Rebranding a Beer and Other Ideas
I came up with an idea the other day: Shotto.
I saw customers requesting tasters of a few of our beers, and the Hand in Hand barkeep served the dashes in shot glasses for them to try. The dinky Otto reminded me of the Baby Guinness shot, which doesn’t actually contain Guinness, but it looks like one.
I wondered what a shot of our nitro stout would taste like with a complementary liquor. Would it be good? Is it worth it? I don’t know. Otto with Coffee Tequila, Otto with Kahlua, Otto with Frangellico, Tia Maria, Disaronno. I guess I’ll have to give Shotto a go and let you know. Watch this space for a Shotto menu. Or notto.
I often start with a pun and work my way backwards. A tv producer friend of mine once asked if I had any concepts knocking about for a magazine show he was pitching. It was something like 30 repeatable five minute pieces.
I came up with ‘Shrigley Come Dancing’.
And then I came up with the concept. I thought that Shrigley learning obscure traditional dance routines in interesting, exotic, unfamiliar parts of the world, squeezed into beautiful ceremonial outfits would be charming. What a show - creative, educational, inspirational. The last minute of each piece would simply be David re-enacting the routine from memory on his own in the outfit in a loft or something. It would be art.
Puns are art.
Needless to say, this incredible idea never came to pass. Not least because David Shrigley was completely against the idea. And so too, frankly, was the tv producer. Oh well. One day, one of these puns will come to something extraordinary. I’m sure of it.
Some ideas are better than others.
Our brand direction, for example - creating an Artist in Residence who takes charge of our look and feel - is one of my favourite ideas we’ve had. Hello Marine’s work and the brand blueprint we built for our core range went together so well that we scrapped the original idea of rotating artists and stuck with one. Read more about Art You Can Drink here.
One of the foundations of this approach is not to interfere with Marine’s process and decisions. This gets the best results and is far more exciting. But when we launched this new brand direction, we needed the art for our entire core range at once, so we worked with Marine to select pieces that she’d already created.
Lady Shaka, as she quickly became known, was chosen for our biggest selling pale ale, Shaka. The leaves went to our bitter, Bird. The black and red abstract shapes went to our cask oat pale, High 5. The colourful flowers and cacti went to our hazy New England pale, Lobo.
The beautiful plants in pots became the branding for our nitro stout, Otto.
We love this piece very much - it’s been with us from the start - but we wondered if customers were missing it on the bar and in our trade store. It’s so different from the many successful commercial stout brands out there that we started wondering if this particular image worked for this particular product. Do customers understand that this is a Dry Nitro Stout at a glance?
We like that our beer branding doesn't adhere to the commercial archetypes. Many don’t in the craft beer world, and we stand by it. It feels fresh and maybe it broadens the appeal to drinkers who just think beer’s beer - and after all, people do drink with their eyes. Let’s keep things interesting
There is something to be said about joining the club, however.
Making it instantly recognisable as a serious stout for stout drinkers isn't a bad idea. Otto could be Black and Gold, Black and White, Black and Cream. We could add a motif, but mainly it would be simple, plain. The dark lords have led the way, and many have emulated this approach to great fanfare and the odd brand award. It works. It’s very tempting.
When we started to explore the Otto rebrand, I prepared a number of options that included this popular approach. Black background. Gold copy. And I took the leaves of the main plant from Marine’s original and created a Gold motif. It looked great. It would sit comfortably next to Guinness, Camden Stout, Anspach and Hobday and more. You can see this idea on the blog menu page here; I used it for the Guinnish article.
But it didn’t feel right. This was imitation. Following. More importantly, and regrettably, it was me messing with our established process. A process that works. Sure, it met one element of what we needed - to be quickly recognisable as a stout - but it ran roughshod over the foundations of our brand approach. It was inconsistent. And as a result, it didn’t feel like us at all.
What we really needed was a Hello Marine original.
A while back, Marine created a beautiful piece of art, which you can buy, called ‘La Nuit’. I loved it and bought a print for my house (we have a few of Marine’s pieces hanging in our house and venues, naturally). La Nuit was originally part of a four-colour risograph project and was licensed to somebody, so we couldn’t use it.
I asked Marine if she could recreate a version of La Nuit for us. It has a dark sky in the background and bright bold leaves in the foreground. ‘La Nuit’ - the night. Darkness, like rich stout. With stars like creamy nitro bubbles. The bold coloured leaves sit proudly in our range. I was able to overlay it with Black and Gold to give a nod to the commercial style I mentioned earlier.
Voila. A beautiful new brand for Otto. Check out all the designs and original art here.
The new design looks really cool on cans, and one day soon, we’ll start packaging Otto in cans again. I’ll write about how and why we choose to package certain beers in certain ways and how and why we decide what’s core, annual, special etc soon.
It’s not something we take lightly, rebranding a core range beer. But we made the right call here. And eventually, we remembered the process; our blueprint. It’s important to push the boundaries of your own brand, but equally important to remember why you created these processes in the first place.
La Nuit was part of a set, which included a piece officially called ‘Mind The Gap’ that Marine called ‘the space hole’. You can buy a print of that here. I love it.
The space hole was the branding for our first ever lager, Yuba. When we created our project lager, 795 - which was about developing a Pilsner-style lager using ingredients sourced closer to our UK home - I zoomed into the space hole, where there was a ladder. This became the branding for 795, which in turn, eventually - because it was so good - replaced Yuba as our core range lager.
So now, our main lager’s branding is a ladder. A beautiful ladder, no doubt. But is it right? Does it fit? Does it still do the job?
I ask these questions to myself all the time. I think they’re worthy challenges as our business grows. We want our portfolio to make sense and part of my job is to worry about these things, however trivial they may appear. You’ve got to sweat it all - big and small.
It probably is right to rethink 795. I think the name definitely needs changing. Mainly because it doesn’t quite fit with our naming convention. It doesn’t sit within our range, being the odd one out - a number instead of a short, abstract word.
The ladder was originally about us taking steps towards planet-healthy drinking. So the image does go with the message very well. And it’s a message worth repeating, so I think it does still work visually. But this is another example of me slightly messing with the process like I mentioned earlier. Yes, it's taken directly from Marine’s piece, but it’s not Marine’s piece.
We could zoom back out of the space hole and use the whole piece again. It’s been enough time; there will be no confusion. And the space hole is awesome!
Bring back the space hole!
Although the space hole is dark. Maybe best for a stout. Hang on a minute… I’m off for a Shotto.