This isn’t a traditional book that you sit down and read cover-to-cover. Your team is busy and you have to move fast (especially if you have a great idea in today’s beverage industry). Our goal here is to help you make a high-stakes decision in an afternoon.
The Beyond Beer Handbook is a purpose-built tool for helping you grow your brewery’s business. It will quickly get your team oriented and armed with all the info and concepts you need to confidently position, brand and launch any extension, beer or beyond.
If you’re reading this, we’re assuming you’ve already decided to launch some sort of extension. So, we want to quickly help you determine the various ways you can position it to scale while protecting your parent brand’s positioning and reputation.
With that in mind, we’ll start with an overview of Brand Architecture itself so we have a shared vocabulary. Then we’ll jump right into the diagnostic Assessment we’ve built to help dozens of CODO clients successfully launch their extensions.
This Assessment is based on years of daily experience helping breweries and beverage alcohol companies launch extensions. We have field-tested and refined it into a reliable tool that you can use to make critical decisions to grow your business.
After the Assessment, your score will determine a few possible strategies relevant to your unique situation. At this point, you can think of The Beyond Beer Handbook as a “choose your own adventure” novel where you can skip ahead to learn more about the pros and cons of a particular strategy.
Once you understand the ins and outs of that possible path, you can put that up against your larger brand strategy (and what your gut is telling you) and decide whether or not it makes sense for your brewery’s brand and this new product.
Then, make the call and move forward in confidence.
Structure & Terms
We’re writing this resource for breweries (because we’re beer people at heart). But everything we cover here is applicable to any Consumer Packaged Good (CPG) food and/or beverage artisan considering adding new products to their portfolio.
For example, we’ve used this Assessment tool and framework to help:
- Distillery clients launch Ready-to-Drink (RTD) cocktails
- RTD companies acquire and/or launch spirits brands
- Kombucha brands diversify into the functional beverage space
- International CPG brands launch first-time alcoholic beverage extensions
- Hospitality groups and restaurants launch spice and condiment lines
- Coffee roasters launch canned cold brew brands
So, no matter what kind of drinks you sell, or new products you’ve got in development, apply what works for your business and jettison the rest.
We also need to issue the same caveat we have included in our previous books because it always bears repeating. Not even the most phenomenal branding can cover for a sub par product. Branding is an investment, a profit center, a cheat code for attracting the fans and customers necessary to scale your business. If you have a great product to sell (beer, RTD, seltzer or otherwise) and world-class branding, your business’ potential is only limited by your imagination.
And with that, let’s dive in.