5 tips on brand building from James Watt, cofounder of BrewDog

If you haven’t heard of BrewDog (or read this week’s Marketing History newsletter…shame on you), then stop what you’re doing and dive into this email.

Under the bold and unapologetic leadership of James Watt—self-proclaimed Captain of BrewDog—this scrappy homebrew operation skyrocketed into a global beer empire worth BILLIONS. 

But it wasn’t always smooth sailing. When the big beer brands laughed at him, James leaned into “punk” branding—a fearless, rule-breaking approach that turned NAYsayers into YAYsayers.

Here are five brand-building lessons straight from the top dog himself:

1. This is Vital for Creativity:

“I love constraints. 

Most companies in the face of a constraint get frustrated, they’re annoyed, irritated.

Constraints are actually amazing catalytic forces that you can use to unlock a higher level of thinking that’s going to push your brand and business forward.

So every time you have a constraint, lean into it with the right attitude, you can come up with something that’s significantly better than any amount of money or resources can offer.

We couldn’t get finance into our business, so we came up with a way to shorten the distance between us, our customers, and build an amazing community around our business.

We didn’t have any money for marketing or advertising. We drove a tank through the streets of London and earned a huge amount of media coverage without having to pay for it. 

Constraints are huge for creativity.

2. Moves to Disrupt:

With our journey everything was disruption, because we knew if we didn’t make a statement we would get lost.

One of my favorite stories happened one day when I picked my daughter up from school, the week before we had launched a campaign called the Death to the Fat Cats.

So we got a helicopter, flew over the Bank of England in Central London, stuffed taxidermy cats, put them in suits and threw them out of a helicopter that was 2000 feet above Central London.

We filmed it, and we made an amazing video. I was terrified hanging out in the helicopter, but the content was amazing. So my daughter Evie was four years old at the time and I remember picking her up from school and her teacher said to me, “James, I’m concerned about Evie.

All kids have fantastic imaginations, but I’m concerned Evie’s imagination is going a little bit too far. She said that her dad last week was hanging out of a helicopter with taxidermy cats and throwing them out with parachutes over central London.”  

And I responded to the teacher, yeah that ACTUALLY happened LOL.

Over the course of our history, we’ve done so many things, which have been low budget, high intensity, and gotten us a huge amount of impact. 

We have projected ourselves naked onto the Houses of Parliament, we made the world’s strongest beer.

We’re always putting things on the line for what we believed in and always trying to be disruptive and innovative in terms of what we do.

And I think we’re seeing a huge evolution in how Marketing is done, but I find it so frustrating that so many people try to reduce marketing to bottom of funnel metrics.

If you do that, you miss out on such a huge component of Marketing, which is emotion, connection, engagement, all these are very difficult to measure but magical intangibles that drive growth.

3. Genuine Advocacy:

The best partnerships have that authenticity and genuine love for the brand, the product, the mission.

What we often say to brand partners is to take a tiny bit of your influencer Marketing budget and rather than give that $5,000 to one influencer with 1M followers who’s going to do one post, give that $5,000 to 500 of your customers to do 500 posts.

They get $10 each and it’s going to be a downswell of authentic organic brand love, which is going to get more eyeballs, more engagement, more views than that one post to a macro influencer. 

It comes back to the idea that happy customers are your best Marketers. 

So if you can just get that voice that they’re speaking in the pub with their friends and amplify it on a channel like socials, that is the new age form of word of mouth Marketing.

4. Genius Viral Loop:

When we launched a beer or a new location, we would incentivize our community to post about it. 

So we launched a new location in Las Vegas and told our community that if they post about the new location on their socials and come in on opening night, they could come to the bar, show us the post and get a free beer.

This just creates this tidal wave of organic content to build buzz.

Every Marketer wants to build hype and buzz, but it’s impossible to do that top down, it’s got to be organic, grassroots. It’s got to come from people who love what you do. 

Now you can help facilitate that, which is exactly what we do via discounts, or free beers if they post about the new launch.

5. Marketing Hill:

A Marketing hill that I would die on is community engagement is the most underrated aspect of Marketing that CMOs and Marketers can think about. 

I spend so much of my time investing in consumer companies and they’ve always got all these big brand concepts, campaigns, pop-ups. That’s amazing, but the building block of any effective Marketing is answering the question of how you can engage your community? 

What can you do in terms of community that your competition can’t or won’t do?

This gives you so much information as to what you should be making, how your biggest fans see you. 

Always start with community and always answer that question.”