Great-tasting beer is the primary goal for any brewer. What makes a good beer? Its appearance, head, flavour, depth, colour and aroma. Add to a good tasting beer, the best designed packaging with a stylish bottle or can and a label, bottle collar or sleeve which promotes the high quality and uniqueness of the refined ‘craft’ beer within and you have a beer that is also visually appealing.
The microbrewery, nanobrewery and more recently the craft brewery, are often small independently owned businesses that employ more traditional methods to brew smaller batches of beer with a unique quality and flavour. Capitalising on this trend also gives these smaller breweries the opportunity to challenge larger breweries for more market share.
However, the uptake in craft beer drinking means thousands of small breweries are competing in what has become a saturated market. Standing out against both the competing craft breweries and the larger brands can be a challenge for a small business. As a result, smaller breweries need to find creative and cost-effective ways to stand out, for example through personalised labels and bottle collars as well as hosting and sponsoring corporate events.
These very small-to-medium scale breweries will not have anywhere near the same level of marketing budget as their larger counterparts. With smaller hectolitres of beer production, they often do not require the large volumes of labels and promotional assets that larger beer brands require making their production costs expensive.