Nobody Cares About Your Brand. Here's What To Do About It.

A few things I've learned about hope, culture, and why you should steal Beavertown pint glasses.

Let me start with something that might sting a little: people don't give a damn about your brand. Not yours, not mine, not anyone's. They've got lives to live. They're not wandering around thinking about what your brand is up to today.

And yet, brands can matter enormously. The difference between the two is what I want to talk about.

There's a book called The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni that I keep coming back to. The premise is simple: everyone wants brilliant strategy, slick marketing, great finance. But the real advantage is knowing why you're doing what you're doing.

Think about a rainy Monday in January. Miles from payday. Everything feels awful. What gets you out of bed and logging on? Many of us, me included, have sometimes struggled to find an answer to that question.

When I came into Beavertown Brewery, the job was to take a much-loved, organic craft beer brand and grow it into the mainstream. The only way to do that without losing the soul of the thing was to understand and play to its roots. Not as a nice slide in a deck about values and personality. Actually understanding why the business exists, and making sure that truth runs through everything.

There will always be someone younger, cheaper, more exciting, or more available than you. Your roots, your real reason for existing, are the only thing that creates genuine difference.

Rational and emotional difference. And you need both.

Great brands have to work on two levels at once. The rational side is table stakes: right shelf, right price, right distribution. You have to play the same game as everyone else on that front. But rational alone doesn't build anything worth caring about, beyond a functional and transactional relationship.

The emotional connection is where it gets interesting. I love The 1975. Probably more than I should. There's no wholly rational explanation for it…I just connect with them. That's what the best brands do. They make you feel something.

(I also think The 1975 are a Millennial INXS, but that's another discussion.)

At Beavertown, one of the most important decisions we ever made was to not take ourselves too seriously. Beer, done well and done responsibly, with mates, should be fun.

Just because a category is serious, inward-looking and obsessed (even possessed) with geography and borders, doesn't mean you have to be. Progressive thinking takes you beyond lines in the sand.

We once ran an ad that just said, "Is this a beer ad?"

That's the spirit.

Steal things.

I've said this enough times that it must be true by now: Beavertown had, maybe still has, the most stolen pint glass in the UK. And I actively encouraged it.

Think about what that means. Every morning, someone opens their cupboard to grab a glass of water and there's the brand, staring back at them. You'd pay a fortune to get that kind of daily presence any other way. Instead, someone just took the glass home. They got a glass. We got brand awareness. Everyone wins.

It's a small thing. But it says something bigger: playfulness works. Brands that are culturally relevant to the moment they're in will always be stronger than those that aren't.

Be in the conversation.

If you're talking about what people are already talking about, you stand out. It sounds obvious, but most brands are still broadcasting at people rather than joining a conversation.

One of the things I'm most proud of is the partnership Beavertown had with CALM — (Campaign Against Living Miserably). People told me you could never put alcohol and mental health in the same conversation. But here's the real thing: people open up after a pint. They say things in a pub, to their mates, that they wouldn't feel comfortable saying anywhere else.

We're living through a mental health crisis. People spend most of their lives stressed and anxious. If we nudged a few of those pub conversations somewhere more open, honest, and helpful, then maybe we actually added some value. Not as a campaign. As a genuine point of view.

We've also worked with Queens of the Stone Age, one of the great rock bands of the last twenty years. They'd been on hiatus, had a new album coming, and didn't want to make a traditional music video. So we put them into Beavertown's world, animated in our visual language. They were headlining Glastonbury. We launched the video that same week. We were in the conversation, not on the edges of it.

So what does all of this add up to?

Know your roots. Find the emotional truth of what you're doing and make sure it runs through everything, not just the big campaigns, but the small stuff too. The pint glass. The charity partnership. The ad that asks if it's an ad.

The brands that matter aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the cleverest strategies. They're the ones that are honest about who they are, relevant to the culture around them, and brave enough to be playful when everyone else is being serious.

Nobody cares about your brand. But if you do all of this right, they might just steal your pint glass.