You brew beer. So what? Brand and positioning for a new brewery

Great beer gets you in the door, not chosen

Most brewery business plans are full of numbers: hectolitres in year one, brewhouse size, rent per square foot, cans or kegs. Very few have a single page on brand or positioning. That gap is the most common one we see in new brewery plans.

A drinker in a Gurugram or Hyderabad brewpub may face a board of 10 to 14 taps, most of them a wheat beer, a lager, an IPA and a stout. If yours are well made, so are your neighbour's. Clean beer is the minimum a drinker expects. It does not tell them why to walk through your door rather than the one across the road.

A brand lives in the drinker's head

A brand is the way customers see your company: your beer, your people and how you behave, rolled into a gut feeling. It is why someone recommends you to a friend, or does not. You do not own it outright. You influence it through every touch point, from the logo and the can to the website, the taproom and the reply your manager sends on WhatsApp at 11 pm.

So two breweries can pour near-identical recipes and hold very different brands. One is the place where the brewer comes out to explain the new release. The other is the place where the server shrugs. List your own touch points this week. Most new brewpubs pass 20 quickly: menus, coasters, glassware, staff T-shirts, the Google listing, the delivery bill.

Positioning is a choice you make on purpose

Positioning is the deliberate act of settling your concept, who it is for and how you differ from everyone else. We boil it down to three questions. What do you make? Which drinkers is it for? How are you different from the brewpub down the road? Note that the last one asks about different, not better. Better is a claim every brewery makes. Different is something a drinker can notice.

Write your answers in one line each. If your answer to the second is "everyone who likes good beer", you have not chosen yet. A 30-seat brewpub serving sours and barrel-aged stouts to beer geeks is a position. "A brewery for all" is a hope. Our guide to the positioning matrix shows how to plot the competition on two axes and spot the gap.

Four places to find a difference beyond the beer

When the beer alone will not set a young brewery apart, we look in four places. All of them work for Indian brewpubs.

• Concept and story. Why you brew, how you started and why it matters, lined up with your prices, styles and atmosphere.
• Location and partners. A neighbourhood is a thin difference once three brewpubs share a street. Tie-ups with nearby farms, coffee roasters or other brewers are harder to copy.
• Service. Rude staff or dirty tap lines will undo everything else. Good service paired with one other strength still stands out.
• Branding. The identity, cans, website, merchandise and the room itself, all carrying the same idea.

Pick one or two to lead with. Trying to win on all four in year one usually means winning on none.

Write the positioning statement, even if nobody sees it

A formal positioning statement rarely appears in public. We still like one for a new brewery, because it forces the three answers into a single sentence the partners must agree on. The shape is simple: your name, then the audience, then what you offer and the part you play in their week.

A made-up example for a brewpub in Whitefield: "We give young professionals a relaxed after-work taproom with crisp beers under 5% ABV and food from the Mangalorean coast." Have each of, say, three partners write a version alone, then compare them. Where they disagree is where the arguments belong. Partners are often too close to see the gaps in their own sentence, which is why a second pair of eyes from outside the business helps here.

Settle it before the tap handles are ordered

Order matters. A brewery that spends three years getting its beer onto bar menus and into people's heads, then finds the brand does not fit, has to unpick all of it. Rebranding later means new labels, a fresh state excise label approval for each changed design (the process varies by state) and retraining drinkers who already knew you. A full rebrand can eat 5 to 15% of a year's revenue. Thinking it through first costs mostly evenings.

None of this replaces the beer. Branding brings people in for a first pint. The beer decides whether they come back. Your first step this week: write your answers to the three positioning questions on one page, then boil them down with our brand essence guide. The full order of work is in our guide to branding a new brewery.

About the authors

Ankur Napa is a Master Brewer who also works in data and AI. Chatty Girija spent more than 30 years in advertising, hosts the Cheers Chatty Beer Podcast and teaches at Craft Beer School.

Common questions

What is the difference between a brand and positioning?

Positioning is the decision you make about your concept, audience and difference. Your brand is how drinkers end up seeing you once that decision meets your beer, your people and your design.

Is positioning only for big breweries?

No. A 30-seat brewpub needs it more because it has less money to shout with. A clear position lets a small place be the obvious choice for one kind of drinker.

Can we position on beer quality alone?

It is risky. Most competitors also claim great beer. Drinkers cannot test the claim before they visit. Quality keeps them coming back once something else has brought them in.