Atlanta Brewing Company marketing director Cameron Davis knows what it’s like to deconstruct and rebuild a legacy beer brand.
That’s what Davis and her colleagues did in 2018, taking Georgia’s oldest beer brand, the former Red Brick Brewing Company, and transforming it into Atlanta Brewing Company, a moniker the company had used until 2010, just in time for the company’s 25th anniversary.
Davis recalled that the idea to return to the brand’s roots was born out of “Tuesday Dream Time” brainstorming sessions.
“We’d sit in a room for 20 minutes and just say all of the stuff that if you could imagine anything for this company, what would it be?” she said.
Those conversations led the brewery’s leaders to wonder what if they went back to the Atlanta Brewing name.
“It didn’t make any sense to us why we weren’t already Atlanta Brewing,” she said.
There also wasn’t a lot to lose.
“We were kind of at the point where we’re rebranding or we might not be around,” Davis said. “Honestly, we had those conversations about ‘If we don’t do this, will we be around in two years? I don’t know?’ I think that’s a question that a lot of breweries ask themselves.”
In episode seven of the Brewbound Podcast’s third season, Davis shared the process for blowing up a brand, the advantages of working with an agency such as CODO Design (who recently partnered with Brewbound on a four-part Voices series on when to rebrand or refresh a craft brand) and the risk-reward of alienating existing consumers.
“You have to do what you feel is best for your company,” Davis acknowledged. “And if some people aren’t happy with it, sorry.”
Davis also shares the realities of rebranding, including the wait for seeing a sales bump.
“We’ve just now started to see those sales go up,” she said, adding that core beer sales increased 28% after the changeover and merchandise sales exploded. “It took longer than we expected but now we’re starting to get that payoff, which is great.”
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