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March 2008 - Strategy Magazine
Who to watch

Big plans for Big Rock - Jim Button

by Carey Toane
page 17

When Jim Button heard that the Juno Awards were coming to Calgary this year, he knew he had a call to make. As the new VP marketing for Calgary-based Big Rock Brewery, Button takes pride in owning the local arts and entertainment sponsorship market in a category that tends to partner up with sporting and other big-ticket events.

"We can't have music come into our backyard and not be involved," says Button. "Our roots are around a group of people that are passionate about making a premium craft beer. What we're doing with a lot of our music initiatives, of which the Junos are proof, is lend a helping hand to musicians as passionate about their craft as we are about ours."

Founded in 1985 by former barley farmer Ed McNally, Big Rock's products are now available everywhere in Canada except P.E.I. and Quebec. At home, Grasshopper and Traditional ("Trad") are pub favourites, but outside Alberta the 13-beer family is less well-known. Button won't release market figures, saying only that "Molson and Labatt spill more than we sell."

That said, Big Rock has ambitious plans to double its current output by 2012, and has shifted sales budgets to marketing to carry this out. "This company is at the point where it needs to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up," says Button, who switched from the agency side to brand management when he joined the brewer last June. "It's grown so fast, and it's gotten into the habit of following the big domestic breweries. So I'm saying let's refocus back onto what we stood for."

This refocusing means Button is taking a longer-term view of how Big Rock goes to market. He is reconsidering the emphasis that the craft brewer has placed on traditional advertising and in-package incentives for the past five years in favour of smaller, more targeted marketing efforts.

"In Alberta, we're [using] more of a defensive strategy," he says. "In our new markets we're very much in a discovery phase, so we're using more word-of-mouth, one-to-one engagement, media relations, samplings....We will use mainstream advertising, but the majority of it will be in Alberta. I don't find mainstream media to be effective unless we have credibility. Unless I've interacted with the beer, I'm not going to believe it."

Instead, Button is piloting a WOM program with Toronto-based Agent Wildfire in six neighbourhoods in that city. If it works, he'll take it across the country. "Beer's a local thing," he says. "I believe you have to be talking to people as if you were standing in front of their fridge at home; you have to be honest and genuine with them."

Even the Junos deal focuses on local activities and emerging artists. As community sponsor, the brand will be most visible in the Junofest music venues around town leading up to the awards show on Apr. 6. Over the four years of the sponsorship, the brand will follow the awards to host cities Vancouver, Winnipeg and Toronto, meeting new beer drinkers on their home turf.

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