Page 22 - Brewdog Teaching Notes

Solves a real problem or meets a real need

Real beer

The team: Onboard the bus and in the right seats

Watt and Dickie have merged their passion for craft beer

with an ability to tap into an unsatisfied customer base
through innovative and often abrasive advertising and

promotion. But they did not lose sight of the command and

control elements of their business model. They have total
control of their business and have matched consumer

demand with planned and developed production

capabilities both repeatable, and scalable processes.

Irrespective of 100 of their bars being closed globally due to
the pandemic BrewDog still managed to grow their total

sales for the first half of 2020 by 15%. The reason lies in

their business split:

Bars -V- Brewing (bottles and cans)

On-trade -V- off-trade

During lockdown people stopped going to pubs but they did

not stop drinking. Having a state-of-the-art bottling plant
(cans) and distribution through supermarkets BrewDog did

not fare as badly as was first thought to be the case.

Watt and Dickie’s focus is laser guided and tied to business

development driven by a mission that focuses on the

creation of competitive advantage.

This explosive growth led to the TSG share sale with Watt
making £50m on sale of part of his shareholding. However,

in light of BrewDogs repeated efforts to cast itself in the role

of a “punk” upstart sceptical of major corporations does this