Microbrewery Microbrand

Interesting story in The Times today about how a Microbrewery microbranded itself:

Soon after starting up, Scottish beer business Brewdog was struggling to sell its product until its co-founders hit on the idea of using the internet to market their distinctive beers.

“It was a hard sell locally at first,” said co-founder James Watt. “People had grown up with lager, and a lot of the pubs in Scotland are tied. So we decided to see if we could interest overseas beer enthusiasts online. We could see an opportunity in places like Sweden and America where specialist beers are popular,” he said.

Watt found the most popular bloggers in each country and sent free samples to them. Having built a following, they convinced local importers to sell their beer and international orders took off. Today exports account for 80% of sales.

One of the travails of being a tech business blog is no one ends us stuff like that (pity, we do consume the stuff.. )The thing that really interested me was they used video as well as text/picture blogging:

Brewdog uses video to talk to customers. It recently gave them the chance to create a new beer by posting clips of its staff arguing about the virtues of different types of beer and letting them vote on how the final product would taste. “We called it Beer Rocks and it was the first ever democratically designed beer. It generated a lot of interest and all it cost us was a couple of hours’ filming and the price of a video camera,” said Watt.

We believe that video will prove to be "the" new customer marketing medium for 2009 as:

- It gives full bandwidth information for users in new/unfamiliar situations - you can see faces, body language etc - potential for greater trust. It needs to be integrated with text, but is a powerful medium.
- It is still novel and thus for a while will have higher attention / takeup (all new Ad modes do in the early days, before people become familiar with them)
- Lots of people now have broadband and are increasingly used to taking video onboard.

Also, there is some evidence that Google is favouring video searches at the moment, as Nate Elliot of Forrester notes.