Connecting customers with craft beer in just three weeks
Family-owned brewery Fourpure wanted to bring their vision and passion for beer to life. With an audacious 3-week deadline, they needed insight, actionable feedback, and a clear direction forward.
Like many of the best things in life, brewing is a combination of art and science. In a huge building in a trading estate in South-East London, Fourpure combine industrial equipment with the very human blending of ingredients and techniques to produce a huge range of small-run beers.
The craft beer sector is growing spectacularly. Just in the first 8 months of 2017, sales of canned craft beer rose 327% in the UK. Since launching in 2013, Fourpure has been a story of breakneck expansion, investing millions in equipment and now employing over 60 people to meet demand.
In 2018 the brewery was bought by Australian brewers Lion (the company behind Castlemaine XXXX). With the extra investment comes further pressure for growth. The brothers behind the company realised it was time to look again at Fourpure’s branding and product range.
They wanted to understand how the craft beer market has changed since 2013, and what today’s buyers want. With a limited budget, Fluxx had only three weeks so we needed to get in-front of Fourpure customers and craft beer drinkers as quickly as possible.
Our aim was to understand what makes them tick, why they like craft beer and why they buy it. Is Fourpure something you take to a party on a Saturday night or is it something to savour on the sofa with a good book? How much is too much to spend on a craft beer and why is it worth spending that bit extra over more mainstream lagers?
We spent the first week meeting customers, everywhere from student union bars to the Facebook offices. From 16 interviews we created 5 personas.
These character sketches gave the Fourpure team a much clearer idea of who they are making beer for. It’s not just the bearded craft beer obsessives who come down to the brewery every Thursday evening. We wanted to understand the girls who pick up a four pack from Tesco on the way to a dinner party.
Along the way, we realised that the company tag line: “Inspired by adventure” just wasn’t landing. Customers did not associate the brand with adventure, just with great beer.
With initial research done, we cracked on with what we called Minimum Viable Branding. In just two days we took the insights from our research and created new can designs, motifs and names, then put them in front of real customers.
We invited 50 customers and potential customers to the brewery tap. Five experiment stations were set up around the bar where consumers interacted with various aspects of the brand.
They played association games, compared brand desirability, and reacted to branding themes, colours, and packaging concepts.
Some people called it a piss-up in a brewery. We didn’t put it quite like this on the night, but the bar became a high-throughput design and branding lab that raised authentic questions in an authentic environment.
Since the event, Fourpure have taken the human-centred approach to branding and run with it. They’ve now created more than ten iterations
of the new can designs, each time putting their work in front of customers and making decisions based on real evidence.
To find out more about our work at Fluxx, check out Fluxx Studio Notes on Medium, download our latest book, or sign up to our Newsletter.
Rory is an Innovation Consultant at Fluxx. To read more of his articles, check out My Mum is Becoming a Data Scientist at 54. Adam Slawson also contributed to this article, you can read more from him here [Digital] Transformation vs. Culture.
