Behind the Rebrand: Monday Night Brewing
After 11 years of being one of the most recognizable breweries in the Southeast, why did Monday Night Brewing decide it was time for a rebrand?
In this webinar replay, Matchstic co-founder and creative director Blake Howard sits down with Monday Night Brewing's Jonathan Baker to share insights from the recent project. Learn how their “beer over brand” strategy led to a visual system with a “can do” attitude, as well as general insights about leading a rebrand and how to approach what can feel like a daunting process.
Transcript
Blake Howard:
My name's Blake and I'm the creative director and co-founder at Matchstic. Excited that you're here today. This is going to be a lot of fun. So, this is a little bit of a behind the scenes look at our work for Monday Night Brewing, and we have one of their co-founders, Jonathan Baker, here. Him and I are going to just do a little Q&A back and forth, like a popcorn style discussion. I do have a few slides that I'll share at some point, but for the most part, we're just going to have a conversation back and forth about how our visual work supported their business strategy and just a little bit more of the thinking behind the rebrand and the refresh, what led up to it, and all of those good things.
Company Background
Jonathan and I have actually known each other since the early 2000s, which is a long time. Before Monday Night Brewing, I knew him before he was famous. I was an acquaintance. We had some friends in common. Obviously, I had heard of Monday Night Brewing as they were one of the first micro-breweries in Atlanta. Back in 2015 when I hosted Creative Mornings Atlanta, I asked him to come give a talk about work and he shared more of the story about Monday Night Brewing. I was so inspired by it. Not only as a co-founder, but he has also been in the CMO role for a long time, overseeing sales and marketing. In 2022, he reached out and said, "Hey, we're thinking about doing a rebrand."
We were so excited at that opportunity just because we are big Monday Night Brewing fans and really wanted to partner together. So, the project has been so much fun for us at Matchstic, and I'm excited just to hear a little bit more from Jonathan today. So, Jonathan, why don't I kick us off with our discussion. Tell us more about why 2022 was the right time to rebrand for Monday Night Brewing?
Jonathan Baker:
I think it was a combination of things, but probably most important, the industry had been changing around us for years. So, we launched in 2011. At the time, the craft beer industry was very different. You opened up shop in a warehouse and you had three beers. You had a dark beer, you had an IPA, and you had a light beer, and that was it. But in the subsequent decade, we've had dozens of new breweries in Atlanta and we also have had this explosion of new beer styles. So, the branding that we had originally designed no longer actually worked for that world in terms of its flexibility. Then, I think another factor was, not only had the industry changed, but the demographics of the drinkers had changed.
So, when we launched, craft beer drinkers were predominantly guys that looked like me. It was white guys, and that was no longer true. That also was not who we wanted to cater to, particularly as residents of Atlanta, the city we love. So, we wanted a logo and a brand that more accurately reflected who we were. Our old logo, if you recall, was actually a silhouette of my business partner, Joel. I went and I had a camera. I went to his house on a Saturday morning to create our logo, and I was like, "Joel, I just need you to wear a suit and tie, just a jacket and a tie." He's like, "All right, cool." So he shows up at the door, jacket, tie, no pants. So, we did waist up and converted it on Illustrator. That was our logo for years.
Blake Howard:
It resonated with people. I mean, people love the theme and the tie and just the idea of doing what you love. I feel like there was a lot of equity around that visual and it served you all well for a long time, but it was just maybe the right time to think differently about how you went to market. Would you speak a little bit about the overarching problem? Because I think this part is so fascinating, you were interested in more of a product strategy, beer strategy over brand. Maybe traditionally, it had been all about Monday Night Brewing and you wanted to maybe flip that. Can you just tell us a little bit more about that business strategy?
Business Strategy
Jonathan Baker:
Yes. So, you're right. I think traditionally, we were Monday Night Brewing front and center. This is our brand, this is what we're building around. Every beer name new product is in service of this larger Monday Night brand. I think the further we got into this new and changing industry, we realized that that is not how people order beer anymore. Maybe it used to be, right? You order a Sierra Nevada, but that also means a particular beer. Now you order a particular beer. You order a Slap Fight, you order a Blind Pirate, you don't order a Monday Night. So, we needed a brand that was flexible enough to have consistency around the overall brand, but also, its primary goal was to showcase an individual beer.
Blake Howard:
I think specifically, I remember some of the conversation about, in Atlanta, with Creature Comforts growing like it had. I just wanted to say how complex their plural name is. So, you would see a Tropicália billboard maybe on the connector in 85, and it's about Tropicália. It's not about Creature Comforts exactly. So, I wonder if even part of the way other beer brands were going to market if that influenced the way that you all started to think about, "Hey, maybe we need to shift a little bit."
Jonathan Baker:
So, yes, that is the way other beer brands were going to market, but I think they were fundamentally going to market that way because the industry was headed that way, not necessarily because they were being consumer first. They read the writing on the wall as well and consumers were looking for variety. Brewery became more of a secondary factor, and it was more like, "Oh, okay, if the Monday Night name is on it, they vouch for this beer and so I'll try it."
So I have a question for you because I was alone in this CMO role for a long time and then we slowly built out a marketing team, but we did pretty much everything in house. For over 10 years, we didn't hire a single agency. You were actually the first agency we ever hired. So, I think we went in with some fears and baggage, but we also came to you guys because we were at a loss as to how to tackle a beast like this. So, how do you typically approach a project of this scope?
Approach
Blake Howard:
Well, one thing that we have that's an advantage is just a little distance. When you've been running in-house marketing for so long, you're so close to it. So, that is a gift that we as outsiders have. But in general, the way we approach something like this is upfront discovery. So, we want to understand from you and others at Monday Night, what's the essence? What are maybe the existing company values? What's the culture like? How do we really boil down everything that the organization stands into some words, into some language to really capture the personality? Then we start to build more of the visual strategy. So, it's not about letting us just design something that we think is cool.
It's more about let's design something that really represents the personality, the unique personality of your brand. Sometimes we do more or less research on the front end. Sometimes we do workshops to just uncover the personality of the organization like we did with you all, where it's just facilitating some exercises. Sometimes it's that plus doing interviews with customers one-on-one, doing focus groups, maybe doing more quantitative studies/surveys to try to unpack or understand more of their mindset in relationship to how relevant the brand currently is in the market.
All of that research just adds up more to a strategy phase where we're trying to really define clearly, “all right, this is the position that the brand is going to take, this is the personality that the brand's going to have”. Then we start to get into more of the creative exercises, where we think, "Okay, how do we use color to communicate this personality? How do we think about type to communicate this personality? What about the overall strategy for the logo?" There's lots of different pros and cons and ways to think about what type of logo you're even going to have. Then how do we also make sure that we build a visual system that will equip our clients to implement it well?
That's a big part of the puzzle is, "What kind of in-house resources does a group have? Let's make sure we think about that and give them something that they can really use to implement it." Because it breaks our heart when we create a visual identity that we love, that we think is beautiful, and then it just doesn't quite get implemented the right way. That's always a bit of a challenge for us. So, we try to think about that ahead of time so that we can equip our clients to implement it well.
Jonathan Baker:
When you guys think about the ideal client, what traits in a client make the process of rebranding smoother versus more difficult?
Blake Howard:
Yeah, we did some research a couple of years ago. We have a white paper called Leading A Rebrand. In the research, we surveyed our previous clients and we asked them return on investment, rebrand benefit type questions. The ones that had performed the highest, we then looked back at that project and that project team to understand what dynamics maybe made that more successful than others. The number one theme was a strong leader on the in-house side, on the client side.
More mentally, someone who could make decisions. They would trust the process, but they would also make decisions. Sometimes if you're a type A person, you're really good at making decisions, you also want to control the process and maybe don't trust a partner. So, it was the duality of that, of, you're trusting us as experts, but then also able to make a decision. And not just unilaterally make a decision, but get input from their team and to really vet the options that we were presenting, think about them, but then ultimately, be able to make a decision.
So, the decision making is definitely a big part of it. I also think when our clients partner well with us on thinking about the rollout and the launch. So, the launch is often something that's just minimized perhaps. The creative process gets fun and you get to reimagine the way that you could start to look or sound, but the rollout is everything. So, even the way that you guys thought about some of the soft launch and the way that you started to roll it out, I think really helped the process go a little bit smoother.
Strategy and Identity Workshops
Jonathan Baker:
You mentioned the workshopping that you did with us, and I remember those meetings. I also remember at the beginning or towards the beginning of the process, you started asking us questions that I hadn't even considered or thought about. I think that was encouraging to me to know that we were being pushed by you guys. But do you mind sharing briefly some thoughts that you guys shared with us on the types of logo options, the typeface selection, color selection? There's all these different things that you're choosing from, and the way that you guys laid them out was really, really fascinating.
Blake Howard:
I've got just a couple slides to go through pretty quickly that show a little bit more of the process and we'll maybe put some visual reference points for everyone listening. So, just to make you squirm a little bit, Jonathan. I put this slide together here of some of the old stuff, but again, it wasn't like it was so terribly off base. It was more about just the strategy shifting or changing and the market had shifted over time. So, this was some of the work from 2017, I think. It was the packaging. Then the bottom right was even before that.
So, this was a little bit of where you all were when we first started working together. Some of those initial workshops, which I have to give a lot of credit to Meghan Murray, our design director, who led a lot of this work. She facilitated this discovery session and Jonathan had some great things. You had some purpose. You had some brand values established that we wanted to just build off of, not reinvent. It was more about let us download it, let us understand it, and then maybe let us add to it like the personality attributes where that was based on just some of our exercises in that workshop.
So, we wanted to build a brand that was imaginative, tasteful, clever, genuine, all pretty typical type things in the rebranding space. But then after we had that established, we started to think about our creative strategy and our visual strategy. How do we look at some brands that are in the space that we're excited by? So we looked at a couple, you can see those in the top left. We started to think about how we can maybe use color. We really liked this idea of day and night, so Monday and night, and black and white represent that. That became a theme you'll see through all of this.
Jonathan Baker:
Can I also say, part of the reason for that, and this is for Meghan as well, was because if you're going to emphasize beer over brand, you need color for the beer and the brand needs to be a little bit more subdued.
Blake Howard:
Yeah. So, if we decided that Monday Night was going to be a red brand, that doesn't pair super well with a huge palette. So, you really need a neutral color strategy for the parent brand if you're going to really amp up the product side. The bottom left is just a topology of brand marks. So, there's word marks, there's letter forms, there's emblems, there's pictorial symbols, there's abstract symbols, there's dynamic symbols that behave and change differently over time. That's a chance for us just to talk high-level before we even react to an original design and say, "What do we want our logo to do for us?"
In this case, because the business strategy was to try to play up the individual beer brands or the individual beer products, we wanted the parent brand to be more subtle. So, that's where a word mark comes into play. You can have a little personality, but you're not trying to make it so loud and to get all the attention. You just want it to be memorable, a little bit unique, but mostly just straight down the middle. So, that's pretty different than if we would've created some big abstract container or symbol. So, those types of slides are helpful for us just to have a good discussion and to understand before we get into subjective territory, "what are we hoping that we do with the visuals?"
Also, we start looking at images that inspire us. So, this is not original design work. This is all found, curated sets of slides where we talk about, "What if we had variable type? What type of typography could we have? What type of texture could we have? What about illustrations or general characters we could create for each brand?" So again, this is just a good conversation that we had with the Monday Night team to get their reactions. This is really about provoking a discussion more than anything.
Jonathan Baker:
I think that bottom left product brand graphic, we probably had the most spirited discussions around. Are we product first like the left? Are we brand first like the center or graphic heavy like the right? A lot of the brands that we were fanboying over recently have been going towards graphic heavy, to where every can looks like an individual piece of art, but doesn't necessarily say anything about a larger brand.
Blake Howard:
I think that was the challenge here. Because we're brand first people, we can play a lot with things like, "Gosh, we can't downplay the Monday Night brand too much." I was really wrestling with that. I don't want to overshadow it because there are product strategies in your category that go to the nth degree where each individual brand has a fully unique personality that is completely disconnected from the parent. I think it works for some groups, but I just didn't think it was the right strategy for you all. So, that was the challenge, was trying to calibrate how we can make it feel consistently Monday Night, but also place all the emphasis on the individual beer itself. So, then we started to explore different logo types or different brand marks that could support that.
So, this is just a look at some of the initial ones. Some are more simple than others. Some have a little bit more of a literal day and night emblem like number four. Then we also started to just prototype two general directions. So, this is the first time that the Monday Night team got to see the positive negative space with these abstract illustrations that you can see for Slap Fight. Then we also presented more of a literal direction for illustration. You can see this irreverent but also very real realistic style for the Blind Pirate there below. Then we had a good discussion, had some feedback. At this point in the process too, Jonathan, you all were probably excited, but also freaking out a little bit. Maybe we can jump.
Jonathan Baker:
We were the most nervous here.
Blake Howard:
Yeah, because you start to see it a little bit. What were you feeling at this moment in the story?
Jonathan Baker:
Terror mostly. There were certainly elements of all of these that we liked and resonated, but none of them felt exactly right. I think it felt like we were just in a slug fest almost, just trading blows with the creative. I think we had one or two conversations with you guys like, "Hey, should we continue going down this path?” We're scared here at this point.
Blake Howard:
I think that's a common sentiment, especially if you rely on intuition and you're waiting, the whole “I'll know it when I see it” mindset. When you see something that's different than what you expected, it's just hard to really understand, "I didn't have a great initial reaction. Is that good or bad? Is it just new? How do I understand?" But you did provide us some feedback. We continued down a route where the logo was going to be pretty minimal with a little bit of personality and then we continued to evolve some of those directions.
So, you can see a slight update to some of the color strategy and the color pairings for this first direction. Then you can see the illustration for the second direction. It got a little bit more weird, a lot more personality, a little bit more playful. At this point, you all started to feel really good about the first direction.
Jonathan Baker:
Yeah, I remember this meeting. We were breathing a huge sigh of relief. I think frankly, on the left, the addition of the custom typeface really set off that design for us and it helped bring forward the craftsmanship angle of craft beer. Between these two choices, I don't think we could have made a bad one. They're both good, but one's a larger departure from where we are. As an established 10-plus-year old brand, which in craft beer years is an eternity, we felt like we needed to honor our past a little bit more instead of just throwing away everything.
Blake Howard:
So eventually, this is where we landed. I think our team was so excited by the concept of the day and the night and the positive space and the negative space as an overall theme that would allow us to create unique illustrations and have a consistent type, but to have a big personality for each beer brand. So, the product, it feels unique, it feels differentiated, but it's still very much connected back to Monday Night.
Jonathan Baker:
We haven't touched on this, that we're evaluating all of these in the context of where they will be consumed. So, we aren't necessarily rebranding for the Monday Night fans because we're cocky enough to think that we're not going to lose Monday Night fans. Our beer is good enough. We're rebranding for the folks that are not Monday Night fans. In all likelihood, the first place they're going to see our beer is going to be in a grocery store, on a shelf. So, what does this can or what does this six-pack look like in the context of all these other beer brands? That drove a few things for me. One, the simplicity of these designs, there's only two colors, red plus white. Keeping the white consistent beer to beer also really helped set these off and made them stand out on a shelf.
Blake Howard:
So, the word mark is all hand drawn. Megan Murray, again, through every letter that's here with others contributing from our team, but we loved the spirit of this and a little bit of the personality, but then that also inspired what we were calling Monday Night Display and these different characters that could be used to be applied to future illustrations, future products.
So, again, this is a way for us not to just create some cool type or font treatment that then the Monday Night crew struggles to expand or scale, but we're able to deliver those characters to them so that they can create future beers. This is just a quick snapshot of some of the brand guidelines of how we define the illustration style. Then we've got just some photos of packaging and the cans and all of it coming together.
Outcome
Jonathan Baker:
So how do you feel about where we ended up, Blake, just on a personal level? Would you have made similar decisions to us, or what would you have done?
Blake Howard:
Yeah, I was thrilled with it. I can tell our work is headed in the right direction when our team wants to just keep working on it, to not stop. Meghan Murray and Sean Jones, who were involved, and a couple others, I mean, they were just having so much fun with the illustrations and perfecting every little bit. So, to me, the number one goal was to help elevate the Monday Night brand, but to also accomplish your new product strategy of elevating each individual beer and into giving each individual beer a personality, but not doing that to the extreme of which we completely disconnect from the parent brand. So, I felt like this hands down was the best direction of everything that we looked at.
The moment that I first saw it, when Meghan shared it with me, I loved it and I thought it was phenomenal. So, I was thrilled overall with how it all came together. When you see it, I was thinking about driving down the connector, seeing a Blind Pirate billboard at some point. It accomplishes that overarching idea of promoting the beer over the brand, but it still very much feels like Monday Night.
I'm curious and we got into this a little bit, Jonathan, but what part of that was more difficult than you expected?
Jonathan Baker:
The middle. I actually didn't struggle with letting go of some of our past, but I do think some internal marketing folks would struggle with that. What I struggled with most is if we're letting go of our past, it's got to be for something that's worth it. In that messy middle, I didn't feel like I had a firm grasp on that yet and that was tough.
Blake Howard:
What part was easier than you expected?
Jonathan Baker:
I think I went into the process knowing that there would be workshops upfront. Also, my cynicism was, "Yeah, of course, you're going to have workshops and they're going to be hokey and stupid. Let's just push through them so we can get to the design." But the output of the workshop was actually phenomenal. I don't know if I've told you this, but we use those words that you identified now internally. Even in investor presentations, we'll hark back to the 3Cs. We added a fourth C, quality.
Launch
Blake Howard:
Well, let's talk a little bit about the launch and the rollout, because people love Monday Night Brewing, especially in Atlanta, and people don't love change. So, there was definitely criticism, definitely reaction. How did you feel about that? How did you process that criticism?
Jonathan Baker:
Yeah, we've been around for long enough to know that, in craft beer in particular, people have very strong personal opinions. I think it's because in many ways, a craft brewery can become a flag for who a person is. It says a little bit of something about where they're from and what they like. So, people really latch on to these brands personally. So, I knew that any relaunch was not going to go 100% smoothly, but I also know enough about human nature to know that we just have to let people sit in it for a little while. So, I was able to mentally block the first couple days, I'd read all the comments still, but try to do it through a lens of interest, not necessarily taking things personally. But it was certainly a very, very spirited rollout. How did it compare to some of your other brand rollouts? I got to imagine they're not always this contentious.
Blake Howard:
Yeah, I think it's a metric of passion and how much people love Monday Night Brewing. I think that a lot of our work, especially if it's not a consumer brand, you just don't have that level of concern and passion for it. So, it's a little bit different than some of our other clients or rollouts. When we've done things that are a little bit more public, it's about that way. So, people have strong reactions to artwork. They don't necessarily understand the full strategy or the full story. So, they're just going to have an emotional reaction and that's fine. It's like, "What makes the world of branding a little more entertaining these days?" That's also why I have a podcast called A Change of Brand. So, a cheap little plug for it there. It's a fun podcast because of the way people react to change. That's part of the unique way we even tell the stories that are on that show.
So, it was about what I had expected. We are newer to getting trolled ourselves. So, there were some comments on our Instagram that were like, "These hipsters probably don't even drink beer" or "They don't know what they're doing." There were some shots like that that were funny, but it is actually true, because I am gluten-free. So, I don't drink beer.
Jonathan Baker:
I think I had to keep reminding myself reading through all this that the people commenting are passionate people, but they're not the ones we were rebranding for. We're rebranding for the ones who have not yet seen us.
Blake Howard:
Yeah, that's right. People love Monday Night Brewing. If anything, the reaction was just saying we love what you have created and what you've done and what you mentioned earlier I think is so true. This is a little bit counterintuitive because it minimizes what I do for a profession, but if you have a great product, the brand change is not going to change the quality of the product. That's most important, to have a great beer and you all do. So, the brand is going to enhance that and maybe going to attract the right people, it's maybe going to get you in the door, but if the product's not great, people aren't going to keep drinking it just because it has a beautiful illustration.
So, in a lot of ways, you guys, you have the most important parts right and the reactions to brand change will just subside over time because the product is great. If you change the product, then maybe they wouldn’t subside, they would keep going. The last question I have for you though, Jonathan, is just what advice would you give to others that are thinking about a significant change? Now that you've gone through this process, what lessons or tips would you provide?
Jonathan Baker:
I do agree with you in that, if you are considering it, you need one single person to be spearheading it and, on the internal side, to be someone who is going to gather feedback and talk through things, but at the end of the day, makes the decisions. Because I think one of the worst things we could have done is design by committee. Because there's elements of all these we like and it would've been really easy to say, "Okay, take this and this and this," and then put it together. But you need a really strong point of view as a brand.
So, if you're rebranding to anything less than that, you're doing yourself a huge disservice. Also, I think, spending so much money and so much time and ending up in a place of such simplicity in a way can feel like you're not doing it right, but you really have to take that higher level approach of “what is the ultimate goal of this?” It actually does take more time and money to make things simpler. It's just how things work.
Q&A:
"During the redesign process, how much of the redesign was shared with Monday Night along the way versus presenting more completed or full concepts?"
Blake Howard:
So we definitely believe in the idea of small steps with our clients and collaboration. However, we do try to make them feel somewhat resolved, because it's not easy to have a vision for where it's going to head. When you do this every day, you know where it could head or what still could be resolved. But we do show pretty refined work.
So, essentially, once we establish the criteria, we go through some discovery and some workshops. Once we get into the creative process, we really have three or four different presentations that we'll go through. The first would be going super wide with the creative strategy, and that's where the brand mark topology slide was, some of the found artwork that we curated to have a discussion. That would be round one. Then we would start to show actual design work after that and revise it as we went. We showed digital sketches we call it, but it's pretty refined. So, some of the mockups that were even in the slides that I showed were the first look at what Jonathan and the team saw. So, what about you, Jonathan? How did it feel in terms of what we presented? How resolved did it feel?
Jonathan Baker:
It felt pretty refined. I think having a self-taught, at least, design background myself, we pushed you all to share more throughout the process and you definitely did. I think Meghan in particular would send me the Illustrator files of a couple things that I could play around with, because I had something in my mind that I wanted to test and it ended up being crap. So, my expectation or my hope going in was that you guys were going to let us peek behind the curtain and see more of how the sausage is made, but I'm glad you didn't because what we needed probably more than your designs was your thought partnership and opinions on the designs that you presented.
Blake Howard:
I think there is a balance there. Some of our clients do want to do a screen share and we open up Illustrator and they want to see us move things around. Sometimes it's helpful. So, I think you having a design background, Jonathan, it's helpful to start to see and collaborate a little bit, but it's like the trust tree. It's like once you open up an Illustrator file and you start sharing, you have to have a trusting relationship that you're not just going to start telling Meghan, "Hey, move that M up. Okay, now move that M over. Okay, now make that M bigger." We're not adding value to you as your branding partner at that point. We're just clicking on the mouse and moving things around. So, finding the right balance is important.
Then in other times, we have clients that are like, "Hey, look, we're so busy. Make a recommendation, curate our options, let us make an informed choice and then we need to get going." So we try to figure that out, whatever's going to work best.
"What was the thinking behind working on the logo redesign along the packaging redesign as opposed to finalizing the logo before the packaging?"
Blake Howard:
So we think about a project like this in terms of a visual system. Your visual identity has many tools, color, type, imagery, illustration, logo. All of that is a set. The logo's a big part of it obviously, but we don't want to design those individual tools in a vacuum.
We want to think about how they could all coalesce together. So, that's why we start to think about logos. We quickly mock them up on different components, in this case, the can design, because that's where they're going to live and that's where that logo needs to perform the best. So, some of the early concepts, you could see that emblem that we had with the Monday Night tucked into that circle. I thought that was really cool and beautiful on the can, but at that smaller size, the legibility really became an issue. So, that's where we ended up seeing a little bit more of horizontal space just fits nicely on those cans at smaller sizes.
So, part of it is just making sure we're thinking about the full visual system and that we're trying out different elements so that they work really well.
"I find your dialogue around the concept of beer over brand really interesting and the comparison to Creature Comforts. I agree that people would order Tropicália over Creature Comforts in their brand strategy, and that's probably part of it. But is that really the case for your lineup of beers? With four of Monday Night's seven core beers being IPAs, it seems challenging to lean into creating individual appeal. So, tell us a little bit more about your thoughts of your specific beer portfolio and how you've got many IPAs and how you started to think about that."
Jonathan Baker:
Yeah, this has been a challenge for us, not just now, but ever since we launched and that we've never had a runaway flagship beer. So, we don't have a Tropicália. We don't have a Fat Tire. We don't have a SweetWater 420. What we do have are a bunch of individually great beers. We poll our fans and say, "Hey, what's your favorite Monday Night beer?" They often have very different answers and are also very surprised when they hear that it's not our bestseller, because in their world, it is.
So, I think the idea that individual beers can become a flagship over time is something that we were excited about. So, we wanted a system that was flexible enough to allow for that. If you've followed us for any amount of time, you know that we're always tinkering with our core lineup too. So, our core lineup now isn't necessarily going to be our core lineup in a year. We're always killing off brands that don't sell well, promoting brands that do sell well. So, it's an evolution.
"What is next for Monday Night? Give us a little look into the future. What do you hope is next for Monday Night? What do you think is next?"
Jonathan Baker:
The industry still changes and our goal is to remain relevant. So, that just means keeping on top of trends, making sure that we, internally, are innovating. We've got some new beers on tap right now, for example, that are pretty wild. We're pretty excited about just digging in the southeast and trying to become a known entity. So, we've got a tap room in Charlotte that's opening next week. After that, we'll be opening a tap room in Knoxville. So, we rebranded primarily because of our distribution footprint, but the distribution and then the tap rooms work hand in hand a little bit to help build the brand. So, we're pushing on both.
"Did you run the concepts by customers to get their feedback?"
Jonathan Baker:
No, we did not. We have done that in the past. But we didn't for two reasons. One, I think we needed a brand that more accurately reflected who we were and we knew who we were better than consumers did, right? Because they had that forward facing view. Second, it would be very hard to get consumers up to speed on the full context of what we were trying to do with product-first, needs to stand out on the grocery store shelf. There's a lot of nuance to what we were trying to solve for. I think we thought we'd be muddying the waters if we tried to get too many perspectives. I realize that's not necessarily the typical approach, but I think for where we were, it made sense.
Blake Howard:
I've heard horror stories and I've been a part of projects that were really difficult because of getting consumer feedback. But recently, just with a few stories on the podcast, I have heard, and I really liked this, the Kraft Mac & Cheese packaging refresh is an episode that's going to be on the podcast this season. They do unbelievable amounts of consumer testing. However, they framed it as it's just one input, it's just one set of inputs. So, the decision maker on that side wasn't seeing consumer research as the end-all-be-all gateway in order to launch the refreshed look and feel.
I think that's helpful because you are going to get a lot of negative sentiment around change and you just can't let that skew. However, it could be beneficial to understand people's perspective to prepare for launch.
"Concerning the old logo of the tie: Because it was such a big component from the first brand in the origin story, how did you think about that? Was it hard to let go of?"
Jonathan Baker:
So we certainly thought about it a lot. I don't view it as letting go as much as an evolution in design. So, the ties, we're not trying to hide them. We still have them up in all of our tap rooms. We still have the wall that says, "Tie one on." We still call our anniversary Tie One On. It's still certainly a part of the origin story that we tell, but people and companies change over time. The tie became less important and we thought it might be in some ways confusing and in competition with the product first strategy. How do you go to market with a product first strategy that's also emphasizing neckties all the time?
Blake Howard:
Yeah, that's good. So, it's a part of your brand. It always will be because it's part of the origin story. It's just not on your product.
Jonathan Baker:
Yeah, we're not ashamed of it at all. We're still very proud of it and it might come back and be on our product. I will say, we're saying our product, but this is really just seven of the hundred beers that we put out in a year. These happen to be the bestsellers and the ones that see distribution, but we have a lot more freedom in part thanks to you all with all of the small batch beers or specialty beers that we put out every year. So, in some ways, the breadth of our design has actually increased because we've tightened this section of our design.
Blake Howard:
Yeah. That's good. All right. Well, I'm going to wrap us up. Thanks everyone for joining. This is a lot of fun. We hope to do more of these in the future. Again, shameless plug, if you are a brand nerd and you like change stories, go check out A Change of Brand Podcast. Yeah, we hope to do more of these in the future and we hope to see you at another one soon. Thanks so much.
