‘Strategy without pain is just cosplay’: What Brewdog’s decline teaches us about marketing
Here Four Pillars co-founder Matt Jones explains that a brand is shaped by what an organisation repeatedly chooses to do, rather than what marketing says it is.
The lesson is to get out of “the wrong room” and start working at the heart of a business.
Real punk: BrewDog's James Watt and Martin Dickie in a "Death to fat cats" stunt from 2015
Last week, it took Brewdog just an 11-minute Teams call to tell its staff that almost 500 of them would be losing their jobs, alongside the immediate closure of 38 venues. The redundancies and closures were the consequence of Brewdog’s sale to Tilray Brands, a US packaged goods company with a portfolio spanning cannabis products and craft beer.
Not on the call were the tens of thousands of consumers and supporters who had invested in Brewdog through its iconic, and brand-reinforcing, “Equity for Punks” scheme. Those fans invested around £75m in Brewdog. At its peak, Brewdog was reported to be worth up to £2bn (about A$4b or roughly two and a half Eucalyptuses). Now those retail investments are officially worth nothing.
Alongside the staff who lost their jobs and the investors who lost their shirts, I found myself thinking about another group: Brewdog’s marketing and communications team. Just last year, Brewdog cheerily announced “a new era”, declaring that “2025 is about putting our community and beer lovers back at the heart of this business”. They even reached for that beloved catch-cry of Linkedin’s eager entrepreneur class: “we’re just getting started”.
Brand demolition: Brewdog made plenty of decisions out of line with its stated values
A really, really good article!
You remind me of the old saying about us living in deeds, not words, and the former affect how brands are perceived even when we use the latter to lessen or heighten the impact.
In the end, it all comes down to understanding who really is in it for the money. Venture capitalists may be generous and altruistic at home but they expect a return on their investment in the market. The determinant factors become how much and how soon.