Pub-lic relations: The Skinny guide to selling beer

Food and drink has always attracted some of the oddest excesses of marketing folk, from the slightly dubious hijinks of the Kia-Ora crows to the bizarre association between golliwogs and marmalade. Still, it isn’t just over-sweetened fruit that sends the world’s marketers into a blind frenzy – beer also brings out the best from the PR world, as you’ll see shortly.

First, some history. The spiritual home of the alcohol-fuelled PR stunt lies in Dublin, at the Guinness Storehouse. Now normally, when one visits a brewery or a maltings, a grey old man in a foosty jumper leads a tour through the dry but undoubtedly factual science of booze production. Trust us, we’ve smelled the knitwear, and it’s a haunting experience.

Guinness, on the other hand, have an enormous monolith of a building filled with interactive gubbins at their disposal. It’s super-slick, very shiny, and features a whole floor dedicated to their own advertising. Yes, that’s right – Guinness will happily charge you to look at their adverts from eighty years ago.

But if you’re anything like us you’ll forgive them because look, it’s a knight in shining armour, and he’s got a Guinness moustache! And now some toucans, and we all know that toucans love Guinness. Pelicans like a drink as well, and you can see how happy they are. They’re so happy, they haven’t even considered being a little bit racist. It’s enough to give Don Draper a massive pleasure-induced aneurysm, but it’s not for everyone.

So what does today’s modern booze brand do to draw attention to itself? In the case of Brewdog, the most modern, booziest and most branded of them all, they get the customers to do all the work. The Mashtag project sees the brewery create an annual crowdsourced beer, with every aspect of the brew selected by the voting public. Now of course, it would be madness to just let people start naming things and throwing them into the beer, so the process is carefully guided along.

Still, it’s a win-win; Brewdog fans will this year get an imperial red ale flavoured with blood orange to enjoy and claim partial credit for, while the brewery get loads of social media ‘buzz’ (which is basically the same as money these days), a load of fresh ideas and good will, and lots of free publicity from writers trying to ham-fistedly pass comment on the world of food and drink. 

For brewers who don’t fancy a full-on interaction, there is the option of taking existing formats online. Formats such as the launch of a new beer with a online tasting, which Inveralmond Brewery conducted via that world wide web when launching their Inspiration series. Again, it’s a cunning idea – it’s cheap to do, it can’t really backfire because it’s just people who know about beer talking about beer, it makes the brewery’s fans feel like they’re involved in what’s going on, and it can all be done in a shed provided the shed has Wi-Fi. 

Of course, there are a few issues with the format, namely that it’s very hard to make sure everyone has the beer. While your correspondent was indeed quaffing a delicious Czech pilsner while sitting in the dark at his kitchen table on a Tuesday evening, many of those logged into the online discussion were stuck in a state of beerless indifference. Plus, and this is more of a stylistic point than anything else, there is definitely an odd vibe to any footage featuring grown men staring down a webcam lens. It’s an iconography issue, and one that can surely be ironed out provided Inveralmond’s head brewer doesn’t start waving national flags around on camera again.

And if neither of those options appeal, the brewers of the world can always take the easy option and buy a deserted island. Yes, it’s crazy stunt time, and this month’s contestant is ‘esteemed’ Australian lager Castlemaine XXXX. The idea is so simple it’s almost completely stupid – buy a tiny tropical island off the Australian coast, then work out ways of getting people interested. Forget putting the horse before the cart, this is like going through the hassle of teaching the horse to drive a lorry, then putting it before the cart.

Of course in terms of PR it’s a masterstroke, because it’s a story that's just mad enough to be believable but that few would ever bother to check up on. Look, now we’re talking about it, and we aren’t even in Australia.

Scotland’s independent brewers don’t all have access to endless supplies of marketing cash or cartoonists who can capture the joy an anthropomorphised bear feels when he drinks a tasty, tasty Guinness, but we feel we’ve laid out some alternatives. Social media, online events, and getting your fans involved are key – or failing that, buying your own island.

In fact, brewers, just buy one of the Hebrides; if you get lucky, you’ll end up with your very own beaked mascot to take on the big boys. What your new puffin mascot does or says next is up to you...