Thanks for having me. My official title is Marketing Manager, but my role has changed a lot over the two years I’ve been part of the collective. My main focus is managing Point of Sale from procurement, to sales support, to e-commerce. When we begin to emerge from the pandemic, I’ll resume working on  large industry events like Great American Beer Festival and Craft Brewers Conference. Additionally, I support market research and consumer insights. 

CANarchy is a collective of craft breweries including Oskar Blues Brewery, Cigar City Brewing, Squatters Craft Beers, Wasatch Brewery, Deep Ellum Brewing Company, Perrin Brewing Company, and recovery beverage company Revitalyte. On top of that we have, at last time I checked, 16 pubs and taprooms around the country and eight manufacturing locations. It’s a pretty big and diverse beast.

A lot! I’m always surprised by what’s next. For me, I’m more of an operations-focused marketer who works with the creatives, but also closely with our sales team, wholesalers, and logistics folks. I consider myself more of a ‘phone calls and spreadsheets’ marketer rather than a ‘colors and words’ marketer. However, I do work alongside some great folks who do just that really well. 

At the CANarchy level we have five: an all-purpose marketing project manager (that’s me), a director of digital marketing, a PR manager, and a digital creative director. But to put that into context, each CANarchy brewery has its own marketing team on the ground that executes their day-to-day. At the CANarchy level, we support at 10,000 ft to jump in when needed, but the individual breweries drive.

A few instances. The big one is the CANarchy Mixed Pack which features IPAs from Oskar Blues, Cigar City, Deep Ellum, and Three Weavers. It’s a cross-country beer tour. Oskar Blues and Cigar City are easy to get everywhere, but Three Weavers and Deep Ellum distribute on a smaller scale in California and Texas, respectively. So a drinker in Florida who loves Cigar City’s Jai Alai can pick up a pack and have a great experience trying these two brands with which they might not be familiar. In a perfect world he or she ends up taking a trip to Los Angeles or Dallas at some point in the future and they remember, “I gotta stop by that brewery I tried in the mixed pack.” 

It’s always a challenge defining that relationship. Marketing and sales think they are very different: marketing wants all the time in the world to make the perfect plan, while on the other hand sales is motivated and competitive to get their products to market and beat the competition. But in reality, they complement each other’s skills and differences. I’ve always joked that I have the best job in the company because I get to have one foot in the marketing team, and the other foot directly supporting the sales team. It’s a fun challenge. I’ve learned a lot. 

Point of Sale items run the gamut from those high-ticket items like retail displays, and signage like LEDs, to more affordable and high-volume things like tap handles, coasters, shelf talkers, and bottle openers for servers. Whatever our sales team needs to get cans in hands, we support it. Tap handles, to me, can be pieces of art: Oskar Blues innovated craft beer in a can and for years their draught handle was literally a 12 oz. can. That’s some cool irony. Deep Ellum’s Dallas Blonde is a figurine head of a blonde woman with all of these intricately molded features. There’s so much creative license breweries can take with their point of sale. 

First they should make sure everyone down the funnel is on board with what to expect and what their goals are: marketing creating the assets, sales/wholesalers knowing what SKUs they are offering to whom, and the retailer planning to offer them. I’d start with:

• Tap handles: when you have made all of that effort to secure a draught line, make sure you have a piece of art that the consumer is going to look at and say “Yeah, I’ll take that one!” 

• Corrugated displays: these are really effective to get incremental floor space especially as more and more brands are fighting for limited space on the planogram at an off-premise retailer 

• Giveaways trinkets: stickers, keychains, etc. are cheap and effective leave-behinds to keep at a cash register or at the end of a bar for the intrigued consumer to take home. Just look at a random person’s Nalgeen bottle covered in their favorite brands. 

The industry is diversifying quickly and a lot is going to happen over the next five to eight years, including not only consumer trends but more craft beer producers exploring beverages beyond beer. For example, Revitalyte joined our collective last year as our first non-alcohol brand. Entering into the recovery beverage category diversifies the collective and gives us new opportunities to reach thirsty people. I’m keen to see what happens with ready-to-drink cocktails, spirits, iced teas, and kombucha. 

To an extent, but CANarchy is a collective of independent craft breweries, and each brand is unique and different. 

One great edge that CANarchy does have is the scalability of the collective. One brand can pick up a white space idea, work on the kinks, and decide if it’s a good investment. If it doesn’t work out, we can just move on… or we can pitch it to another brewery where it might fit. Conversely, if it does work out, we can spread that success to other breweries in the collective. Our seltzer portfolio is a good example of that. 

At the moment, CANarchy is the support infrastructure for these killer individual brands. However, in the past, we executed a really cool CANarchy Island at GABF where we were all positioned together for consumers to see, and there’s the CANarchy Mixed Pack.

Looking forward, CANarchy recently launched VII by CANarchy, a 7% ABV very hard seltzer in a 16 oz. can. It’s infused with electrolytes, and comes in some very striking packaging. We chose to brand this new seltzer ‘by CANarchy’ instead of part of a specific brand family because we have a bit more room to experiment with the CANarchy brand and build some brand equity in CANarchy itself in a B2C position. Taking a risk with an innovation, in this case like a higher-ABV seltzer, could give us independent feedback for future exercises for individual brand families.

In conclusion, the best way to put it is that CANarchy is like the NFL, but Oskar Blues is like the Denver Broncos or Deep Ellum is like the Cowboys. The NFL wants people to get involved, to choose their favorite team to cheer for, banter with their friends about, root for in the Super Bowl that is GABF, and wear the gear. No one is just wearing an NFL hat except for Rob Lowe.

A lot of the B2B marketing in the beer space is done by the sales and marketing folks in their ABP (annual business plan) meeting, pitching and planning what each brewery is bringing to the bar and the shelf for that next year. Since much of my personal role revolves around the B2B e-commerce for sales and wholesalers, my goal throughout the year is to 1.) help get our POS portfolio ready for those meetings and 2.) always have the resources and inventory available to drive placements and sales, since not everything goes to plan and the environment changes. 

Secondly, and more specifically to answer the question, breweries should be aware that social media reaches both the consumer and industry insiders. Social media is often focused on the consumer: new events, new beers, quick videos of the brewery’s culture. I’d encourage those marketing teams to keep beer buyers in mind, too, when writing copy and staging the photos. They may have a slightly different ‘eye’ for your content. 

Well, firstly CODO’s stories are really cool. Also, many folks know Good Beer Hunting, but I personally enjoy their Read. Look. Drink. segment. Their staff posts what they’re reading, looking at (something visual), and sipping on. It peels back the personality of the writers. 

I religiously read Shane Parrish’s Farnam Street blog and The Knowledge Project podcast. It offers brilliant and timeless lessons on decision making. I suggest it to every smart person I know. My favorites: The Difference Between Amateurs and Professionals and Chris Bosh—Hunger and Greatness, respectively.      

I’d have to say our CANarchy Island at Great American Beer Festival. I moved out for this job the July prior, and had only a few months as the new guy to get these seven craft breweries together under one roof at the biggest beer event in the country. 

I had never been to GABF before, so it was a trial by fire that went off smoothly with a lot of hard work. We even took home some medals! 

And thank you! Can’t wait to keep reading more of your stories.