this is becoming more important.

“You are never going to achieve what you want to achieve if you don’t want to market.”

But not everyone is on board with marketing and branding. He tells me how he and Cody Fague, who is the other co-founder, were at a conference. A man approached them and told them, “Branding is for people who don’t know how to make craft beer.” Arthur laughs as he tells me that, “But you have to have great branding. We’re seeing this even in some startups. We’ve worked with people who have had a marketing person on their team.”

“You can’t overlook programming,” he tells me, emphasizing its importance. “You look at certain breweries with loaded calendars, and the ways they connect to the community [through] programming and education.”

For Arthur, having events in a brewery is not only a good way to market your brand, it’s always a good way to show the community that you’re willing to put yourself out there to connect with them.

“Some people will walk up to the bar and people think craft beer is all weird and expensive, and then be fun made of if they only drink Bud Light.”

“Why would you open a hospitality business and not be hospitable?”

I ask him what he thinks could be done do rectify moments like that.

“I don’t know. I mean, from our perspective we always tell the story, but a lot of it does lie on the front line deliverer — the brewery employees. To make sure they reach out to people and make sure they advocate for their brand.”

“There is a move to be more inclusive, and I think it comes with programming. We don’t see it so much as a problem but an opportunity. Really, everyone’s seeing it, and it would be cool to see what everyone does.”