The market is always changing, great brands understand how to adapt.
Coming into the a new year in 2022 at Granville Island Brewing we had to face some uncomfortable realties.
Consumer consideration was declining, legacy drinkers had lost their connection to our brand and new consumers didn’t know who are or why we are. Just as apparent, customers in trade had been losing confidence in the brands ability to be consistent in market and add value to their outlets. Naturally enough, change was need.
Second step was to understand our customes point of view (National Key Accounts, Regional Key Accounts, Indepandants, etc.) I understood from the get-go, we are going to need our customers support in order to regain placement and visibility in the market before the consumer pull starts to take effect.
Through various meetings, phonecalls and feedback sessions with our customers and our internal Sales organisation (both had vital feedback from different perspectives) boiled down things to a few root causes.
Availability & Format: we we’re incurring too many out of stocks on SKUs in markets across western Canada for too long. It cost of placement in channel and frustrated customers enough to the point where they stopped ordering. We had also changed pack sizes, delisted or rebranded legacy skus and it confused too many people.
Awareness & engagement: consumers hadn’t ‘seen us’ in a number of years. Not just on shelf but online or in the community so we were not top of mind pre shop.
Portfolio Mix: from a style perspective, we didn’t have much in the way of ‘exploritory styles’ for mainstream craft drinkers who like a variety of choice.
Understanding the root issue through the consumer and customer lens
This was one of my favourite parts of the project. We needed to get primary data from both consumers and customers alike to confirm our assumptions before we started so we can solve the right challenges and not just the ones we assumed.
To start we worked with Skylar Wilton and Assocites to gather our consumer research. We looked at two drinker demographics first, those that we want to attract and those that “should be” in our funnel but have become lapsed drinkers.
At the end of a number of focus group research sessions and direct Q&A sessions, we confirmed some of our assumptions, consumers no longer recognized the brand in market (recent visual ID changes didn’t connect with consumers like before and no one could tell us what it was we stood for. A simple “who are Granville Island Brewing” lead to some pretty lackluster responses.
Something new we learned about ourselves could be summed up in one great response from a group member, “they are like a dads golf polo shirt, pretty straightforward, kind of dull, does what it’s supposed to but not something you wear anywhere else or talk about with folks”. “Someone that was cool, trying to be cool again but it’s not quite right”.
In the BC world of Craft Beer, this was death sentence.
The Fix in action.
The job infront of us was a big one and needed to be approached in 3 parallel work streams.
1. Reconnect with brands visual identity with the brands core identity.
We took the time to deep dive on our 40 year history to get a clear understanding of how we started, who we are and what visual ques we had that kept consumers along for the ride. From this research it was clear that we our visual ID post 2017-2018 had lost its sense of place and personality.
The visual ques of the current branding no longer connect the city of Vancouver our people of British Columbia, we had narrowed our focus too much on Granville Island the place and this excluded the rest of the city and providence (our primary market).
