The marketing director tells Tim Healey how Beavertown fights FMCG uniformity with creativity, culture and emotional connection – and why the best brands live in both the rational and the irrational parts of people’s brains.
You have worked at DDD group, T-Mobile, and Giffgaff for 10 years. Since 2019, you have served as the marketing director at Beavertown. Please walk us through your career to date.
By the time I started working in marketing, I had failed at three other things that I would have preferred to have done: the first was being a professional footballer. I played for Crystal Palace’s youth team for a very short period of time (aged 12-13), which didn’t quite pan out as I had intended (which I put down to a lack of talent).
Next, I started playing in bands. I was the guitarist and songwriter and obviously, like all bands, they each self-imploded – there were lots of egos. At school, I felt that I wasn’t very good at anything other than football and theater. I did a lot of theater, specializing in dance, and then pursued a degree in contemporary dance. I wanted to be a dance choreographer.
I finished university and I needed some money. While I was weighing up whether to do a masters in dance, I ended up working in marketing. I started working for a business that marketed products on behalf of companies that didn’t have marketing departments. We worked in pharma and health and beauty.
From there, I wanted to get more into what we used to call ‘youth brands’. T-Mobile was the new telecoms business, and I started working for them. While there, I got a phone call from a headhunter who said: “We are going to launch a new tech telco business, but we can’t tell you anything about it. Someone’s mentioned your name. Do you want to come down and have a conversation with us?”
It was a new business idea to disrupt the mobile industry. Giffgaff was always positioned as the David versus Goliath of mobile networks. It just sounded like a really interesting opportunity.
I think I was employee number four. We grew the business for 10 years. It was a hugely successful, massively loved brand, really challenging the market. The creative was really good. We won awards. Turnover and revenue were really healthy and it continues to be a successful business today.
Once the business had got to a point where every year wasn’t completely different to the previous year, I began to look around for new possibilities. I was already a massive fan of Beavertown, I remember going to a pub because it was the first near me that sold Gamma Ray. I’m a Spurs supporter, so I was at the opening of the new Tottenham Stadium. They (now we) have a taproom and brewery in the stadium, and I thought this is a brand I’d love to work for. I think we could do some great things together.
Next day, I emailed, got a call the same day, and we went from there.
I then met Logan Plant (the founder) at our brewery. I remember that in the brewery below us, they were playing Black Sabbath, and the floor was vibrating. I thought, yeah, this feels like my vibe.
They’d seen such huge organic growth during the early days of the craft beer revolution in the 2010s, but had never really put weight behind their marketing. They needed someone to come in and grow the brand, which I had spent at the previous decade doing for Giffgaff. They wanted to build out capabilities, strategy, approach, channels, define what the brand means. And that’s what I’ve done ever since.
What is the offer at Beavertown?
It is a beer brand born out of the social scene: the zeitgeist of craft beer. We’ve got ‘Neck Oil’, which is our number one product.
We try to market it in an interesting way. It’s creatively and illustration led – it’s a bit of a side-step to what you might normally expect from beer brands.
I distinctly remember the first time I saw the arresting Beavertown cans back in 2015, when it was still a relative novelty. Now you can get Beavertown in many, if not most, bars. There have been a slew of impressive campaigns, not forgetting partnering with stadium rockers The Queens Of The Stone Age for the launch of their single and even providing your own sun cream. I’ve seen giant inflatable balloon DJ booths promoting Beavertown at festivals. I’ve watched your special Halloween films at the cinema. I’ve seen out-of-home tube ads – with all of that in mind, what does the next year look like from a marketing perspective for you?
As Neck Oil is our major project, we’re encouraging people to ‘stick your neck out’; ‘get involved’ and be ‘never normal’.
There are many different approaches and elements to the campaign, including outdoor, radio, podcasts, digital, every social network, YouTube pre-rolls, in-store, in-pub, and below-the-line activity – all of which are pivotal to what we do.
We’ve got a new product that we launched this year called Cosmic Drop. There’s a berry one and a watermelon one. And we’re doing some activity with influencers, at the moment, pop over to Instagram to see it.
FMCG brands need to have a familiar language, because that’s what the audience expects. But if we only do that, then we’re just like everyone else. And equally people want brands to do interesting, have some newness and freshness. So, we always look to do that in our activity, like when we collaborated with the rock band Queens Of The Stone Age.
Drawing on your leadership expertise, what has your career taught you that helps you to make a great team?
I don’t think you can pay people to care. I think people either care or they don’t. You need to find people who feel as passionate as you do about what it is that you’re trying to do. That passion is like gold dust. Passion is the power and the motivation that keeps you going.
Find people with passion and then empower them to be able to deliver your projects. The icing on the cake is to get people in the right roles to play to their strengths.
Sometimes in marketing, where it all gets a bit stressful and weird, is when you forget that most consumers walking around on the street aren’t thinking about your brand the way that you are.
I was in Shoreditch yesterday, and from where I was sitting, you could see three pieces of outdoor advertising plus buses and taxis going by – all with ads on them. People were wandering around in clothing that was over-indexed with brands. We live in marketing, so we live and breathe brands, but the majority of people do not.
So treat people how you want to be treated, and if you can understand the consumer perspective on it, then that combination is helpful in constructing an environment where people feel that they can say something, put their hand up and sometimes challenge what is being proposed.
I know that I’m not always right. I’m more than happy that people will challenge me; that they will have a different opinion. I like the idea of ‘leaders with strong opinions that are loosely held.’ You’ve got to look at problems and challenges collectively with your team.
Could you tell us about a customer research discovery that you’ve made that you found surprising?
When I joined Beavertown, as with many startups and early-stage fast-growth businesses, they didn’t do much research beyond trying out the beers with different people and getting feedback – not like today where we operate in a commercially driven space.
When I joined, I needed to check two things. The first was how big the brand was from an awareness and consideration perspective. It turned out that it was way smaller than anyone thought it was. If you ‘live in it’ and are ‘breathing it’ all the time, your perception of your brand will always be bigger than what normal people walking around the street.
The second thing I needed to confirm was what does this brand actually represent and mean to people beyond it looking cool and having great-tasting products. We did some qualitative research.
There was this one quote from a woman who said: “Whenever I’m at a party and I bring some cans of Beavertown with me, and I am drinking from a Beavertown can, it will always start a conversation. Someone will always come up to me and say, ‘Oh, wow, what’s that on your can?’ or ‘that looks different.’
It was such a wonderful insight. The beer and the can designs were never created to do that. We never set out to ‘get consumers to tell each other about our beer.’ But it turned out that the can designs did the job for us. Beavertown sits naturally in that space: in the hearts and minds of our consumers – and is at once both rational and emotional.
The decision to use cans gave our creative director, Nick Dwyer, a total 360-degree canvas to create their image on instead of just creating a label at the front of a bottle. At the time no-one was using the whole can to tell a story. It was a different way to look at canned beer: how to house the product, using artwork in a creative way. Those early decisions led to that person in our qual research to having a conversation at a party. That’s brand gold.
What myth about marketing would you most like to bust?
I hate it when people say: “marketing’s the fun bit”. I don’t think it’s any more or less fun than any other department. Every department needs to add value to a business and if you are not, then you’ve got a problem, right? So I think I’d probably like to bust that myth.
What advice would you give your younger self if you could go back in time?
Stick to playing football would probably be the first one. I would also advise myself to take a step back: take a moment to step back from the challenges, the issues, the relationship turbulence and try to take a broader, more holistic view of what’s happening.
In the moment, you can get very close to the fire, and things can seem very personal – but more often they’re not. Everyone in the room is probably thinking more about what you think about them than about you.
I think in business in general, we are making some good progress in learning to treat people as we want to be treated and also in learning to be nicer to ourselves – and we do need to continue – but in any situation, the challenge immediately in front of you is ultimately just one aspect of your life.
Great leadership is trying to be human and trying to be consistent with your approach and of course getting the job done to the best possible outcome.
What question would you like me to ask the next senior marketer when I interview them?
What piece of culture last had an impact on you? And it can’t be an ad. I think it’s really important for marketers to be plugged into culture, and ideally the same culture as your audience. You can’t outsource that.
What would yours be?
Go and see any dance production by Pina Bausch, if you live in London, they are often at Sadler’s Wells. I promise you: you will be emotionally touched by it. It can be two and a half hours long, but it creeps up in pace, you’re not sure what you’re watching, and then there’s the emotional impact at the end. I’ve seen people literally sit there and cry.
Your question from the last senior market that I interviewed is: could you tell us about the most interesting prompt you’ve used on any large language model and how helpful with the results.
To be honest, we don’t really do a lot with AI. Every piece of our visual world is hand-drawn, and that naturalness needs to come through in what we do as a marketing department. We are playing around with AI to forecast stuff and predict. But rightly or wrongly, it’s just not a part of the marketing mix at the moment.
If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is…
The great brands connect with their customers on both a rational and an emotional level. Human beings will always be overridden by feelings more than rational thought. If you connect emotionally with people, they will have a deeper, longer relationship with you than if you’re purely functional.
You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.
This interview has already appeared in The Drum. Discover the best campaigns, industry insights and interviews from world-leading marketers, creatives and more.
