The branding geography of surrey craft breweries

Abstract

The craft beer industry has effectively leveraged the consumption trend of localismas an expedient and pragmatic competitive position against established and once nearly omnipotent national and international big beer brands, who were able to benefit from production and marketing economies of scale. A key differentiator for smaller scale beer producers is their agility in developing new batches of products and bringing them to market, which presents an interesting and highly dynamic brandscape to study. Not unsurprisingly, therefore, beer product branding often draws its inspiration from "local", utilizing ideas from history, humor,myths and stories, ingredients and,of course, tangible physical and intangible sociopolitical geography. This chapter seeks to review the beer label brand architecture of craft breweries in the United Kingdom (UK) County of Surrey. It will examine the craft brewer use of names (brewery and beers) and naming associations (signs and symbols) embedded in their graphical identities and contrast findings against the top-selling UK beer brands. This visual content analysis based research aims to better understand the pervasiveness of local geography in Surrey craft beer brands.