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Selected sponsorships with carefully chosen sports clubs or events are a great option for infant beer brands in Australia’s burgeoning craft beer market, according to Colonial Brewing marketing and communications manager Jenna Godley.
Speaking in a podcast with industry publication Brews News at the national conference of the Independent Brewers’ Association, Godley said Colonial was the first craft brewer to ink a mainstream AFL club beer sponsorship deal with Essendon and had formed close ties with the club.
She said the initiative had proven highly successful and included developing special beer cans for Colonial beers celebrating the club’s premierships and its legendary coach, Kevin Sheedy.
Godley said her background working in sports management with St Kilda and Essendon in the AFL, and then moving to Toyota managing its cricket and AFL sponsorships, had given her a good idea of the benefits sponsorship could bring.
When CUB ended its entire AFL code sponsorship covering all clubs, an opportunity emerged for smaller brewers to link with AFL clubs (which had previously been prevented from doing so).
She said Colonial had approached Essendon for a variety of reasons, including its devoted grassroots fans and the fact that its membership continued to grow after the club had overcome its drug scandal.
She said Colonial initially gauged the feedback from Essendon supporters about the beer and received a positive response. As the partnership grew and the company activated more through social media, “the Essendon supporters became mini-ambassadors for us” Godley said.
She said local partnerships offered great value in the marketing mix of start up craft beer brands. These partnerships could include local sports clubs and festivals, and might start out as contra deals and later extend to more formal traditional sponsorships if the brewer was successful.
For example, Colonial also had a partnership with local football club Port Melbourne, (where one of Colonial’s brewing operations is located) which plays in the VFL. This started out small with Colonial offering its brewhouse premises for club functions and grew from there, she said.
Godley stressed that partnerships were only effective if the sponsor was prepared to spend on leveraging. In Colonial’s case this included targeted and co-ordinated social media campaigns and internet advertising as well as a range of activations.
Colonial has renewed with Essendon through to the end of the 2020 season, but now the AFL season has finished, the company will focus on a range of music and arts festival sponsorships, as well as some “lower tier” opportunities in cricket, Godley said.
She said another recent example of a successful AFL/craft brewing relationship was Two Birds Brewing with the Western Bulldogs.
