125 - How to map out your Brand Architecture

0:00I do not want to eat you. Yeah, I know. No, you don't. I've got a lot of like heavy metals and toxins. I'm going to get trichinosis. I mean, it's kind of a matter of time before we just go nuts in this office and just start gnawing on each other. Yeah, it's not good. We need to start working from home more often. I mean, we do. I'm in there like once a week and I still want to beat the shit out of you. All right.

0:37hey cody what's up not a whole lot isaac how are you doing today cody i am doing excellent and today we're going to review our year-end beer branding trends newsletter we sent back in let me check my calendar the end of 2025 wow so we've been sitting on this one for a while guys We've been waiting for the right time. Pouncing. We are timely, as always. The reason we have not talked about this for a while is that it is becoming part, this is not an official announcement, but it's becoming part of what will likely become the beginnings of V2 of our Beyond Beer Handbook. Again, not committing publicly to that, but we've learned so much about brand architecture.

1:21We published that, I think, coming up on two years or a little over two years maybe ago. And we just continue drinking from the fire hose every day. And this is part of that. So, yeah. Yeah. I remember seeing this newsletter come through and being a little taken aback that we didn't decide to include it in the book itself. Well, yeah. The thing you got to remember is that you and I are dipshits. I know that we have a podcast and that means that we have authority, but we don't. We're just two idiots. And, you know, we're just trying our best. You know, we're just living and learning. We are two Indiana dipshits.

1:57So fly over. Hayseed corn dogs. Yeah, just dips. I mean, like good hearted and we work hard and we take care of our people, but we are ultimately from Indiana. So actually really quickly, let's just completely waste our listeners time. Do you remember Micah? This is almost 20 years ago now going to San Francisco for a portfolio review in school that was like in 2000. Oh yeah, no, we were like still in college. We were babies. yeah it's a huge part of kodo lore i think we should tell the story so our listeners are let inside the inside joke okay you're gonna need to fill in some blanks here uh yeah there's a chip on my shoulder too because you guys were sent to this portfolio show well we were why and i was not so well we were regarded as some of the best which means all now which is really funny but we were regarded as some of the best design students in the country no big deal you weren't i was and micah so there's that now wait i didn't go to san francisco i went to brooklyn it doesn't matter yeah again i didn't go so yeah well you you you know you you weren't a big dog you were you were around so anyway uh who cares doesn't matter there was a very fancy designer guy as all fancy designer guys are in academia they're they've you know i don't want to be a dick but you know they never really had a job and they're whatever um so this was but this back in 2008 9 in particular this is the heyday for designers being i don't i don't even know how to describe it yeah like if you picture like the guys from zoolander design designers acted like that actually that's that's real that's apt that's really good they were it's just absurd and i remember like i was a hillbilly and like i played football i got drunk in cornfields and i went to art school and I'm surrounded by these aliens is, is just such a weird, it's why it's why we had to start Codo.

3:57Like I, I wouldn't be in the industry if we hadn't started. Yeah. And you're trash. Yeah. I think that's something we connected over pretty, pretty firmly. Yeah. It's like, what, what the fuck is going on? Anyway. Okay. So the punchline, uh, is that some head in San Francisco, some like psycho mantis dressed weirdo looked at Micah's portfolio, uh, laid out on the table and said, wow, this is a really good portfolio. You're probably the best designer in the Midwest. That's it. That's the whole story. Yeah. Which is hilarious because, you know, there were two dozen designers we all looked up to that were also objectively better than us.

4:34To this day. Right there in Indiana, let alone the Midwest. Yeah. We're friends with easily two dozen designers who are outclass anything that we can make all day. Yeah. It's just absurd. It's such a stupid. Anyway, Indiana. All right. 19 minutes into the show. Now let's get into this. So going back to 2005, the end of it, here's a setup for this newsletter issue. And we're going to link to that in the show notes, et cetera. So here's what we asked. I'm just going to kind of cheat and read through it. What does your next year look like? That's what we opened this issue on. And then we went on to say, if you are planning to launch a new beer or launch a new brand, beer or beyond, are you launching a new beer series, opening a new location, acquiring another brand or business, selling one of your brands or businesses, scaling one of your brands via the sub-brand ladder, line extending part of your existing portfolio or a specific product, rationalizing your portfolio, creating a co-branded product, forming a hospitality group, refreshing your brewery's brand and packaging.

5:38I haven't read this in a long time. That's obnoxious. That list is way too long. But my point is that if you're doing any of this, those are inherently brand architecture problems. And if you do not pause long enough to work through what each of those mean to your overall model, your concept, your business, you're going to end up with a very tangled mess that your customers, and we see this regularly in our work, even your own team kind of struggles to understand. So I don't think we need to run through most of that, Cody, but I think that we do continually and should continually beat this drum.

6:10Tell me why brand architecture is such an important topic and pretend that you and I haven't written a book on the subject. Tell our listeners why this matters and why it is so important today. Yeah. I mean, even like some of the things, some of the benefits you get out of having a firm grasp on your brand architecture, just even at a glance, it's a process that can help you understand how everything you do, all your different brands, your products, current and future, how those add up together to build a more resilient business. Something that can help you make quicker decisions when you're bringing new products to market.

6:44So it helps clarify a lot of uncertainty. It's something that can help you identify opportunities for new brand development and line extensions. You know, you might look at everything together and go, wow, we're not doing this at all, but we could. And distributors asking for this. Yeah, Y is ever considered X or Y or Z. identifying space you can move into with clarity, help you find opportunities to streamline communication and budget efforts. You know, maybe you're doing something duplicative that's hamstringing you. We see that a lot. It's help you future-proof, new product development pipeline.

7:19You know, always be looking out ahead. What are you going to need to move on here in the short term and then in the longer term? You know, you can protect your brand from cannibalization and dilution. You know, are you releasing any products that are stepping on each other's toes or are they being polite dance partners and working together in concert? Oh, I love that metaphor. Present a more compelling, cohesive narrative to your fans overall. It's like, does your s*** make sense? Like when you put it out there all together in the zoomed out sense, can people tell what you're up to? You need to do more of Kodo's writing because you're better at it than me.

7:57And my metaphors are always like, are you going to cannibalize and eat yourself? And you talk about dancing and other frolicking. I do like bringing up consuming human flesh. That's an interesting angle. However, you know, you can also dance. You can dance and eat people. I recently, well, I love a good sea story, as do many of men. And I recently read The North Water. Anyway, I was telling my kid about it. My kids are now fascinated by the idea that people survive at sea by eating other people. So we're going to have some parent-teacher conferences, I'm sure, soon. That's what you do out there in the open water.

8:36There's a term. I think it's the custom of the sea. Have you heard this? Oh, no. It's so funny. Oh, no. It's just an accepted idea that if we go out to sea and we get in the s***, I'm going to eat. You're going to die first, hopefully, naturally. But I'm going to nibble on it. Make some chili. Make some tacos. Bisque. Yeah. Bisque. I feel like. I feel like. I'm not going to eat you. Yeah. I know. No, you don't. I've got a lot of like heavy metals and toxins. I'm going to get trichinosis. I mean, it's kind of a matter of time before we just go nuts in this office and just start gnawing on each other.

9:12Yeah. It's not good. That's. We need to start working from home more often. I mean, we do. I'm. I still. I'm in there like once a week and I still want to beat the shit out of you. All right. This is going to be either our best episode or our worst episode ever. Why don't you take this next section? You wrote the newsletter. Yeah. You ostensibly are the expert here. I'm just going to issue an apology to our 37 list. I'm sorry. You know, we're not doing well. This is just a rough time right now. No. So what are we doing? Okay. So we've established a brand architect, TLDR. Brand architecture is important.

9:52So how do you map this stuff out? Again, to your point, Cody, how did we not include that in the book? Because we didn't have a formal, we were making these maps, but we didn't have a formal way of kind of communicating that to the reader at that time. It's a very simple answer along with being dipshit. So how do you map out your brand architecture? You can jump straight into the computer. But what we like to do at Kodo, this isn't like a big performative thing, but I love a good whiteboard or just a piece of paper. If you're more digitally inclined, you can jump in Illustrator or whatever. Pick the tool.

10:28It doesn't matter. But I think your first few rounds of charting everything out are going to be messy. But that's okay because it's iterative and you're building towards the final list. So step one here, we say this every episode also, you're definitely going to want to click on show notes and click the link there. This will walk you through everything we're getting ready to say, but it occurs to me that this is, you know, pretty visual. So list everything out. Start by listing out all your products. Don't worry about the form it takes you at, like how fancy the chart is. Literally just list out flagship beers, seasonal beers, specialty, rotator, LTO.

11:02And then the next thing for any, obviously, fourth category stuff you got going on, Seltzer's RTD, HopBot, or whatever. From there, we're trying to get a sense of the rest of your entire business. You know, Kodo has done this for our own business. He lists out your locations, your co-branded products, special events, community partnerships, anything that represents either an important touch point with your customers or obviously like a big revenue stream. So that could include merch, that can include catering, event center, co-manning. You know, that's one that we have a lot of clients doing right now as well.

11:33You know, manufacturing stuff for folks, contract brewing. And finally, any upcoming products. This is an important one. So, you know, things that you are either interested in, things that you think, categories, I guess we'll make this more concrete, right? New beers, NA products, segments, categories, locations, acquisitions, anything that could be on the horizon. Because again, you mentioned it in passing or I did, I can't remember amongst to all the cannibalism talk, the idea of future-proofing decisions and kind of collapsing the time it takes to make decisions. We're trying to call those shots now.

12:05So there's that. So, okay, you've got this massive list of stuff now. What do you do with all of that? Let me scroll down on my newsletter because I'm not going to use my brain. It's too early. I just want to cheat and read. Your next step is to group these. We do these intuitively by grouping them into a chart form. And again, click the link in the show notes. you'll see this pretty clearly there. But the form your map takes will shift based on how you organize your portfolio and brands. So just as a kind of shorthand here, a branded house portfolio might fit on one page, whereas a house of brands or, you know, like I guess technically it would be like a hybrid brand where you have kind of a branded house, a few sub brands, more of like an overarching house of brands, but it gets in the weeds really quickly.

12:49But that stuff could might span several pages and that's okay. There's no right or wrong answer here. And again, this is all iterative. It's going to be intuitive, but what we like to do with our clients is think at a big 30 ,000 foot view. So just like what are the big kind of top line categories? So obviously beer would be probably a healthy one, right? So you might have flagships and IPA series, your seasonals, barrel age, like anything that is beer lives under beer. We can then sub set it after that. Seltzer, spirit, hop water. I mean, I don't want to just be obnoxious and list a bunch of stuff, but you list all that stuff out to start.

13:28I think interesting here to point out too, is that it's not just product categories that we're pointing out necessarily. You might also touch on venues or hospitality outlets. So tap rooms, brew pubs, catering, event centers, other locations you own, and almost treat those things as products, too, just to help you think about them. We put out a template for all of this, didn't we? We did. I was going to save that as a surprise for the end, so that's great. Thank you. But actually, it does make more—we probably should have led with that because that's probably one of the reasons why this newsletter is so important.

14:04We do have a template. You just download it and write all over it. So I'm really sorry for scooping you. Cody, that was my gift to give the listener. I can't even focus right now. I'm so furious. I'm so hungry for long pig.

14:22My daughter's also obsessed with that idea. I should not have told her this stuff. She's nine. Yeah, you got to let them like get their feet settled before you start telling them about long pig. Did you know that man tastes like pig? Well, no, no, I didn't, dad. All right. Where are we? You go. You just I'm going to drink coffee. You talk. Please try to salvage this. Yeah, I will try to be the bridge that holds up this fractured relationship. Step three, you want to specify an overarching model. So unless you know your overarching brand architecture model from the jump, we usually save the step for last because all the work you did in steps one and two that we've discussed.

15:08Along with just brand strategy at large, it's going to dictate the correct model or models. In a really simplified sense, your choices here are branded house, house of brands, or a hybrid brand. And for what it's worth, we rarely see our clients fall neatly into one of those buckets. It's even smaller breweries that might produce a few thousand barrels per year can have a fairly complex architecture map with fourth category brands, sub brands, line extensions, multiple locations, types of locations. I think sub a thousand too. I mean, I know it's very subjective, but, but like, you know, folks making four or 500 barrels a year can have that, that sort of complexity too.

15:48Yeah, it really, you don't, this isn't a, this isn't a thing where only big breweries have to deal with this. And that's why this is valuable. Even if you're not the biggest guy on the block, this process can still help you wrangle everything and spot areas for your improvement. When I am putting the links in the show notes, I'll also mention that we've recorded episodes on all of these topics. I mean, like at length. So we'll include that there too. But the bigger takeaway is to read the Beyond Beer Handbook. That's a full rundown of this entire subject. Click the link in the show notes to get your template.

16:18But it's not buried under like some email gate or anything. You just download it. Cody, other than ruining my day, do you have anything to add to kind of wrap us up here? No, just that I'm mortified and I'm terribly sorry that I've let you down. And I hope the listeners forgive us. Forgive you. I don't have anything to apologize for. I hope the listeners forgive me. Yeah. Okay. And also that they go to beyondbeerbook.com and grab a copy of this phenomenal resource on brand architecture. We should have an epilogue in that book about survival cannibalism. Yeah, when all else fails. If you do not understand how to position your new RTD, just know that if you're ever lost at sea.

17:11It would honestly be a way better book if we did s*** like that. Yeah, it would. so i love uh i we haven't written a book in several years but uh she was much younger then but i remember like maddie right in the room looking at it going boring and then and she's right dad's books are boring yes sweetie they are she's right more pictures all right thank you cory thank you isaiah 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.

17:55Take care. We'll catch back up with you soon.