When Should You Rebrand Your Brewery?
We frequently get asked, “How often should breweries rebrand?”
To answer this, it’s useful to look at the history of brewery rebrands in the BC market.
The craft beer industry in BC started off in 1984. It grew slowly for a while but began to accelerate in 2013, when regulations changed to allow breweries to operate their own tasting rooms.
For our blog post on BC Brewery Logos earlier this month we did a survey and counted 225 breweries in the province. That includes brew pubs and contract brewing brands.
According to our research, 32 breweries in BC have rebranded themselves. That’s a new name, a new logo, or drastically different packaging.
This next graphic shows the timelines of those 32 breweries. The 3 that started back in 1984… those are on the bottom-left. Other breweries were added as the years went by.
Green triangles indicate the year each brewery was founded. Every circle is a rebrand. Yellow stars indicate ownership changes. and blue squares are name changes.
We included ownership changes and name changes because they were easy to find while researching this topic. The other reasons behind the various brewery rebrands are less easy to discover from the outside looking in.
Our data here from 1984 to 2004 is spotty. In the days before everything was documented on social media it’s harder to find specifics about things like brewery logo designs. We’ve done some digging, but there’s still more left to do here. (If you can fill in any gaps, please let us know!)
Now, if we overlay the timelines of those breweries that have rebranded we can compare the timing of their rebrands to the overall growth of the market.
As you’d expect, the number and frequency of rebrands starts to increase as the market becomes more saturated. We also start to see more rebrands happening each year. 2017 saw 12 BC breweries rebrand. 2019 has only seen 3, (but the year’s not out yet.)
Looking at this you might be thinking about the size of the breweries. How big were they when they rebranded? It’s a really good question. Unfortunately, we’re still researching this. The data has been difficult to track down.
Frequency of Brewery Rebrands
We’ve shown this chart to a couple of brewery owners and their immediate follow up question is always: “So… what’s the average number of years between rebrands?”
So the tricky part about that question is, where do you start measuring from? If you start with the launch of the 3 original craft breweries back in 1984, the average number of years between brewery rebrands is a lot different than if you start measuring more recently. And brewery owners want to know this number because of how it affects them in the current market, not just out of historical curiosity about the old days.
As previously mentioned, our data from 1984 to around 2004 is still a bit spotty. So we decided to cut that time period out of the equation.
For the purposes of answering this question we decided to draw a line in the sand at the beginning of 2005. It’s completely arbitrary. But the market has changed so much since 2005 that it’s also kind of necessary for the next bit of info to have any relevance to the current market.
On average, BC Breweries rebrand every 4.9 years*
*Since 2005
This could be useful info to know as you consider long-term planning for your brewery.
It could also be useful when evaluating your competitors… trying to estimate when they might rebrand.
Related posts: Do’s & Don’ts When Rebranding A Brewery
If you’d like to discuss rebranding your brewery, please get in touch.