Don't drink this! Why you should market yourself like a good craft beer

If you’ve been reading for a while, you might already know that I’m a beer geek.

The first time I visited Europe, I was whisked from the airport to a small gasthaus (pub) in Ramstein. My experience with beer up to that time was Arizona desert party keggers (wooooooo! paaartayyyy!) and Miller Genuine Draft at the ball game. So when these wonderful people brought me a huge golden tower of Hefeweizen at the gasthaus, I was in awe. And a little cautious – is this a joke? Then, one sip and I was done with watery cans of corn sugar forever.

So I am a beer snob and I’m not afraid to say it. I have standards that no can of light beer will ever hope to meet. I’ve even entered the world of home brewing, so my kids have to endure tours of local breweries and talk of IBUs (as homeschoolers, the added benefit is learning about chemistry and the fascinating world of enzymes).

One of my favorites is Stone Brewery in Escondido, California. Excellent beer, of course. What I really admire and wanted to share with you is their marketing.

Beer marketing?

Stone will never compete with Budweiser or Coors. That’s actually a great thing. People who order Bud Lite at the bar or the game or bring home cases of Coors will probably never pick up a bottle of Arrogant Bastard or Russian Imperial Stout. Which is fine, because the Bud Lite-drinking people don’t give a rat’s ass about craft beer. All as it should be.

So Stone’s market is not billions of people, it’s more like a few million. Easier.

And what about that Arrogant Bastard Ale? Let’s make the niche even smaller and easier to work with. Here’s a snippet of what’s on the label of Arrogant Bastard:

This is an aggressive beer. You probably won’t like it. It’s doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth.

Okay, so first: Arrogant Bastard, the name. You have to be a certain kind of person to appreciate that name and not turn away in disgust while you search for a pretty name like, oh I don’t know… Hamm’s. To me, the name rocks. It draws me in, because sometimes, on a deep cro-magnon level I like to feel like an arrogant bastard and I want to drink what other arrogant bastards are drinking.

There’s a snearing devil on the label. ’nuff said.

Now, we turn to that awesome description. It basically says DON’T DRINK THIS. You probably won’t like it. Isn’t that sorta counterintuitive to the whole idea of marketing your product? Don’t you want to tell people why they should like your thing instead of convincing them that they won’t?

Yet this is exactly the thing that will make certain people snag it off the shelf before they finish reading the rest of the label.

Certain people. Not Bud Lite People. See, Bud Lite has to tell people that they will like their beer. If anyone suggested to a Budweiser executive that they should tell people who like really great beer to stay away, they’d probably get tossed into the mash.

Except that it would be an excellent marketing strategy. “Beer snobs, stay away. This is for real men who drink real beer.”

Can’t you just see the right dudes get all fired up about that? Boo-ya. They would probably sell beer to guys who didn’t drink a lot of beer but really enjoy feeling like they’ve one-upped the snobs and the yuppie crowd.

But Budweiser is trying to sell beer to a humongous market, so they won’t do that. They have to be careful.

Be an Arrogant Bastard

A lot of us know about finding our niche. Some of us are still working on it (okay, I am) and it takes time. But I was just thinking that I’ve still been too careful about turning off people who might not get me. That’s a hard truth, but there it is.

I have to work on that.

So what about you? Can you challenge yourself to actually try and turn away people who don’t get what you do or how you do it?

If you’re kind of like an Arrogant Bastard Ale person, you’ll friggin’ love this.

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