123 - How to Define Your Brand's Key Messaging Pillars

0:00I'm still waiting for the day that a brewery hangs its hat on environmentally unresponsibly brewing objectively flawed beer for people they don't like flawed beer for flawed people is that anything that would kind of resonate with me actually yeah you just you're i mean i wouldn't i wouldn't drink it but i would laugh at it give me my give me my slop my lager slop

0:34hey cody what's up Not a whole lot, Isaac. How are you doing today? Cody, I am phenomenal. Today, we're going to discuss how to define your key messaging fillers. Nice. Some background, your brand identity, packaging, all this stuff is crucial for standing out. You need to build equity long-term. You need to drive sales, but these are just one part of your brewery's branding and marketing puzzle. Once you've got these components squared away, you have to continually build your brands. That includes building them internally with your customer service and behind the scenes relationships, you know, with distributors, retailers, et cetera.

1:11And it branches out from there to your social media presence, point of sale, materials, merch, environmental design, and more traditional channels like out of home. A big part of all this, of understanding what stories you should be telling, huge part of it actually is defining your key messaging and communication pillars. And that is our churched up way of saying which big ideas you want people to associate with your brand. That's as simple as it can be put. So what do you want people to think about when they hear your brewery's name? How do you want them to describe your brand to their friends?

1:42What big ideas and differentiators do you want them to remember when it comes time to buy some beer when they're looking at that beautiful planogram and trying to make a decision? So we've studied this topic for years. We've often found convoluted approaches for framing these messaging messages and kind of brand personality stuff out in the wild. So I remember going back to school, Cody, and reading books, just like kind of seeing needlessly complicated prompts and quizzes and flowcharts and like that. And it's not like it doesn't have to be that hard. So we're we over the last, I guess, 16 or so years have developed a few simple tools we use to help our clients frame their key messaging pillars.

2:20And we're just going to give those to you today. So let's get into it. man, are we doing this for free? I'm certainly not getting paid to be here. You're, you're all right. I guess you're not either. All right. How part one, I guess I should, I should keep everything on schedule here, right? How to frame your key messaging pillar. So one of our favorite ways of sussing out compelling ideas in our work is to have everyone on your team answer this question. If you could go into someone's head and put three or four big messages, big ideas, big stories about your brand in there, what would those be?

2:54Yeah, that's it. Really? Yeah. Hard, right? It does not need to be more complicated than that. But let's dive a little deeper here. Why don't you give us some examples of these sorts of messaging or the messages we see come up in our work maybe as of late? Did you have that list up? I sent that over before we started here. I do. Hold on. Here are some examples we've all seen in our project work. And I don't have to read all these, do I? Every single one. Okay. Well, we'll see about that. Every single one. Yeah, just go ahead. You heard the man. Okay. We've got, we are one of Canada's original craft breweries.

3:32We are the quintessential Upper Peninsula beer brand. We source all of our ingredients directly from Germany. I should mention these aren't all from the same brewery. You're probably wondering. This is the most interesting brewery in the world. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Super, super prolific. And really well positioned. Yeah. We are one of San Diego's most beloved breweries. We are your go-to Fridge Stocker beer. We are the No Frills Midwest Cocktail Company. And I think I'm done for now. I don't want to read any more of these. I think that our listeners understand how this works. There are five.

4:07Hold on. Six more examples. You coward. You read them. No. I insist that you read them. I refuse to be peer pressured. I won't be pressured into doing my job. All right. Okay. Uh, listener, please sound off in the Apple reviews or wherever you're on your zoom, wherever you're listening to this. Uh, do you have a good grasp of the type of key messaging we're talking about here? If you don't, I'll read off the rest of the list that Cody, uh, was supposed to do just to spite him. We use tech to grow the best cannabis in Michigan. We are Oregon's original craft brewery. We are the iconic Wisconsin Supper Club.

4:44Stay tuned. That's going to be a fun case study here in early 26. We deliver wild Alaskan seafood directly to your door. We make cider from apples grown on our family farm. We build our own whiskey barrels in-house at our own Cooperage. Wow, that was not hard to do. Cody, Corey, what do you do with these sorts of things after you get that big list together? What's the next step for our three or four listeners that are still here? Well, Isaiah, your first The first few attempts to put key messaging together will likely result in dozens of ideas. Say that again, actually. When you're starting out, you don't have to try to go for laser-focused bullseye right off the bat.

5:26Correct. Yeah. This is a situation where you're trying to come up with as many things as possible up front and then whittle them down. That's a creative process, just writ large also. Sure. Yeah. I mean, it's a great way to solve all kinds of problems. In this case, you can work with your team or branding partners, staff, et cetera. Once you have that big, long list of ideas, work with folks to window it down to three or four big ideas. You'll probably be able to group some, eliminate some because they're redundant. And so you might be - Maybe you sleep on it. Sorry. Maybe you sleep on it and they just end up not being that compelling.

5:58That's another common one. You come back a week later and you're like, what was I thinking? What was I doing there? Yeah, that's not good. What was I cooking? What did I know? Why did I die on that hill? You may now at this point be wondering, well, why do you need to get it down to three or four? And this is simply because folks out in the world have limited bandwidth. So the goal here is less but better. So how can one kill or combine your way to getting this list leaner, sharper? Our prompt to our clients is always to work to move beyond table stakes. Yeah, we should stay there for a minute too.

6:35It's important to challenge yourself to think beyond table stakes when revising these messages. So, and this comes up, anyone that works in design or messaging or positioning or marketing or whatever strategy will have heard these things before. Whenever we are working with a brewery through their strategy and helping them figure out their values and key communication pillars, there are just a handful of ideas that are almost always true for your brewery, but can also be claimed by a lot of your competition. And examples are not hard here. You know, we make high quality. We've actually started coding like in the last year saying, you know, tell us your core values, but don't use the word quality.

7:13Or like tell us what you stand for and stuff like that. Like just don't talk about quality. I know you use the best ingredients. I know you're community focused. I know you're environmentally responsible. We can list off 20 more. But those things just come up again and again. And it's not that they're not correct or true. It's just that they're not differentiated. So I'm still waiting for the day that a brewery hangs its hat on environmentally unresponsibly brewing objectively flawed beer for people. They don't like flawed beer for flawed people. Is that anything? That would kind of resonate with me actually.

7:48Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't, I wouldn't drink it, but I would laugh at it. Give me my, give me my slop, my lager. It's up to the trough. Yeah. Our, our ventures into homebrew is kind of like maybe falling into that Venn diagram. Oh yeah. Sour beer back in 2008, nine, we were making beer regularly. Yuck. Early on that trend. All right. So these things, you know, like high quality beer, again, are likely true and should guide how you act behind closed doors, but we're looking for true and compelling differentiators around which you can build your brand around, which we can kind of build your brand world around.

8:28So once you have a grasp on these big ideas, you can start to frame out what sort of brand personality and voice best fits your brand and everything ladders back up to these messages, messaging. So let's discuss the next part, which is part two of this outline. And this is an overview of how to define your brand personality. So we're kind of taking a step away here, but it's all building on each other. So Cody, brand personality, I think most people probably understand what that is, but let's define that real quick. It's definitely one of those self-defining terms because your brand personality is exactly what it sounds like.

8:59It's how you carry yourself, how you talk, how you treat people, how you act both online and in the real world. Now, this will manifest most immediately in your day-to-day social media posts and, you know, in your own on-premise customer interactions. From there, it spreads down all of your mainstream touch points, anywhere you're talking or interacting with anyone in the world. Beer names, event names, yeah, POS. We help clients sketch us out with another prompt. We ask everyone on your team, if your brand were a person, if it were to morph into some sort of horrible homunculus, what sort of personality traits would it have?

9:36A golem. Beer golem. How would that person act? Who would they be? What would they be like? Sometimes people name celebrities. Sometimes people just describe. So here's some examples we've seen in our work. You know, we're wry and clever, or we are blue collar. We're experimental. We are dedicated craftspeople. We are outdoorsy trout bums. That's a fun one. We're good-hearted stoners. Another fun one. We are worldly travelers, et cetera. You start to get an idea of who those people are. Yeah, we're foodies. We're shade tree mechanics. We're busy suburban dads, 20-something dog moms. What's Greg's?

10:16Relentless tinker. relentless tinkerer. Tinkerer is hard to say, but a super fun one there. Shout out to Printer's Ale. Hey, Greg. Hey, Greg. And just a quick process note here. In our earlier younger years, we did phrase this question, and I mentioned this before. If you're a brand-based celebrity - Oh, I'm glad. Okay. Yeah, I'm glad. I wanted to interrupt you. Yeah, go. Sorry. I mean, and I am interrupting you. Go ahead. I wanted to talk about this. I just - Sorry. I get disappointed if you don't interrupt me at this point in a relationship. it just wouldn't be it wouldn't be it wouldn't be my idea it can't be so we we used to ask we used to phrase it this way if your brand were a celebrity who would that be for years we did we ended up dropping the celebrity qualifier because like clockwork it would lead to one of two possible answers yeah oh i don't i don't i don't know who's i don't watch tv you know i don't I have no idea.

11:11Yeah. Yeah. So someone would feel flustered and be like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know celebrities. And like, okay. Understandable. Like some people are just tuned out from that or the other route. Good for you. Yeah. Yeah. No kidding. You're probably happier for it. Someone would answer with one of the same seven or eight people. It's super wild. We have heard this list of people on dozens of brewery branding projects. It shifts a little over time, depending on who's in the zeitgeist, but yeah, there's like eight or nine. Do you know who they are? Bill Murray, Matthew McConaughey, Paul Rudd, Ryan Reynolds, Robert Downey Jr., sometimes phrased in the form of Iron Man.

11:46Just Iron Man. Ron Swanson, Woody Harrelson. George Clooney is one that came up all the time, which is really funny because he's pretty nondescript. He's just handsome. We're handsome and talented. That's our brewery. I mean, that's how people describe you. There's no character there, just a handsome face. I'm like a saltine cracker with a really nice appearance. Just a hunk. Just a dead-eyed hunk. We never heard Robert Downey Jr.'s character from Tropic Thunder. Yeah, we didn't. I wonder why. That's weird. In the year of our Lord, 2026. Something else worth noting, and listeners who are switched on might already be thinking this, and we discussed this with a client a while back as well, we rarely hear females' names in this process.

12:30There's no value judgment or deeper thought here other than it is interesting. uh so cody can you actually think of any time we've heard a lady's name and like like a lady celebrity i guess a female celebrity so so to echo your point yes it's super it's so rare that it almost never happens we have definitely heard amelia erhart before yeah i guess that's right that's one very i'm thinking of one very specific uh aeronautic client but uh any others uh that you can think of you know i i'm not up to speed on stand-up comedy but i know we've heard a couple of female comedians as well. But the point you're making is super correct.

13:08It's like a 25 to one ratio. And not to say that's weird, but it's a little weird. It's interesting, at least. Maybe a big structural problem with a little bit of bias, strange bias there. All right. So you want to go through the same process. You mentioned this a moment ago, the same process of editing here is when you frame your key messaging pillar. So we meaning we want to get the list down to five, six, seven, eight. you know, somewhere in their personality traits. And again, why this amount gives you a cohesive foundation, but also enough room to kind of flex and, or I'm maybe using this word incorrectly, but code switch, you know, as a channel or situation calls for.

13:46So a few other questions you can tack on to this, uh, kind of brand as a person line of thinking can be, uh, you know, is this a man or a woman? How old are they? What does this person do for a living? Where do they live? What sort of house do they live in? Do they have a sense of humor? What are they into? You You know, what are they like, and I mean this lovingly, what are they obnoxiously passionate about? You know, what do you get up to outside of work? We don't care about what you do for a work. You know, like, what are you into? You know, what are their biggest strengths and weaknesses? How much can they bench?

14:16Yeah. That last one's not. Yeah. What do you, what do you deadlift, bro? How many teeth do you have? Oh, you got more teeth than me? You got a fully formed brain? Look at you. what is their biggest pet peeve? What do they hate? Who is their favorite band, et cetera, et cetera. You can kind of get the idea here. And you can go forever. I mean, it's fun stuff to help you build that out. But I will also say that we've never focused on brand archetypes. And this is a conversation we've had a handful of times over the last year or so. We've never focused on archetypes, framing them, or I guess, defining them in our strategy process, though it's not an indictment on that approach.

14:59I think we did this on a Q &A episode a while back. I feel like we've said this before. We've just found that defining your brand voice and personality by humanizing your brand in other ways is a clearer path of arriving at those same ideas than saying you're a jester or a wizard or like a falcon or whatever. A forager. Yeah. A spirit wolf. A lothario, a traveling lothario, tinkerer, just a guy who his way across the land or gal, whatever, you know, we're not judging your brand. I think, yeah, you mentioned this. I think we did a segment or perhaps even an entire episode on it. We'll throw that in the show notes.

15:39If, if I'm not hallucinating, we're not, we're not going to do that. You have to listen to the whole catalog to find it. I'm not doing that. All right. Okay. I like this. That's good. Yeah. No, you're not going to click through. let me know you the listener right now have you ever once done our show notes which we put so much time and energy and effort into have you ever clicked through them i'm just gonna start hiding easter eggs in there now if we stopped doing it would you care if we stopped the show would you care let us know you're not gonna yeah this is this actually like other than that this was actually i think a pretty good talk all right take us home please in conclusion i like saying your own conversation was good like yeah this is i think yeah we this was a really good episode dude dude we f***ing crushed this all right this is an important topic and it don't over complicate it what do you got cody i'll be quiet i promise i'll be quiet if you are to build a strong differentiated brand um it's mission critical for the long-term health and success of the brewery to define these pillars and to help figure out what the brand personality looks like but But so your brand, it's much more than your logo or packaging.

16:53It's a culmination of all the experiences people have with your brand and your reputation and everything that they think about when they think of you and everything that they feel. Huge part of shaping the story lies in defining your key messaging pillars, crafting your overall narrative so people understand who you are, what you stand for, and why your brewery should be their go-to. If you give this process the time it deserves, you'll create a strong foundation for all of your marketing efforts and set yourself up to create lifelong fans. This is me not talking.

17:30Roll that. Roll the outro music. Do it now. Do you think we'd get more listeners if we did ASMR stuff? I hope so. You have really gaudy purple nails on right now, which I wasn't going to say anything about but could you just like tick those against your mic yeah i'm gonna make a peanut butter sandwich and record the noises it makes i saw i saw a minivan yesterday i was out in greenfield taking my dad to the doctor and i saw a minivan that had you know calvin peeing on something oh yeah what was he pissing on that calvin's always yeah well he was whizzing on trump and whizzen on ice and then next to it oh that's that oh that's subversive yeah i know but then right next to that was a sticker that said beagle mom oh you had it had to be in the first half yeah did i send you the picture of the uh the big truck that i i was driving by it was it was a um a cement mixer and it had a a vat on the side that said lube core and i just thought that was really funny like i'm gonna go work at lube core yeah yeah yeah i think that's a great fit for you man i've i've really uh i'm gonna go in-house in-house meaning i'm just gonna mix concrete way more fun every day could you imagine doing that job in this weather we're recording this in winter by the way we don't need to date this but it's cold as shit outside are we recording we are recording right now all right well hey that's the outro we're leaving in there thanks for listening to beer branding trends if you like what we're doing here if you find this valuable, please rate and review us over on iTunes and head over to beerbrandingtrends.com to join more than 5 ,000 subscribers who receive our monthly email newsletter covering strategy, currents, and actionable advice from Kodo Design, a branding firm on the front lines of beer and beverage branding.

19:24Take care. We'll catch back up with you soon.