Too often brewing businesses fail to effectively communicate with their teams, their consumers and the press. In doing so Melissa Cole, contributing editor of The Brewers Journal, says they are making things more difficult than they need to be. But she also advice to share, too.

Creating an idea and spreading an idea has a lot behind it, and it has changed a huge amount in a very small time. But it remains a relatively simple principle, which can be implemented on a micro or a macro scale, and it’s one I think the brewing industry, particularly in these incredibly tough times, really needs to take a moment to think about. 

The main driver behind me wanting to write about this started, as it so often does, out of frustration at not getting press releases and being shaken out of that frustration by Round Corner Brewing taking the incredibly proactive step of sending me their current proposed release schedule for the year. 

I have not been sent a brewing schedule by a brewery in 15 years. The last one I recall being sent was from Shepherd Neame telling me what their seasonal schedule would be for the year. Just think about that – a decade and a half – before someone thought that one of the most prolific beer communicators in the country might need to know what a business was going to be selling for titles they write up to three months in advance for.

It’s madness…

However, it’s also endemic, and I happened across a TED talk by a best-selling author. This was prompted by some random thoughts I had on the fact that we are an industry that all too often holds our cards too close to our chests. Whether deliberately or through the sense of fear that the often hand-to-mouth nature of this business can evoke, we fail to communicate far too often.  

As Godlin points out in his talk about The Tribes We Lead, the world has changed immensely from when we started with an efficient factory, started by Henry Ford (as problematic as he was) under the idea that we could change the way the world worked by automating, something that resonates in the world of brewing.

As efficiencies increase, beer is cheaper to turn out and the overheads of a workforce can be decreased and those profits can be, in turn, used elsewhere. But at some point that becomes a zero sum game as it hits a point where sales and output balance themselves out. 

The next stage, Godlin posits, is advertising. If you can get enough money and tell enough people then you can sell more, but this model requires you to act like you are the best, you are the top of the chain (an example of this being taken quite literally is by larger breweries siting billboard adverts in close proximity to smaller competitors), taking average ideas and pushing them out to the masses, because average is the easiest way to get the most people. 

However Godlin, most especially through the way the world works now, believes tribes are the most important thing. They connect silos of people to create a movement and this is only possible through communication. 

Any business is a movement. A series of silos to connect in order for it to function; whether it’s a small business of just a few people or a much larger one, the key is to connect those silos of people into a common goal. Now, I appreciate this sounds a bit like a cult but those who create them are remarkably good at what they do and you can take learnings from that, without it getting creepy, and the first way to do that is engender loyalty. 

It’s important to note that loyalty should never be blind, we’ve all seen how that can go, but it is something that can be earned through simple steps and the very first building block of that trust and loyalty is open communication. 

If your sales staff don’t know what’s going on in the brewhouse but it’s plastered all over social media that some high-profile brewer has popped in to sprinkle some hops on something, how can they honestly tell excited customers what’s happening?

If your sales staff don’t know what’s going on in the brewhouse but it’s plastered all over social media that some high-profile brewer has popped in to sprinkle some hops on something, how can they honestly tell excited customers what’s happening?

Melissa Cole

If the brewhouse doesn’t know how much demand there is for something out there, then how can they gauge how much to brew? And if your PR & marketing department doesn’t know there are worryingly low levels of demand for a product being generated by customers, how do they know they need to big it up to the press, or through social media, to consumers if the sales staff aren’t telling them?

In reverse, just think how furious everyone in the business would be if sales wasn’t telling the accounts department who they needed to bill or if the brewers didn’t communicate to your maltster they need an extra tonne of pale malt for the next brew day?

And it’s not just about convincing people that they want something they don’t already have yet. This is undoubtedly one of the biggest heffalump traps the brewery industry has fallen into. It relies on the next big beer, instead of building a business that focuses on bringing together those people who have a sense of wanting to be part of something more than just lurching from hype beer to hype beer, breweries often have a tendency to grab at the available instead of building the steadily attainable and rarely look outside of their immediate circle. 

A lot of this is what has made the industry a white cis male-dominated world. It’s the need to hold on to the reigns, stay in your lane, make sure that you collaborate with those people that will bring that little sprinkling of hype dust to your brewery, because a failure to move out of your silos means you never challenge the status quo.

In my experience, that also leads to a sense of myopia and a dissonance between those who really want to connect with you, who want a sense of being in a tribe and how they receive your information and, more importantly, how you continue to lead it. This comes not just from the top but from all layers of your business. 

If someone has joined a business, they almost certainly really want to be there, so how are you telling them the story of what you believe, what you want to be out there. How are you engendering a sense of belonging and belief, so that they can go out and sell that sense of belonging and belief for you and continue to build your tribe?

Again, I urge you not to think of this as a cynical tool, that way a sense of omnipotence lies, but to use it to create an honest change which does lead to more successful business… oh, and for the love of god, send me press releases.